Have you ever wondered why and where your body becomes sick? Why one person gets diagnosed with one disease and someone else another? When you’ve been ill, you might think to yourself, “I’ll never get better”, but then miraculously, you do. We’re able to move forward in life and not think much about it after that—even taking it for granted.

One woman never takes her health for granted. She went through a serious health crisis and taught her body how to overcome several serious illnesses, starting with spiritual/emotional healing. She grew up the last of five children in a very chaotic household with two parents, essentially raising herself. Her mother, somewhat of a medical intuitive, told her, “When you get sick, look at what’s going on emotionally for you.” There is much irony in that statement, as she was living in her mother’s house.

Today’s Western medical students continue to be taught the imagined separateness between emotions and the physical body. When most Americans go to the doctor, they are not asked, “How are you doing processing your sadness from your divorce?” or told, “You have thyroid disease, so let’s talk about how you express your emotions.” Often, patients leave their doctor’s office not having felt heard.

So, 10 years ago, the woman was diagnosed with a right frontal lobe glioblastoma. Her father had the same glioblastoma, which killed him 13 years before—just six months after his diagnosis. But she knew in a deeply quiet place inside of her that it would not kill her. Her brain and spine surgeon told her it had to come out immediately. The word “no” fell out of her mouth.

After a short period of self-doubt, she came back around to herself and got online. She came across strong research regarding plant-based diets and chronic disease, so she began eating mostly plants. Some time went by when her brain surgeon mentioned that the tumor had slightly reduced in size. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” he told her. However, 10 years later, she now had two tumors still renting space in her head.

She realized later that it wasn’t until she faced her childhood trauma that both brain tumors completely erased themselves at a very rapid rate. It took about a year and half to begin reclaiming her “inner children” with a trauma therapist and begin loving them (herself). She gained a quiet richness deep within her, and a feeling of being enough slowly overcome her. This love began replacing the generalized fear she carried throughout her day. Soon after that, she began facing the most devastating loss of all: feeling the abandonment of her true self due to the trauma faced as a child. She believes this was the key to healing her disease—feeling and grieving that loss.

Spiritual healing is not quite an intellectual process. This woman’s body was speaking for her, asking her to pay attention to the feelings she spent a lifetime suppressing. This was the hardest work of her life. She lost some relationships, but began building stronger ones—the most important one being with herself.

Gabor Mate, a Canadian medical doctor, believes that when we do not express ourselves, our bodies “will do it for us”, that most disease is emotions-based and our body will say “no” for us when our voices won’t. It’s imperative for us to look at how the autonomic nervous system responds to a stressor if we have trouble facing uncomfortable healthy emotions such as sadness, fear, anger and loneliness.

According to Mate, “Emotions themselves are electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the nervous system. Emotions influence, and are influenced by, the functioning of our major organs. When emotions are repressed, this inhibition disarms the body’s defenses against illness. Repression—disassociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm—disorganizes and confuses our physiological defenses so that in some people these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health, rather than its protectors.”

What Mate means is that when we consistently put others before ourselves, our bodies send out a message that sets up an environment in the body to create illness—usually starting with an inflammation response.

When we are not taking care of ourselves emotionally, physical illness will come into the body and say to the emotional self, “Pay attention, please. I’m getting you sick because you need to stop ignoring who you really are.” Apart from gene-related disease, autoimmune disease, heart disease and most cancers appear to be our Spirit’s way of saying, “Pay attention.” This has been and continues to be well documented.

Sometimes it takes major life changes for people to “wake up” and put themselves first. If we can listen to the signals our bodies send us, it’s our chance at a life of true joy and love. Not only did this woman’s two brain tumors heal themselves, but her thyroid regulated itself, her arthritic hip stopped causing her pain, her blood pressure improved and her hot flashes stopped completely—all without medication. Her primary care office called to ask, “How did you normalize your thyroid when you’re not on any medication?” She replied, “Got a minute?”

Allison Murphy is a NY and CT State licensed health and science educator, health coach and yoga practitioner. Connect at [email protected].