Healing Chronicles

When a person has health problems, people often engage in an age old strategy of giving the problems a name, such as autism, or asthma, or diabetes. While it may make sense to give something a name, problems can arise if the name takes on a life of its own in people’s minds. When that happens, when the name given to a problem starts being perceived as somehow the problem itself, then a whole misconception is created and people, acting on the misconception, may start saying and doing all kinds of nutty things.

For instance, a person could be having nerve health problems or memory problems, all of which are just consequences of strategies used and choices made by the person and others around the person. After the problems are named, rather than seeing them as just nerve or memory problems, people often see them as something in a way caused by an entity, a thing that comes with a name, maybe Parkinson’s disease, or Alzheimer’s disease, or als.

Now the whole thing with a name thing can take off and people even talk of being attacked by the thing with the name, as in “als attacks the nervous system” which is not really right at all, as there isn’t really anything attacking the person. Things are just deteriorating as a result of choices being made.

So, to counter any of this going on in your own mind, look at what happens when we replace disease names with a simple back to reality phase like “the consequences of choices made by them and others around them.” Doing this quickly clears things up in a pretty interesting way.

For instance, instead of saying “For fifteen years, she fought lupus”, we would have “For fifteen years, she fought the consequences of choices made by her and others around her.” Has a whole new ring to it.

Instead of saying someone “endured the ravages of als” it could be much clearer to say “he endured the ravages of the consequences of choices made by him and others around him.”

Some strategies for handling problems don’t sound as good after a problem has be unnnamed.

For instance, while maybe it somehow sounds ok if someone is “taking morphine to deal with the pain of cancer”, “taking morphine to deal with the pain of the consequences of choices” sounds rather problematic.

Some ideas start to sound kind of funny.

“They are doing research to find a cure for autism,” becomes “They are doing research to find a cure for the consequences of people’s choices.”

“Scientists wonder if they can develop a vaccine to prevent people’s experiencing als,” becomes “Scientists wonder if they can develop a vaccine to prevent people’s experiencing the consequences of their choices.” Hmm. While vaccines may have some benefits, this sounds as if it would be quite an achievement.

Will genetic or stem cell research really turn out to be the path to finally “creating a world free of the consequences of choices”?

So whenever you hear one of these names, just remember it’s just a name and what is really going on is that somehow choices being made and strategies being used are adding up to what is being experienced. Then what’s going on and what needs to be done to change what’s going on remain clear.