In spiritual circles being ill is looked at as a bad thing. It means something is wrong, we’re off balance, there is dis-ease and we need to be checking what the heck is going on. Which is all true. Even in the spiritual community we have to work against hundreds of years of enculturation and the loss of indigenous wisdom when it comes to understanding our bodies let alone having a healthy relationship with them. Being able to understand what they are telling us? That rarely happens and we still only truly listen when things are in crisis. We have a long way to go in order to get back to a healthy relationship with the embodied portion of this embodied existence.
One of the things to regain is the full color palate of messages the body can send. Mostly we see black or white. Either we’re healthy with just the annoying things that we consider “normal” and “negligible” about life like tight shoulders and groins from all the sitting and small hand movements we do or we’re damaged/sick in some way and need to fix things. Which covers all the contingencies the way fig leaves cover our naughty bits. Just enough to be what might be called decent but not enough to do anything else. *sigh* So what else should we know or listen for? House cleaning.
Most of us think of colds and the flu as a nuisance and an interruption. They come on at the most inconvenient times, they knock us off our game, and while we sometimes can work through them it’s a damn nuisance because that’s pretty much all we can do and it takes all of our efforts and pharmacopeia to do it. But colds and flu can actually be your body’s way of putting you in harmony, not taking you out of it. Like completely cleaning the tuning the engine of the car, having a whole new paint job put on, making sure that everything underneath is in pristine condition, at some point you’re going to want to clean out the backseat and the trunk right? You’re not going to do all that work and then leave used condoms and greasy food wrappers and bear cans and gawd knows what else back there are you? That stuff has to go. What’s some of the easiest ways for the body to eliminate junk? Your upper respiratory system and your bladder/bowels. At some point, if you’re going to get the junk out you’re going to have to cough it up. It’s pretty inevitable. It wasn’t licked on by kittens and it’s not going to float away on Unicorn farts.
Having a cold doesn’t necessarily mean that things are wrong, it can very much mean things are going right. When you come out the other side, you’ll not only feel well, you’ll feel new, which was the point, right?