I am a keen observer; I always have been. My entire life I have observed people and situations and learnt a lot from my observations. And one of the things I have observed very closely is that we often appear to get ‘better’ but not truly heal what is there to heal.

What I mean is that we can be experiencing an ill: we may have a disorder, we may be repeating a behaviour that is not serving us but is in fact hurting us, and from this point we can make choices to get ‘better’ but not actually arrest what is behind the initial ill in the first place.

And further to that, I have observed that getting ‘better’ is championed and confirmed by our family and friends closest to us in such a way where it halts the process at that point – at what some would believe is the full recovery but in truth it is only the initial stages of healing becoming obvious.

When I began to gain weight and began to socialise more after living underweight, malnourished and withdrawn from other people, my friends and family turned to me and more or less said – great, you are getting better. Yet I knew I was no way near ‘better’. Perhaps from the outset things might look ‘better’, someone may be ‘happier’ or physically ‘healthier’, but within, their suffering and turmoil still remains. And the very root that led to the ill in the first place still remains.

What I am alluding to here is that although we may look ‘better’, ‘happier’ or ‘healthier’ after a period of dis-ease, dis-order or illness, this is not the stop point. If it is, the real, underlying cause will re-emerge in one way or another elsewhere. How can it not? It may be able to be suppressed for a period of time but it will live within one’s body until something triggers it to re-surface again. Or it will be converted to look like something else which is ‘better’ when in fact it is still the same ill-energy that looked ‘worse’ before.

It’s important to now define that by illness I do not just mean a common cold or cancer or another named disease. I mean living even the smallest step away from who we truly are, for example, living with a lack of self-worth, self-doubt, holding ourselves back or living in drive.

Anyone progressing through any type of illness needs the necessary steps to restore the body but once that stage is reached it is an opportunity to then look at what was behind the ill in the first place and clear the hold it may have on us.

Too often we skip past this and then another illness surfaces, unknowingly to us from the same root cause as in the first case. And too often are we confirmed and applauded for only the physical achievement of getting better and that’s because it looks better so we believe it must be fine.

What I am further alluding to here is that life is not just about physicality. There is more to life than physicality; that before physicality there is energy – life is energy first. Albert Einstein made this clear to us with the fact that E = mc2. Put simply – everything is energy. And Serge Benhayon took this a step further to say that “Everything is energy, and therefore, everything is because of energy” (Serge Benhayon, 1999).

An example of this was in a young woman I observed in high school. It wasn’t unusual for me to observe people across their lives – this came from my deep care of people and wanting to know and understand where people were at in their lives. I knew what was happening for those that were around me daily, both at school and after-school activities, as well as in my home because of my observations and conversations with these people.

This young woman was older than me. She was always sporty, growing up in a family with long-distance runners and other sporty siblings.

Somewhere along the line for reasons I could not make sense of myself at the time, she chose to starve herself and lost a lot of weight. When I was 13, I saw her looking close to her death bed with how emaciated she had become. There were periods of time where she would not be at school and I knew she was being held somewhere to eat more consistently and gain some weight.

She did gain back weight and became physically healthy again, but I could see in her that she still did not feel like she was enough. She still had an intense focus on her body and exercise. I would often watch her run home from school with her bag on her back and books in hand. She wasn’t merely just running for health. She needed to run. It was clear to me at the time that she was not better, but because she was at a physically healthy weight and her menstrual cycle had returned, she was able to get her family and doctors off her back as this satisfied their definition of ‘getting better’.

She went on to become a champion ultra-trail runner. This entails training almost every day with running and strength training, to name a couple of the different exercise regimes. It also entails running distances of 85 or 100kms and sometimes 6-day running events.

From my own observation however, she was not better. My sense was that the same energy that had been used to once starve and strain her body was now being used to train and strain her body, failing to arrest the root cause and therefore not in truth, ‘better’. She was still able to be as slim as possible whilst being deemed healthy. And she was literally championed for it.

I share this story with the understanding that this woman isn’t any different from the rest of us.

We are all born innately delicate, sensitive, and aware. And this is but one example (out of many) of living in a way to shut down this sensitivity and awareness through various behaviours. We live in a world that not only confirms that we are ‘doing better’ but champions our choices to step away from our true selves – and our innate sensitivity, delicacy, and awareness.

We can convert things to make them look ‘better’ but this doesn’t mean we are truly better. We are only truly better when we are closer to who we truly are. And who we truly are does not come from external achievements, it comes from within; we are born with it and it is there forever whether we ignore it for our entire lives or not. It is only when we let ourselves be shaped and moulded by the outer world that we step away from who we truly are and this is the first movement towards illness and disease.

By Anonymous

Further Reading:
Observation Builds Trust
Learning to observe and not absorb life
Healing my Exercise Addiction and Adrenal Exhaustion