We don’t tend to trust our bodies, particularly when we become ill. However, think of the millions of processes that our bodies carry out perfectly in billions of cells every second; compared to that consistent, reliable, steady and perfectly coordinated functioning, the few times that our bodies manifest distress are few and far between. It is far more realistic to trust and believe in our bodies than to distrust and not believe in them. Indeed, it makes little sense when our bodies have served us well up to the time of an onset of an illness – a pain, an ache, a viral infection, a heart artery blocked, low blood pressure and so on – that it suddenly becomes the enemy. Surely, it makes sense to respond to the physical distressing symptoms as messengers, allies that are attempting to bring some physical or emotional neglect of self to the fore. The intentions of the illness symptoms are to alert us to the fact that we have been off the wellbeing track and need to get back on it. The nature of the symptom, the verbal description of it, the location of the symptom, the time of the onset of the symptom all contribute to the message that the illness wants to communicate. However, what happens more often than not is that we shoot the messenger – the body – by seeing it as letting us down rather than alerting us to neglect that is present and may have been present for a long time. When the latter is the case, we may have ignored less threatening symptoms, such as intermittent insomnia, vague aches and pain, tiredness, over-eating, under-eating, overweight, underweight, lack of fitness, etc. It is also common that individuals will have resorted to various over-the-counter medications to offset these symptoms, but did not take any time to examine their true purpose. Testament to this is that there appears to be more pharmacies than pubs in towns and cities throughout the country.

At the end of November I became suddenly acutely ill and for somebody who hadn’t been to a medical doctor since I was in a monastery over forty years ago, my initial response is that ‘I’ll get through this myself.’ Even though the pain was relentless and intense, I stuck to the determination ‘I can ride this storm’ like many other emotional storms I had endured in my lifetime. I stopped eating and was not sleeping. On the third day, under pressure from my long-suffering wife, I went to a local doctor, but, unfortunately, was misdiagnosed and the prescriptions given only exacerbated the illness. Of course, this outcome copper fastened my notion that this is something I can get through myself. Three weeks passed, with no return of appetite, continued insomnia and weight loss of three stone.