Do you have health problems that seem like they’ve appeared or gotten worse as you’ve continued along your spiritual journey?
You’re not imagining things. This really happens.
One of the major causes is trauma – but not the trauma you’re probably thinking of.
What is trauma?
Before I go further, let’s make sure you and I both use the word “trauma” in the same way.
I’ve heard people label their accident or abuse as “my trauma,” which isn’t accurate. (I’m not judging – that redirection and dissociation could be part of their coping mechanism, which I would never force anyone to dismantle.)
Outer experiences such as accidents and attacks can be traumatizing, but they are not the traumas themselves.
Trauma is the combination of emotional and physical responses that happen within a person in the moment of an accident, attack, etc. It also includes the repetition of those responses at any point afterward.
Emotionally, in the moment of a traumatic experience, a person experiences strong, sudden emotions like fear that they don’t know how to process, so they unconsciously trap those emotions in their cells.
Physically, that experience is so unexpected and threatening that the person’s nervous system sets up a physical response which will get triggered if the same threat arises in the future.
When does trauma first happen?
If I were to ask you when each of us experiences our first trauma, you might think the answer is, “It depends on personal experience.”
But actually, we all experienced our first trauma at the same moment.
That moment happened for each of us in the womb when we received our Core Wounds.
Let’s set the scene:
You, as a fetus in the womb, in the moment right before you experienced your Core Wounds.
(How and why they happen are too much to go into right here. If you want to learn about that, a good place to start is another of my posts, 10 Things to Know About Your Core Wounds.)
Your soul has already entered your body.
You are also fully connected to Source, because nothing has affected your energy yet so it’s pure and open.
You feel completely loved, connected, and supported.
You don’t know anything other than safety.
Then…your Core Wounds happen.
In that moment of receiving your Core Wounds, you lose all that sense of love and support from Source.
At the same time, the frequency of your energy field drops dramatically.
The sudden combination of both experiences is traumatizing.
And since you just lost your support from Source, you’re left on your own to figure out how to process the experience…
…which you can’t, because you’re a newly formed human who doesn’t know how to “figure things out.”
For the first time in your life, the survival instincts built into your nervous system kick in to protect you, since you no longer feel protected by Source.
All this happened while you were still in the womb. This was your original trauma.
And everyone is still carrying around at least that original trauma, if not other traumas, unless they have learned about this or worked with a healer who knew about this original trauma and have been able to get all the way in there and heal it.
How trauma leads to chronic health conditions
The part of a trauma response that I’m most interested in as a healer is how a body that’s in fight or flight can’t properly perform repair and maintenance functions such as digestion, immune function, and generating new cells.
The human body is designed this way so it doesn’t waste resources that might be needed to fight or flee.
This is why people with unresolved trauma are much more likely to experience chronic health conditions: They’re in fight or flight so frequently that their bodies don’t get a chance to heal what started as a much smaller problem.
Can you see the link we’ve established at this point? Core Wounds -> trauma -> chronic health conditions.
How your spiritual journey could be making it worse
Remember how I said that your original trauma occurred when your Core Wounds broke your connection with Source, leaving you on your own to figure things out?
That message that Source isn’t here to protect you still lives in your nervous system today.
So with every step you take along your spiritual journey where you seem to be starting to rely more on Source, your nervous system gets more freaked out.
Because according to your nervous system, you’re trying to align with and rely on something that isn’t there.
Your intellect may know Source is there.
Your heart may know that Source is there.
You may have experiences of feeling Source energy running through your body.
All of that can be true, and yet you still have within you the responses in your nervous system that you have been practicing for decades.
They are hardwired into your system – into the neurons of your brain and the nerves of your nervous system.
And simply going to a spiritual retreat is not going to dissolve those responses.
In fact, what happens instead is that it ends up triggering your nervous system. The more that you affirm to yourself, “I’m going to rely on Source and the universe,” the more that your nervous system hears that as you’re going to rely on something unseen, something that disappeared, left you behind, abandoned you while you were in the womb.
Your nervous system can’t accept that, so it freaks out. It gets triggered.
Do you see now how you’re being triggered by your spiritual journey?
If you’ve noticed that you get sick every time you go to a spiritual workshop or retreat, you’re not imagining it. That’s the effect of your nervous system trying to pull you back to the only safe paradigm it knows: relying only on yourself.
And since your nervous system turns off repair and maintenance functions when you’re triggered, the more time that you spend in a triggered state means the less time your body has to heal itself, which is a large part of why your health gets worse.
Next step
If you have a health condition that’s gotten worse as you’ve gotten more spiritual and you’re ready to make the inner and outer changes needed to heal it, schedule a consultation with me and I’ll walk you through how we can do that work together.
Much Love, 💜🤍
