What happens when you start thinking about the huge credit card bill that arrived in January, or the row you had with your partner last night? The mind churns, it replays the row and it brings back the memory of the moment you decided to buy a couple of extra Christmas gifts and bung it on the credit card.

But it’s not only the mind that’s stirred. The body is agitated. On a day to day basis we recognise this, when feelings of anxiety create a tight chest or anger results in a knotted stomach. We know we are frightened when our heart is thumping or in love when it flutters. Our body responds to our thoughts and feelings, it’s language is articulated through it’s experience. So why do we not make the same connection when we become unwell?  Wondering about feelings, circumstances or old wounds isn’t what comes to mind when we call the doctor or go to the chemist.

If we reframed illness as a life wound, would we treat it differently? Taken literally, ‘Disease’ describes a body that is not at ease! Through my own experience of having suffered dis-ease I have a passionate belief that many diseases, but in particular auto-immune disease, are symptoms of a psychospiritual pathology. By that, I mean a deep loss of meaning in life and spiritual disconnection from oneself. I came to realise that what drives us emotionally and spiritually affects the health of the body and that many of these emotional, psychological and spiritual triggers are what leads to the body suffering.

In auto-immune diseases the body attacks itself in the same way the mind attacks itself when we repeat negative messages and behaviors. Depression, acute anxiety, ME, MS, addiction, psoriasis, acne, acute back or neck pain. are all expressions of internal pain; the body manifesting what can’t be spoken. A common factor in many of these diseases is inflammation. What inflames us? What repressed rage is the body holding. Unconsciously holding rage can be poisonous where feelings of woundedness  and defensiveness weakens the immune system and drives the body to dis-ease.

So how can we learn compassion and kindness for our self. Learn to listen and trust our bodies’ as messengers of our suffering souls. Understanding the language our body speaks is vital to good health. Wondering about a frozen shoulder or a locked up lower back and if perhaps it may be a reflection of being stuck in old patterns, unable to move or a deeper wound unaddressed. Psychosynthesis is about unlocking potential; transforming rage into Will, trauma into compassion, denial into acceptance through feeling the places it may be held in the body.

Hospitals are not equipped to treat the soul – medication can’t cure the Soul.

This is what Jung had to say:

“ For what is the body? The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche;

   and the soul is the psychological experience of the body. So it is really one and 

  the same thing….Soul and body are not two things, they are one”

Soul and spirit are an abstract part of our language used to describe the sublime and yet difficult for the rational brain to accept as a place of healing;

His soul soared’. Soul music, soul food, a spirited person, a dispirited feeling’

We use these words casually and yet it’s the place of our imagination and visualization that connects us to the deeper part of ourselves and allows an exploration of the Soul in order to hear it’s suffering. Looked at from another angle, symptoms of dis-ease, be it depression, panic attacks or a sudden onset of excema, could be seen as a gateway to the experience of awakening to Self and spiritual growth; signposts not symptoms.

In this time of political and environmental chaos, so many of us are split off from ourselves, from others and from nature. Almost unconsciously, consciousness has come to the fore. The zeitgeist is ‘Wellbeing’, but ‘Wellbeing’  comes not only through reconnecting mind body and soul in our self but knowing that we are also part of a greater whole. We have no concrete evidence of soul and its uncertain journey but what we can know is that when we suffer ‘dis-ease’ we have a choice to take responsibility for our own healing by allowing our deeper selves to be witnessed. When mind body and soul are held we also act for the wellbeing of our world and the health of our society.