Mind Body Spirit presenter and Hay House author Sandy Newbigging shares some insights on the healing power of calm -and how to see beyond the symptoms in order to cure the causes of physical conditions.
Why is my body not working as it should?
Not knowing can be incredibly confusing, concerning and frustrating. Although there tends to be a lot of research available on what your physical condition is, what it’s called and what’s not working properly, it’s often harder to find information about why it’s happening in the first place. By no fault of their own, doctors are experts in diagnosing conditions and prescribing the appropriate drugs or interventions to treat symptoms. However, they are rarely trained in, or equipped with, the ability to explain why the body creates certain physical conditions. Medical professionals, taught by classical institutions, are often trained to view and treat the body as separate from the mind and the soul. From this inevitably limited perspective, physical problems can only ever be the result of physical causes. You’re gaining weight because your thyroid isn’t working properly. You’re feeling ill because you have a bacterial infection. You’ve got pain in your joints because you have arthritis. Or you have irritable bowel syndrome because you have a food allergy. Although it is not necessarily obvious at first, upon deeper examination, these explanations aren’t diagnosing the cause.At best, they are diagnosing a symptom of another symptom, with the real root- cause remaining unknown.
Taking the above examples further, being told you’re gaining weight because of your thyroid is not being told the cause. It merely begs the next question: Why is my thyroid not functioning as it should? Being told bacteria in the body is the cause of your sickness, again falls short. Why is there a build up of bacteria? Why are the joints swelling in the case of arthritis and why has the body become allergic to certain food types? Is it wear and tear, because it ‘just happens sometimes’ or simply bad luck? Again, answers like these don’t satisfy the curiosity that comes from asking why. There is much that can be learnt from the body for those who are willing and able to understand its many meaningful messages. I have found the body to be a brilliant barometer for what is in and out of harmony within your mind, emotions and spiritual Self. As a natural consequence, I view physical conditions more as a red flag to draw our attention to where any disharmony is being highlighted. Highly symbolic, the body tends to present physical symptoms in the areas of your body that serve particular purposes, with these functions reflecting what’s happening in your life. As a result, I invite you to be more interested in the functions of the body parts, organs, systems and senses and how the experience of the physical condition feels like to you.
The healing power of calm
With my Body Calm approach, we make a distinction between the condition label, the associated symptoms and the feeling of what it is like, within you, to experience the condition. All too often I find people get distracted by the labels and get caught up treating the symptoms. In doing so, they miss a major element that offers vital information on why the condition has happened. In the case of migraines for example, the label would be ‘migraines’, with the symptoms usually being headaches, nausea etc. When faced with such an issue, most people reach for a pill or potion to get rid of the symptoms. However, to understand the mind-body-soul connection reason(s) for the condition you want to look deeper to explore how the migraines feel to experience. When I’ve asked migraine sufferers what it feels like, I’ve had answers like ‘I feel under attack’. With this recognition, the next thing to explore is ‘Where has the feeling of being under attack been showing up in your life? Amazingly, time after time, we discover that the feeling will have been going on in a person’s life before the condition and symptoms showed up. Here’s another example to help you understand the healing power of calm. I recently work with a lady who had terrible knee pain to the point of not being able to walk. I asked her, ‘what does it feel like to experience the knee condition?’, her response was insightful:‘I can’t support myself, I feel weak and fear that I’m getting old’. I then asked, ‘where has that experience of not being able to support yourself, feeling weak and fearing getting old been showing up in your life? To which she said: ‘oh my God, it’s how I’ve been feeling since before my knee pain started!
We used the Body Calm techniques to help her get peace with the way that she’d been feeling and the knee pain disappeared to the point she was able to walk up and down stairs for the first time in ages. The Embodying work is also great for problematic life circumstances that keep showing up too. For life stuff, again, you want to explore what the circumstance feels like to experience and then use the Embodying Exercise (which I will be teaching during my workshop!) to help it transform.
When you can interpret the meaningful messages coming from your body, you’re able to tell a massive amount about your mental, emotional and spiritual health and use that information to help your holistic healing journey.
Sandy C. Newbigging is the no.1 bestselling author of six books, including Body Calm. Come along to Sandy’s workshop ‘Body Calm and Self Healing’ on Friday 29th of April from 1 – 3pm at the London Wellbeing Festival. Buy tickets.
For the full workshop schedule visit our website. Book tickets for the festival and download the festival programme to find out who’s on, what’s on and when. 
