Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting point and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.
—Albert Einstein1
76. Why Do You Have the Symptoms You Have Now, and Why These Specific Symptoms?
THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, I’VE SHARED WITH YOU some of the fundamental questions that underlie the slow medicine path to extraordinary health: Skillful Living. And, rather than answer the questions for you, I’ve attempted to walk you through the process of asking yourself these questions and helped you to think about—then gradually act on—the answers you come up with:
•We’ve learned that when we live skillfully, we’re not always trying to control things.
•We’ve learned that it’s best to act in alignment with natural rhythms and cycles.
•We’ve learned to view the body not as a series of autonomous parts, but as a whole entity, inextricably linked to the elements of our mind and purpose that embody us as whole people.
•We’ve learned that no man is an island.
•We’ve also learned that past hurts can continue to adversely affect our health if we don’t let go and rebuild.
•Ideally, we’ve learned to be more present for the things in the present that really matter—like our relationships.
I trust that you’ve come to understand by now that these factors—and not the “absence of disease”—constitute the fundamental nature of extraordinary health.
Now, at this point I’d like you to begin thinking about two last important questions: Why these symptoms? And why now?
As I do with the patients who visit me at SunRaven, this is when I ask you to restate and reframe your health challenges and your health objectives. Often they’re quite different from when our consultation began. I find that a good place to begin this final chapter of our consultation is to make sure you have a better understanding about why you have the symptoms you have now—and why you have these specific symptoms to begin with? After reading through the previous chapters and considering all of the yes/no questions that preceded this one, it’s now a good time to consider the context of your quest for health. The questions here are, Why do we get sick? Why do we find ourselves with certain ailments and challenges in the first place?
I’m hoping this question might appear less esoteric—you know, “out there”—now that you’ve gotten this far in the process of Skillful Living. There’s nothing more concrete than understanding the relationship between our life and the circumstances we find ourselves in, health-wise. Viewing life and health holistically, as we’ve come to learn, requires that we look for unifying themes that connect all the dots, across all the aspects of our lives. Essentially, this question might provide the most significant clue yet, indeed the key that breaks the code and solves your most challenging health riddle. But to get at it, we have to leave the Western medical paradigm once again, and consider the knowledge and wisdom that’s accumulated through thousands of years of humanity, before the microscope was even imagined. We’ve got to look in that mirror again, and once again tap our intuition.
There are two parts required for this decoding process. The first is to understand the timeline for the development of your most important and pressing symptoms: When did your symptoms first appear, and in what form? What was going on in your life during that time, or immediately preceding it? Just think about how helpful this was for Steven. Indeed, it opened the door to his eventual recovery.
Here are some examples from other patients I have seen recently. Note how the associated issues didn’t always appear obvious at first, but in each case there was definitely something going on:
•I got an annoying rash behind my knee. It started in 2004. This was right after I got laid off. It spread around my left leg within a few months. It was ultimately diagnosed as psoriatic arthritis.
•Once we moved to the city, I started to get tired all the time. Within a year, I was missing a lot of work, and even family events. They gave me antidepressants and did all kinds of tests but never really diagnosed the problem. Now I’m barely keeping it together. When I go back home to the farm, though, I definitely feel a little better. I wish I could stay there longer.
•I don’t know whether it’s migraines “officially,” but I get really bad headaches at least once a week. I can’t even think when they’re happening—they knock me on my butt. I guess they started a few years ago. Everything was going fine then—and still is: I’m a very successful lawyer, always busy, always traveling, and often in the limelight. I love what I do—especially being able to help desperate people. One thing I’m not crazy about is that I’m not able to be around my family enough. But then other times, it aggravates me that they’re too demanding. What do they think pays for our house and summer camp and great vacations?
•My doctor tells me it’s a typical pattern: First I gained weight in my thirties. I got high cholesterol and went on a drug. My blood pressure wasn’t so hot, so she put me on another drug. Then my blood sugar went up, and I started to take a third pill. That didn’t work, and eventually, I started a few shots of insulin. Still getting fatter for sure, and not exactly feeling great about my health. What was going on when all this started? Nothing, really. When I was twenty-eight, I lost my job, and that was awful, but I’m not going to say that caused any of my symptoms. In fact, to be honest, it was a bit of a relief: I hated that job. I think it might have been the stress of looking for a new job—which lasted two years—that did me in.
•I know what’s going on. It’s the whole priest sex scandal thing. When all that hit the news back in the eighties, it freaked me out. I wished no one would talk about it. I felt like every time it came up—whether someone was talking seriously or making a joke—they could see right through me to my secret. I thought about it all the time. I was literally losing sleep. I was clenching my jaw. And then I could tell that I was getting physical symptoms: terrible diarrhea, and my stomach was always cramping up. For a while there, I was actually bleeding in my stomach. I think it was all that stuff that happened when I was six, trying to get out.
