The Invitation of Illness

By Erin Hayford, ND, SEP

“Incurable…really only means that the particular condition cannot be cured by ‘outer’ methods and that we must go within to effect the healing.”
—Louise L. Hay¹

I was 21 years old when I was diagnosed with an incurable illness. According to my doctor, my only option was being on heavy-duty, immunosuppressive, and anti-inflammatory medications for the rest of my life. Surgery down the road was also a very likely possibility as the condition would inevitably progress. Suddenly, I was thrust into a war against my own body. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that “Your body is betraying you” and these medications were my weapons—the only way to “win” the war.

Current conventional medical paradigms reinforce this war analogy, as evidenced by the language we use when discussing disease:

• “She’s battling cancer.”
• “He’s fighting a cold.”
• “They succumbed to their illness.”

Such language ingrains a fear of symptoms, framing them as an adversary and as signs that our bodies are failing in some way that must be corrected at all costs. The problem is, when we accept this paradigm, we miss a crucial truth:

Bodies do not, in fact, fail. They respond.

As naturopathic doctors, we understand better than most that our bodies are dynamic, living ecosystems. They are like orchestras, where each instrument has an individual role that contributes to the overall, collective symphony. And like any symphony, there is a conductor. In the case of the body, the conductor is the nervous system.

Though we are familiar with the nervous system’s many functions, it’s important to remember that all of them revolve around a single goal: keeping us alive. This, in turn, depends on one fundamental question: Are we safe?

To answer this question, the nervous system is constantly scanning the environment, through neuroception. This term—coined by Dr. Stephen Porges, a pioneer in our understanding of the nervous system and the stress response—describes how the body unconsciously detects safety or threat.² When a threat is perceived, the conductor instructs the orchestra to shift gears. Specifically, the amygdala, which processes what we see and what we hear, triggers the fight or flight response when necessary.³ As Dr. Porges explains, what the nervous system perceives via neuroception changes everything inside the body.

This is where we start to grasp the inextricable link between the mind and body and its role in chronic illness.

My Story

Before my eventual diagnosis, I was working as a farmer, in the thick of yet another humid summer in Maine. I had dropped out of college (for the third time) and felt directionless in life. With generations of farmers behind me, I did find farming a worthy way to spend my time. There was another obstacle, however, to moving forward in my life: I was experiencing symptoms, and they were worsening at a rapid pace.

From as early as I could remember, I had regular stomach aches. Fast-forward to my life as a farmer, and the stomach pain had turned into a daily, 24/7 ordeal. It wasn’t just stomach pain anymore, it was every digestive symptom imaginable, paired with profound fatigue, cramping, aching muscles, throbbing joint pain, debilitating brain fog, and overwhelming weakness that made my labor-intensive farm work incredibly difficult.

The day that finally pushed me to seek help was a perfect storm, outside and in: humidity coupled with my probable dehydration and extreme weakness. I felt what could only be described as a sense of dread rising up from the pit of my stomach as I tried to stand and walk to the barn. Suddenly, my vision swirled, I broke into a cold sweat, my legs gave out, and I collapsed. The process of receiving a diagnosis was, to put it mildly, unpleasant. After what felt like endless tests and imaging, I was handed my diagnosis: Crohn’s disease.

Back to the Inextricable Link

To fully understand this link—between mind and body—we need to explore what the nervous system perceives as threats, and how it becomes programmed to define them in the first place. Threats, simply put, are stressors. But contrary to popular belief, there is no universal stressor; stress is subjective, depending on individual perception.

Perception of a threat is shaped by many factors, with the majority of our safety-vs-threat programming occuring during childhood, particularly between birth and age 7. How well and consistently our needs were met, how safe we felt expressing emotions and aspects of ourselves, environmental factors, and other variables all contribute to how our nervous systems—and ultimately, how we—show up in the world.

The amygdala is part of the autonomic nervous system and its influence on the body is automatic and unconscious. The programming it receives operates similarly, meaning that much of the time our nervous system is detecting and responding to threats unconsciously. While it certainly reacts to conscious feelings of fear; research suggests that approximately 95% of brain activity is unconscious.⁴ This implies that much of what we think of as our personalities are actually unconscious reactions based on past events. It also means that depending on our early life experiences and how many perceived threats our amygdala has stored, our fight or flight response might be triggered more often than we realize.

Naturally, if our system is detecting threats more frequently, we are often shifted into a state of sympathetic activation. And sympathetic activation is not a state in which the body functions optimally—nor is it a state conducive to healing.

Thus, the breeding ground for chronic illness emerges.

It must be reiterated: bodies do not fail, they respond. They respond to the inputs they are given. Sometimes, the harmful, disease-causing inputs are obvious; for example, lifestyle factors are always an important consideration when assessing the cause(s) of disease.

However, as I progressed through my own healing journey and eventually into clinical practice, I found time and again that, while addressing these more apparent factors helped—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot—more often than not they weren’t enough. They didn’t provide the full picture. Something was still missing, and I was determined to figure out what that something was.

When I enrolled in a biofeedback elective in my third year of naturopathic medical school, I began to understand this profound mind-body connection. Through this modality I found the resolution I was seeking: the “why” behind my illness. And that “why,” as I’ve learned, opens the door to much more than improved health or reduced symptoms.

Early childhood programming teaches us to suppress parts of ourselves, to not express or even recognize our needs and wants, to override our emotions, and to develop limiting beliefs about who we are and what we are capable of. We say yes when we mean no. All of this is done to stay safe, and is a response to what we experienced, heard, learned, or intuited in these early years of life.

While these ways of being in the world were most certainly necessary and protective at the time they were created, they may now be preventing us from living a full, rich life. Worse still, they may be contributing to our illnesses.

Essentially, this “threat programming” causes us to suppress who we truly are, for the sake of survival. So when we trace symptoms back to their root, the answer to why we got sick leads us back to ourselves.

Symptoms, then, are not enemies. They are the voice of the rejected self. They are sacred guides, inviting us on a journey to reclaim our wholeness. They invite the suppressed, hidden, and wounded parts of ourselves to emerge from the shadows and return to the light—to be acknowledged, to take up space, to be seen, heard, accepted, and loved.

To heal, we must reconnect with the wisdom of our bodies. We must trust their guidance and listen to their messages in order to understand what they are responding to. This is the path to sustainable health and healing and, ultimately, the path back to ourselves.

Through my illness, my body led me on this healing path, guiding me to a beautiful life, and providing a deep sense of belonging that, due to my own programming, once felt elusive and inaccessible out of reach.

My “incurable” illness was cured.

And through it all, I found myself.

Now, I invite my clients to explore this question: “Who is your illness inviting you to become?”

References:

1. Hay L. Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them. Hay House; 1982:2.
2. Porges SW. Neuroception: a subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero Three. 2004;24(5):19-24.
3. Šimić G, Tkalčić M, Vukić V, et al. Understanding emotions: origins and roles of the amygdala. Biomolecules. 2021;11(6):823.
4. Young E. Lifting the lid on the unconscious. New Sci. July 25, 2019. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931880-400-lifting-the-lid-on-the-unconscious/