virus, what did my particular cold have to offer me in my creation of a life, relationships, plotline, and body?
DIVING INTO THE LANGUAGE OF ENERGY
Language is more than just words and sentence structure. It embraces all the ways you codify your experience and how you exchange with others. Similarly, healing is more than just finding techniques to fix what is wrong. Using the language of energy to heal includes finding ways to address and shift how you experience and interact with life.
Some years ago I was captivated by the film Arrival, starring Amy Adams, which really brought this concept of language home to me. In the film, Adams plays a linguistics professor recruited by the army to figure out how to communicate with an alien spacecraft, one of twelve encircling the globe. Adams is in a race against time to discover who these beings are and what their intentions toward the planet might be.
The bulk of the film shows how a linguist can figure out the workings of a language (and whether a language even exists) when the speakers don’t use sound, words, or other linguistic building blocks we are familiar with. In the case of these beings — spoiler alert — Adams comes to realize that they communicate by emitting smoke-like glyphs, a kind of bar-code language, in conjunction with telepathy: mind-to-mind shaping of experience and concepts.
Most fascinating to me was that the film does not stop with the linguistic triumph of cracking the code of the language. It shows how Adams’s character learns to understand the mindset of these visitors — their conceptions of time, space, and connection — that make them clearly kindred spirits. The film is not about learning vocabulary and grammar. It is about communication itself — finding shared expression, dialoguing, expressing meaning (the aliens need help to save their world) — and about the relationships that form when communication is successful.
Each time you enter into energy dialogue with yourself, you are investigating what your body, spirit, and mind are trying to express in a multidimensional language that is not composed of words and sentences. Through this dialogue, you are building a deeper, more-engaged relationship with yourself.
Sylvia, who was diagnosed with two kinds of metastatic stage IV cancer, had a similarly urgent mission to learn how to communicate with a body that was screaming at her in life-and-death terms. She needed to learn the language of energy and to dialogue with her body, spirit, and mind in order to figure out what would save her planet.
A hard worker who gave selflessly to her many children and grandchildren, Sylvia kept a family business going and was the glue holding a whole extended family together. As great as she was at caring for others, her selflessness took its toll on her body. She sought medical care too late and was not a candidate for chemo. Essentially, she was sent home to die.
Because the diagnosis was so severe, it liberated her to think outside the box. She decided that whether she was going to live or die, she would make each moment count. She would listen to her body and let it guide her and teach her each moment she had left. Using what she knew from parenting preverbal infants, she tuned in over and over again to perceive what her body wanted, needed, and was trying to communicate.
Her focus was not to delay death but to catch hold of life.
Sylvia learned simple energy medicine techniques to get her energies circulating and interacting more effectively. She engaged in an hour-by-hour experiment to recognize what her energies were asking of her, rather than following a preprogrammed cancer protocol. She listened to what foods spoke to her, and she brought in more life force via fruits, vegetables, and juicing. She experimented with other nutritional supports that showed up on her radar in synchronous ways.
Most important for her self-healing journey, she focused her ability to care for others onto herself, reassessing what mattered to her, letting go of all agendas except for dialoguing with her body, taking in the love her family gave her, letting go of needing to be the glue for her family, and deepening her spiritual practice.
A year later, she was pronounced cancer-free.
Sylvia didn’t discover some formula for using energy medicine (or nutrition and spiritual inputs) to heal cancer, since it wasn’t cancer that got healed: It was Sylvia. The cancer was a very loud shout from her body saying something had gone wrong in her body-mind-spirit communications. The path to healing was how Sylvia dialogued with her energies, supporting her three selves to draw in the behaviors, substances, and healthier storyline that allowed her immune system to find a new normal.
Your body has the inbuilt ability to heal, to adapt, and to function under diverse circumstances. No one else heals it: not the doctor, the shaman, the energy healer, the beloved, or the medication. When we heal, we are not attacking disease; we are finding ease. We are not eradicating illness; we are redefining wellness and living it. We are not just seeking absence of pain or symptoms; we are listening to and responding to the pain and symptoms in recognition of what they are communicating. This is what Sylvia’s body taught her.
Pain and symptoms are messengers. The goal, before we sedate or mute them, is to receive the message, thank the messenger sincerely, and then offer that messenger what comfort is possible within the context of responding to the messages.
Cultivating wellness moment by moment will support the body’s amazing ability to heal. Here are some major keys to self-healing you might find helpful:
•Come back to the breath.
•Step into the now.
•Engage in authentic dialogue with your energies.
•Affirm core truths.
•Make space for your body to heal.
•Choose actions, thoughts, and environments that support well-being.
This can’t happen if we are busy blah-blah-blahing to the body with chemicals, blasting it with complex and expensive treatments, expecting practitioners to do all the work, and buying into disease models that the body can’t understand. The body understands wellness. When it falls away from that, the key to self-healing is to get creative in finding ways to guide it back home!
FIRST LANGUAGE
Like the language used by the aliens in Arrival, the language your body speaks is much more complex, dynamic, and multidimensional than merely sounds organized into words, arrayed in sentences and paragraphs. If you have ever been blessed to be around infants and watched them engage with the world around them — learning sounds and gestures and how to communicate their needs — you have a baseline familiarity with this first language.
Right from the start, infants have ways of communicating. They don’t say, “Please pass me a new diaper”! They wriggle, shift their breathing, or turn red and wail. They look around or fix their gaze. They turn toward the loving arms that are holding them, or they stretch and go rigid and struggle to move away. Any experienced parent will tell you that infants are each unique in temperament and in how they communicate. That is part of the fun (and frustration) of parenting. What is going on for these little beings, newly arrived? Who are they, and how can we communicate with them? How can we soothe, nourish, love, protect, teach, and stimulate them and speak their language?
When you were an infant, long before you learned your native tongue, you were activating the language of energy. You vocalized,