The idea here is to look into what was going on in your life when your symptoms began, to recognize the initial trigger of the “imbalance” that caused your health problem. What did those triggers represent? Was it loss? Trauma? Overthinking? It’s basically self-therapy (though if you prefer, you can do it with a trusted professional). Finding your triggers can help you avoid them; you can begin to regain the original state of balance that kept the symptoms at bay. For example, if some great instability occurred around the same time your back began hurting, reestablishing stability now can shut down any recurrence of the trigger and go a long way to lessening or preventing symptoms. It might take some time—and cause some unpleasantness—to go back and figure out what was going on in your life that might have triggered the onset of your symptoms, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor if you want to achieve extraordinary health.
Look at it this way: You wouldn’t treat the pain and inflammation of a splinter without first removing the trigger—the splinter itself—and ever expect to get better, would you? You could keep applying Band-Aids and ointments, and taking lots of pain pills, but until you deal with the trigger, the pain will persist (and, eventually, infection will set in). I realize as I use that example that it’s not entirely accurate: the truth is, the body itself understands this dilemma, and it will work hard to eject the splinter on its own. But if you keep jamming it in, you’ll defeat that self-defense mechanism.
THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION
The second part in this process is to delve more deeply into the association between the physical site of the first symptom and the mental/emotional state that’s related to it. For example, I’ve seen in hundreds of my patients that the lung and colon are likely associated with the emotion of unremitting grief—the prolonged attachment and subconscious desire to hold on, which we discussed in chapter 7. Similarly, we know intuitively and from personal experience that the head, neck, back, and shoulders are associated with mental and emotional stresses, and so on. While there are a few physiological causes of pain and inflammation in those areas, it’s much, much more likely that the trigger, as we’re defining it here, is emotional. This is especially true when the condition is a chronic one. In fact, I’ve seen countless times that when my patients get at the root of underlying emotion, their chances for physical relief become far greater. And this is well documented in the recent literature. Moreover, there are dozens of traditions dating back thousands of years—from traditional Chinese to Native American medicine—all of which focus on these associations between parts of our bodies and the emotional state to which they are linked. In each of these divergent cultures, the map of connections is quite similar, giving it a fair amount of credence in my mind. Find a healing tradition that suits you and explore the connections.
The goal for you is to understand the particular ways your body and emotional states are connected, and to work toward ways to reduce your physical susceptibility to the imbalance that results from those states. Sometimes, just learning to recognize the triggers will stop the emotional states. But often, you will have to learn creative ways to avoid them. You can employ techniques such as simple forgiveness, to “let go” of the trigger. To borrow a metaphor from the genetics versus lifestyle debate about health, a gun might pose a potentially deadly threat, but it can’t fire on its own. You have to pull that trigger—or holster the gun.
So my suggestion here is to stop putting patches on those recurring splinters and work on ways to prevent them from getting under your skin in the first place. Get a journal or a notebook and write down your main symptoms. Maybe you can do this as a timeline. Then write the major life events that correspond to the periods when the symptoms began, and when they flare up. You can think of those circumstances as the initial triggers. Are symptoms still associated with the vestiges of those triggers? Do symptoms flare up when those subjects come up? Surprisingly, it’s often that simple. Next, see if you can identify the emotional states associated with both the life events and the health symptoms on your health timeline. Remember the equation:
TRIGGER (life circumstance) 
EMOTIONAL STATE (the feelings it brings up) CHRONIC SYMPTOM (in the body site where the emotional state manifests) ILLNESS (the systemic problem associated with the symptom and site over time)
I have seen people who’ve suffered their whole lives from debilitating symptoms like headaches—who have taken dozens of drugs and tried scores of treatments unsuccessfully—virtually cure themselves of their ailments by going through the process of mapping their own equations. Here’s how two patients, Connor and Dawn, summarized their efforts:
•I was always looking for food triggers like MSG and sulfites (or lack of sleep or exposure to light or whatever) for the cause of my migraines. But when I did the timeline and kept a log, I figured out that they seemed to first come on when I was still living with my parents and times were tough at home. I spent a few months continuing with the journal and realized that I often got migraines soon after I talked to one of them on the phone, or even when I was just thinking about them and all our “issues.” (I also learned from a food diary that I get migraines a day after I eat chocolate.) Don’t get me wrong; I love my parents. But as I kept going with the log, I figured out that even when something was going on with them that was just on my mind, a migraine would follow, within a day or two. That was freaky. But why was it happening? It took a year, but I got to the bottom of it, a pretty deep well of anger and resentment. The short of it is this: My brothers got a free ride, but I caught hell from them, always. I couldn’t do anything right. Once I started to talk about this—with my brothers and friends, and eventually with my parents—the headaches started to get much less frequent. Like you said, I was able to “let go” of the emotion, so my body let go of the illness. And I got better able to sense my trigger emotions, so I could work on keeping them in check. My headaches are 90 percent gone now, and that’s dramatically improved the quality of my life. Not to mention my relationship with my parents is much better—more honest and more forgiving. Man, I miss chocolate, though.
