Multiple Sclerosis is Not Your Enemy

Photo by Polina Sergeeva, Flickr

The phrase “keep fighting” gets bandied about the MS community quite frequently. Fight the MS monster, fight your disease, don’t give up the fight.

I understand how this can be empowering for some people, a cheerleading phrase of encouragement to keep on keepin’ on. However…

You and your illness are not separate. Multiple Sclerosis is not your enemy. It is not a foreign invader, it’s a condition of dis-ease in your body. If you relate to MS as your adversary, then you are creating a context in which the thing to do is to then attack yourself. But attacking yourself won’t help you heal. In fact, attacking yourself is what you are already doing – it’s the mechanism that is MS – the immune system waging war on itself. So it stands to reason, then, that you cannot heal your body from attacking itself by attacking yourself. Right?

Nobody yet knows what triggers the immune system to turn on itself as fiercely as it does in someone with MS. But I’ve always found the body to be comically literal. If you spend a good portion of your life telling yourself what a piece of shit you are in myriad ways, your body will listen. How it manifests from person to person may vary, but your body will get the message – it will bend itself to the reality you create in the system of you. If that reality is “ME is bad, attack me” then you are giving your body the literal command to attack itself.

Does this sound crazy to you? I am sure it does, if you believe in the Newtonian-influenced paradigm of Western medicine in which the mechanical body has nothing to do with the mind. But from a quantum perspective (which is currently shaking up science as we know it), our thoughts create our reality. There is no body and mind duality. There is only a bodymind.

Why me?

Once the initial shock of my MS diagnosis wore off, I began to consider the years leading up to it. I kind of wondered “why me”, but not really. I knew why me. I had been wading around in a pool of self-loathing for as long as I can remember. If I hadn’t been so terrified in those early days of my diagnosis, I probably would have marveled at the simple and poignant literalness of the illness I had manifested. I certainly marvel at it now. I mean really, it’s funny! My body has quite the sense of humor, if you like dark comedy, that is.

Surrender

I think it was Einstein or some other smart dude who said you can’t solve a problem from the same state in which it was created. So what can we do instead of “fight” MS? Some people may think I’m nitpicking, that the word “fight” is irrelevant. But language frames our experience and directs and creates our reality. So if what we want is to heal and be healthy, the language we use about our illness with others and with ourselves matters.

So instead of fighting MS, maybe we can surrender to it. And by surrender, I don’t mean give up. I mean feel into what it means. What is the message your body is sending you? What is this illness meant to show you? Don’t fight, flow.

Accept.

From a state of acceptance for what is, we free ourselves from the tension and anxiety held in place by the state of battle. Now that I’ve introduced the concept of the Default, I should mention here that acceptance for what is in any given moment is a great way access your Default. Resisting what is will make it impossible, because that resistance will manifest as tension in your muscles that will keep you from being able to relax into the state of you when you just are…the way you were born to be…satisfied, effective, radiantly healthy.

If we accept where we are, we can begin to then find out what it means to move into a state of health. Instead of trying to defend ourselves from the MS enemy, let’s find out what we need to do for our bodies and our lifestyle and our spirit so that we can be in such a way that MS isn’t.

Want more inspiration? Read The Light Prayer or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

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Related posts:

1. Taking Control of Multiple Sclerosis
2. Multiple Sclerosis is just a label

Tags: default, einstein, MS, Multiple Sclerosis, newton, quantum