Our body is a representation of our subconscious. It holds onto all sorts of memories, beliefs and perceptions for us, a ton of messages. These messages might show up in the form of niggling feelings, dreams or passing thoughts, or get stored in the body in form of tension, blockages, constrictions, flattening sensations and emotions.
Like a child that wants undivided attention, our body will only let these messages go, if we are willing to stop and acknowledge and then release them. If we don’t listen, their volume gets turned up, so we can’t ignore them any longer. As a result, these niggling feelings turn into a bigger thing. They want to be heard, acknowledged and seen. Therefore, they send a stronger, more visible message for us to understand, as in disease, illness, chronic ailments or injuries.
You might have an accident and hurt your knee, or run your shin against the table, break your leg, shoulder or elbow, or you get an earache. It totally depends on the holistic picture of what’s going on within you; your thoughts, perceptions, feelings and experiences, and of course what accidents or what conditions and illnesses are occurring that give us a precise insight into what is truly going on for you underneath the surface.
This holistic picture will then also give us a clear understanding of who you are, what your gifts and message are, as well as your most aligned pathway of what exactly needs to be prioritised, shifted and worked on to get you closer to your Limitless Potential and experiencing wellbeing, health, love and abundance on all levels.
You might wonder what the messages are actually for?
They are here to guide you home to your centre and to help you remember who you are.
Every single one of your body’s messages better enables you to understand yourself and who you are.
The more you listen and get to understand yourself, the more your subconscious becomes conscious, and the more clarity you’ll discover around your ever-expanding purpose and your next steps.
The result is inner certainty and a deep sense of knowing of who you are.
I find that when we look at the whole picture of all experiences, struggles, health conditions and injuries, and into what they represent and are associated with somatically, we can really tell so much more about who a person is. It tells us where they’re coming from and where they’re supposed to go to find their fullest expression, which in turn leads to happiness, fulfilment and abundance.
The really interesting thing is that our health represents us in such minute detail.
A simple example is our liver:
Our liver deals with toxins that are coming into our life. That’s not just toxins from our environment and from our food, but also from emotions and from dealing with toxic influences in our lives. Our liver processes toxic emotions, but also toxic people and situations that don’t serve us anymore.
Our liver handles a lot of stuff here. It’s not just dealing with environmental toxins, food toxins, additives and preservatives and so on. It also deals with emotional components and sensations around us and within us. There’s a lot going on to handle!
The liver can get overwhelmed due to too many toxins entering the body—for example with medications, environmental stressors and emotions on top; but also, during stressful times, with wrong food choices that your body can’t tolerate and sees as antibodies rather than foods; or when there are methylation disorders present. The liver can’t keep up with processing and detoxing fast enough and starts “storing toxins away”.
You can imagine it much like a person sitting in a house in which there’s a lot going on. There’s dirt and clutter everywhere, there’re kids running around, there’s construction work going on in the background and visitors are dropping in. The liver has been trying to declutter all this, but it has reached a level where it couldn’t cope anymore. So it decides: “Okay. Hang on. Give me a second. I’ll bag all of this up and deal with it another time when there is more space and time to look at it all.”
It grabs big black garbage bags and stuffs all the clutter and dirt into it, no matter if environmental, emotional, food; it doesn’t matter. Whatever it can grab it stuffs into these bags, pulls them shut at the top and chucks them into a little storage room at the side somewhere, where the bags are left to rot just out of the way. That way it manages to cope just enough to keep its head above water, so it can deal with whatever else is coming along.
What happens, though, is that more and more toxins get stored in these bags and these bags are like little capsules. The liver packs all the toxins and bits and pieces that it can get a hold of, and wraps them in fat cells (adipose tissue), that are then almost separate from the rest. They act like little compartments that hold all the memory, waste, toxicity, and painful experiences, all together wrapped in capsules of fat cells.
This is why we put on weight too, because it’s too much stuff that the liver and the body can’t deal with at the time. It gets packed into fat cells and then stored away in adipose tissue around the pelvis, legs, thighs, boobs, belly etc. Where and whether it gets stored is determined by your body and personality type.
When we then finally have a break, go on a holiday or do a detox, the liver sighs with relief: “Ahhh. Breathe out. Finally, I’m getting a chance to look at all these black bin bags that I haven’t had a chance to look at for ages! Now I can slowly unpack.”
This explains why we may experience hangover like symptoms when we detox. We might feel emotional, get cranky, tearful or angry. Then all the different emotions, sensations and experiences that we didn’t get to deal with at the time are getting unpacked and let out to the surface.
This is actually a really good thing. We give ourselves and our body the chance to clear out what’s no longer serving us.
However, people often get frightened by this and want to suppress all that they feel again. Therefore, they eat foods that aren’t serving their body or watch movies, which ultimately bring in even more toxins to deal with because it’s a sensory overload with even more emotions, thoughts and information to process. It’s all too much.
We as people are generally not used to processing life and feeling the feels, so we disconnect from these rather inconvenient sensations and “pack” them away. It’s too uncomfortable, and therefore doesn’t seem to be “right”.
You know how we are often taught to believe that “happy” is a good emotion and “angry” is a negative one? Well, feeling angry now for no apparent reason is surely not a good thing, right? Therefore, we want to push the emotion away again. We don’t want to feel it.
In the end, the emotion/toxin gets suppressed again, and other toxins get stored on top—unless they actually get acknowledged, felt and released.
You can see that all our organs and emotions are doing something pivotal and really, really important, and by being able to understand what’s happening in our body and being able to read it and translate it for ourselves, for our loved ones or for our clients, we gain pivotal understanding of the messages of our subconscious and intuition. Consequently, in being able to understand what these messages are, we learn how to follow our path to more alignment and truth.
When we can understand how to read our body, follow its messages and nurture it, we become more and more connected to who we truly are. We become embodied! We’re “Home”, And we actually live more and more of our Limitless Potential.
If you ‘re feeling called to learn more about reading your body’s messages and empowering your health (or that of your clients) check out my popular The Footprint Connection Reflexology™ Online Course and TFC™ Certification Program.
Image Credit: Diego via Unsplash