Your Burdens...
and Your Body's Illnesses

NOTE: This article does not follow on from the previous chapter. This will appear in the final book in a separate section called "Body Thoughts" which will feature short articles with useful perspectives and insights. 

I wish to share a number of perspectives with you regarding the burdens you bear in this life of yours and the illnesses and distresses of your body.

The first perspective is that your burdens are your gifts. Please think on this and allow yourself to see how this might be true for you:

Think about the things in your life that you find to be particularly difficult to cope with. Your struggles, challenges and difficulties. In every instance there is the manifestation of the struggle - the events and circumstances in your life that you are finding challenging - and then behind that there is a belief or choice that you are holding onto that is the original cause of that struggle in your life. The originating belief will initially be hidden from you. You will start out thinking that the “problem” lies outside of yourself in someone else or in circumstances that are beyond your control. And you will quite possibly face variations of the same problem over and over again in your life. Perhaps you will even do so for many lifetimes. And this will continue until eventually you are able to see that the problem actually lies within yourself. It is a belief that you are holding onto that is being reflected back at you in your external circumstances so that you can see it in all of its multifarious manifestations and come to a new choice about it, so that you can release that belief and replace it with a new, more helpful one. When you do this, this is the very essence of spiritual healing. You are changed and your whole life circumstance is also changed. Miraculously, as you change your originating belief, these problematic “others” and these challenging circumstances in your life simply, “magically” change too. They cease to trouble and become harmonious.

When you have, in this way, healed yourself, what you have done is to transform a limiting belief into an empowering one. And through this process you will have gained wisdom and compassion. You will have learned a great deal about life and about yourself. And you will have learned to be more loving and accepting of yourself, of life and of others. And somewhere in all of this you will have found something beautiful and wonderful that you can give to others to make their journey easier.

And so this is the first way in which your burdens are your gifts. In healing them you gift yourself a great deal and you gain something that you can gift others with.

But there is another way in which this is so. If all of your burdens were lifted right now then you would, quite simply, no longer be here. Neither incarnated upon planet Earth, nor within this separation reality. Without your burdens you would not be here.

An analogy I like is to imagine that living upon planet Earth is like living at the very bottom of a deep, deep ocean. This is so because there is a very high density of consciousness here. It is as if the pressure is great indeed. Time moves slowly and we are, mostly, quite unaware of the connection between cause and effect. That is why most here cannot even believe that they are the creators of their realities. Hence the analogy of being at the very dense bottom of an oceanic abyss. And in order to be at the bottom of this deep ocean you need a vessel that can exist here or else the pressure would surely crush you. That vessel is your human body. It is created for just such a deep-density operation. But you also need a lot of ballast - dense, heavy stuff that you carry with you - or else you will leave your body and float up, up, up through the higher densities and bob up to the surface of this deep ocean. If you pop up through the surface then you leave separation. So you need ballast to keep you here. And the ballast you bear is exactly this set of powerfully limiting beliefs that is causing all the pain and difficulty in your life.

Do you see how the analogy works? If you did not have these limiting beliefs you could not be here. They keep you “down” on the planet. They allow you to pretend that you are this tiny, weak, mortal little human being. They permit the whole experience of your life to play out and for you to be “inside” that experience for the whole of your life. And since you are needed here for exactly the life that you are living… since your being here, just as you are, is a gift (whether you know it or not) it is these limiting beliefs that are your gift. They enable you to be here and then they become the means by which you see yourself, love yourself, heal yourself and help others around you in the most wonderful way.

Of course as you do this, as you heal yourself, so you release your ballast. Bit by bit your consciousness becomes less dense. But you were born into this world so you are here. You can raise your consciousness a great deal whist still here and do a great deal of good before you become too “light” to continue to be here. And that is the ascension process. Heal yourself so much in a lifetime that, when that lifetime is concluded, you are then done with this level of existence. Then your journey continues at a higher level of consciousness.

But what does this have to do with body? Well here is the next perspective that I wish to share with you. Llualarth recently alerted me to something that I would like to pass on to you. He shared with me that these burdens of ours, these profoundly limiting beliefs to which we cling, are not only manifest in external difficulties with other people and with circumstances. Of course they are also manifest as health problems. Every disease and illness has, at its root, a choice, belief or idea that we are holding onto. Somehow, on some level, at some point we have made a choice that has brought this physical discomfort or ailment to us. But here is the bit that I had not previously understood: this illness, whatever its nature, is not the body punishing us for our belief! It is the body helping us by pointing towards the belief. And more than that. The body is helping to bear the burden. It is really and truly helping. By manifesting the disease it is moving the “problem” outwards. It is helping you to transform that belief, then “exercise it” from your consciousness and transform it into something more helpful. Yes, it is true that if the belief is painful enough then this might end up killing the body. But you, of course, do not die. You continue to exist after the death of your body. So you will “walk away” with the wisdom and the learning. You will have the opportunity to come to different choices in future as a result of the growth and learning of this lifetime.

And so I wish you to understand this: illness of the body is not the body making a mistake. It is the body demonstrating to you, in a tangible, physical form, what your burdens are and, indeed, sacrificing itself to help you to resolve those burdens. And those burdens are not your mistake either. They are your gift that you are busy unwrapping. And once unwrapped, they will enrich you and all those around you.

I do not mean to say that you should then “like” being ill or physically distressed. I simply mean to indicate that you can cease to judge yourself and your body as being in any way “wrong” as you go about the sacred process of loving yourself and your body in the direction of true wholeness.

A final thought I will leave you with is this: there are those who have taken on the task of bearing others’ burdens with the desire to be of assistance to them. Souls who have incarnated and accepted struggle and suffering as if it were their own when it was not. I suspect that many (most? all?) of those who read this will, to one degree or another, have done this. Because I suspect that a great percentage of my readers are “wanderers”, spiritual travelers who have entered this reality to help with its healing and transformation, rather than being entities that evolved upwards from the very matrix of this reality. If you are one such, a wanderer, then you have, by definition, taken on some measure of difficulty that is not your own for the purpose of transmuting it into love and healing. Bear this in mind too, when you find yourself frustrated with some difficulty or illness that you just can’t move past. Allow for the awareness that this might be a truly magnificent gift on your part. That you are bearing a burden, not of your making, but of your choosing. That you are carrying a belief and pain that originates inside this reality in the minds of others so that it can be healed and transformed in your psyche. That you are, in the deepest truth, doing God’s work. And that, just perhaps, this is what makes you so ill.

Does that not change the whole way you feel about yourself, your struggles and your illness?

Be kind to yourself brother light and sister soul. You go, literally, where angels fear to tread and do, literally, God’s work. Be kind to yourself. And love your body, for it is your greatest friend and ally in this world.