The Pause Button: Acute Illness and the Messages they Bring
I recently got sick. Really sick. Like high fever, congested head, sore throat, so tired and achey I couldn’t get up the stairs sick. It hit me hard and fast — one day I was celebrating Thanksgiving with my family and the next I was on the couch, in tears because my body hurt so bad. There was no working, no rallying, no pushing through, my body was sending me a strong message — “stop.”
When we’re sick like this, often the symptoms are so intense that they’re all we can focus on. We find ourselves saying “I can’t believe how much I’ve taken breathing for granted.” Or “am I really so tired that I can’t take three steps without feeling short of breath?” It can take all our strength to get up and make ourselves a cup of tea, or sometimes we literally need someone else to care for us.
Something I noticed when I came out of my fever delirium was that, my body had actually been gently speaking to me for a couple weeks to slow down. I was getting tired going into the holiday, pushing through some deadlines, and cramming in as much as I could before my four-day break. It’s as if this illness was my body’s way of hitting the pause button when I wasn’t doing it for myself.
And there’s no shame in that, sometimes this just happens, we get sick and it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with us, in fact, it’s quite the contrary. Our ability to get sick is actually a sign that our Life Force is speaking to us loud and clear! An intense signal to pay close attention to the messages our bodies have for us.
We live in a world where life moves quickly, and it often doesn’t slow down just because we need a break. Unfortunately, there is a strong dissonance between society and nature — to which we are directly connected. We as humans, have this beautiful natural rhythm. We are not machines, we can’t make ourselves “go” all the time. Even the trees rest during the winter before they produce fruit in the spring. There is a time to become abundant, and there is a time to go inward, to tune in to what our bodies need, and to rest.
In a sense, getting sick is like our own Life Force setting a boundary for us when we aren’t setting one for ourselves. It’s saying “hey, you’re tired, this is too much, it’s time to rest.” Truly, it’s a beautiful function when we view it separately from all we have to “do.”
Beautiful? Really? Yes, and here’s why. Often when we’re in the middle of an acute illness and we ask ourselves the question, “what was happening right before I got sick?” We find we already know what took us from there to where we are now. Maybe you’ve been suppressing some deep grief that you didn’t have time to deal with. Or possibly, you got really aggravated by something a relative said to you and your anger just reached its boiling point. Perhaps you’ve been trying to meet a deadline and you’re just maxed out and overwhelmed by all of life’s demands.
Either way, acute illness can give us a moment of clarity. Sometimes during this we can feel or realize strong emotions, our intuition can peak, maybe we become more conscious of something in our lives that needs to change. There is innate wisdom in acute illness. It’s a point of contraction, a hard push inward, a space to become really present with whatever point of contention is coming up in our lives. It’s an opportunity to heal and come out on the other side with an even more conscious perspective.
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