It’s quite common for folks who get into healing and spirituality to hold onto simplistic views for safety.
We hold onto it to try to find some distance from the discomfort we are experiencing, created by deeper, more visceral, and stressful beliefs and identities.
PHYSICAL HEALTH AND EMOTIONAL ISSUES
One of these simplistic ideas is that our physical health challenges are created by our emotional issues.
I have this illness, so it must be created by an emotional issue. Working on that issue is the answer.
The reality is often far more complex. What happens locally is the result of movements within the larger whole. The small things we think we grasp are drops in the bucket of what’s actually going on. Innumerable things influence our health and our emotional issues are just one of those.
Yes, it makes sense to explore that aspect of it and see what happens. Most of the time, it won’t hurt, and it may help.
And it also makes sense to recognize that innumerable factors influence our health. Our health is an expression of what’s happening in far larger and more complex systems.
HOLDING ONTO SIMPLISTIC VIEWS FOR SAFETY
Holding onto views, identities, and stories for safety is inherently stressful.
I find it helpful to identify these and explore them.
What is the story? And some underlying and supporting stories?
What do I hope to get out of holding onto it? A sense of safety? Predictability? Having answers?
What happens when I hold onto it? In this case, do I overly narrow my options for how to explore and view my own health? Do I apply it to others and tell them their physical health issues are held in place by emotional issues? How does it impact my relationship with myself and others?
What’s the genuine validity in the reversals? Is it true that my physical health may have other causes as well? Or that the main cause could be something else?
How would it be to hold the initial story more lightly? How would it be to explore the emotional components and see what happens? And also explore other avenues? (Including finding more peace with my health and body as it is?)
WE ALL DO IT
In one way or another, we all hold onto overly simplistic views for safety. It’s what we humans seem to do, at least so far.
And, in reality, any view, identity, and story are overly simplistic.
Any mental representation is different in kind from what they are about. (Unless they happen to be about mental representations.) The terrain is always different from and far more than any map.
What we think we grasp is a tiny part of what’s there, no matter what it’s about.
And what we think we grasp tends to change over time. It’s provisional. It’s not final or absolute.