•I don’t perfectly understand why my knees and my other joints are associated with fear, but I had two problems for a very long time. All my joints ached like hell, especially my knees—and I was constantly afraid they would give way when I did any kind of physical activity. That wasn’t the only thing I was afraid of. My friends always said I didn’t try new things, and they were right. This all started in childhood, which is a long story—a pretty crazy-looking page on my timeline—but suffice to say I learned pretty early and pretty painfully not to take any risks at all. To summarize, when I was eight, we were at the beach, and I swam too far out, and got caught in a rip current. I was swept miles down the shore before I was rescued, exhausted and nearly drowned. I had to spend the night in the hospital. But my mother was nearly committed herself, she was so crazy over it. My parents became overprotective, and I suppose I followed suit. Total paradox, but following your suggestion, I tried treating the fear first, instead of the physical symptoms of joint pain. I read somewhere that “action cures fear”2 so I tried to take some action. It didn’t make any sense to me at first, but when I pushed myself, like when I decided to go hiking with friends, my knees felt better than they do when I’m just walking around a grocery store. After a while, when I stepped it up—I did a ten-mile hike, eventually, alone—each mile marker I passed gave me more self-confidence, and less pain. Hiking on my own, especially in new places, gave me all kinds of self-assurance. I applied for a promotion and got it. I asked my boyfriend to marry me, and he said yes. I was finding that taking chances was making me a lot less afraid, and—very weirdly at first—the pain in my joints almost disappeared. What’s interesting now is that I don’t consider it weird anymore. Whenever I feel pain in my knees the first thing I do is look at the stuff going on in my life and my emotions about it. I always assume that’s the cause.
This “context” equation of triggers, emotional states, symptoms, and illness isn’t weird at all, as Dawn discovered by mapping her timeline. It’s the essence of integration, the basis for genuinely integrative medicine.
PRACTICAL PRESCRIPTION 9: THE LEAP
Now, I’m proud of you for making it all the way to this point. But I want to remind you it’s not over yet. Just reading the book is not going to cut it. The idea is to ask the right, skillful questions regularly, and act on your instinct to find the best answers for yourself. I encourage you to now look at the whole of the slow medicine prescription—the 77 Skillful Questions list—which follows this chapter, and spend some time thinking about or writing down your intuitive answers. You might be inclined to feel this is a lot to do. Don’t fret:
•Start by looking at the questions and working on just a few that seem easy to you. This will give you some traction and a sense of achievement, and help to clean up some low-hanging fruit. You’ll be surprised at the considerable amount of energy this will give you, and the preparation will help you as you transition into potentially more difficult questions.
•Then go back to questions that might be challenging (but doable) and work on one or two of those at a time.
•Eventually, as you feel better (which you will), only then identify some core issues—the really challenging questions—and develop a plan and a commitment to finally tackle those.
Over time this method will help you to get through much of the work. It might take months for you to address the “easy” questions; the more challenging ones may take years. But if you stick to the plan, you’ll get there; and you’ll feel better and better each step along the way. In fact, you’re likely to feel better now, just knowing you have a plan that makes so much sense!
Don’t let the herd knock you off course. It takes courage to go in another direction given the influence of our modern society and our susceptibility to the words of others. The path I have laid before you is not new or unique. However, the message, as it is popularly presented, has lost much of its essence and, therefore, its efficacy. The work I am describing takes preparation. The next step is more like a leap. Really, it’s a genuine leap of faith, because we must break away from the stronghold of those who would tell us that there is an easy way to do this.
Before diving off a high cliff, it’s best to make sure your final step is square and balanced toward the water below, lest you go tumbling over the rock face-first and splat. Slow medicine might necessitate a plunge, but not a tumble. It’s about working hard to find and to move into your center, in integrity, square within yourself. It’s about having a true, clear, and deep understanding of your relationship to your body, mind, spirit, other people, the natural world around you, and every aspect of the world. It’s about alignment. That’s the skillful path to peace and harmony, happiness, and extraordinary health.
I have a very wise karate teacher who described the achievement of becoming a black belt in this way: He said that some people think that attaining the rank of black belt is the goal of the journey. In reality, he said, it’s just preparation to hike the mountain. When you get your black belt, it means that you’ve acquired some necessary skills and equipment—the physical endurance and the moves, the boots and the walking stick. In the process, you’ve inched closer to the mountain. Finally, you’re there, but you’re there at the foot of the mountain, not the top. It takes courage, humility, commitment—and hard work—to reach the summit.
Similarly, I set out to write this book with the goal of helping you develop the confidence in your own ability to find extraordinary health by learning to ask the right questions, and preparing you for the journey up the mountain. Now you have the right equipment and the right framework. The slow medicine prescription for success is natural, organic, simple, holistic, and utterly achievable. But it won’t be easy. No journey to find treasure ever is. It will take some work, for sure. But now you know the most skillful way to get there. I wish you great success in your journey, and I’m honored that I could be the one to see you off. I hope to see you later on down the road.