You may wonder: how can an illness be good?

And you may be curious to find out. Let me see if I can shed some light on your question.

The vast majority of us suffer from an illness of some sort. Be it something like allergies, obesity, constipation to more serious conditions, like diabetes, cancer or AIDS.

I have a vast history with illness, 20 years of suffering from a chronic gastro-intestinal disorder.

All those years of having it I kept wondering: “What is the cause of it?”

In my case, in classic medicine, the cause is still a mystery. Imagine that: 20 years and the cause is not yet determined. 20 years for me that is, because the illness may be in existence from the dawn of humankind.

All that is known about it is that it’s some sort of auto-immune illness. And, to my knowledge, auto-immune illnesses are created in situation where we kind of attack ourselves.

Other examples of auto-immune illnesses, besides my own, are allergies and AIDS. Even if they are distant cousins, they are cousins nonetheless.

For years now I’ve been studying illnesses, mine especially, and, a few years ago, I came to a conclusion that shook my entire view of the world. And that is:

“Illness is just a way our body deals with extreme stress and fear.”

It’s not negative, it’s not a death sentence. It’s like a valve that lets off steam. If it wasn’t for that valve being there, we, the sick ones, would have been long gone.

When we get ill, we think that we are unlucky, frail or maybe even cursed. We feel bad about it. Illness feels like a setback, like someone erects between us and our life a wall that’s very difficult to climb or break through. We think that now we have to get treatment for the body, go to a hospital and maybe even get surgery, and, in some cases, we start thinking at death as a possibility.

Except one thing: there’s a flaw in that reasoning. The cause for that illness was stress, and we feel that stress each time we think of something painful or scary in our lives. To cure the illness, we must deal with that stress, and that translates into facing it and letting it manifest, facing our fears and letting go.

Stress originates in the past, we project it in the future and affects us in the present. In my non-medical opinion, stress is the root cause of every illness imaginable and, as I said before, illnesses are nothing more than the body’s ways to deal with that stress and avoid self-destructing.

You may ask: “If what you say is true, how come people die from illnesses?”

My answer is: Without dealing with stress on an emotional level and trying to cure illnesses only by taking medication, your basic reason for being ill is not attacked. Fully medicated, you still feel stress and fear, the body tries to cope, but, in the end, if nothing is done on the emotional level, it will run out of resources and it just gives up after a long struggle.

You may have heard dozens or even hundreds of stories of people who healed themselves, only by forgiving and letting go. Those are no accidents, those are facts. One of those people is Brandon Bays, who had a tumor in her abdomen the size of a basketball. By facing her biggest fears and forgiving, she cured herself completely, and now she teaches hundreds of thousands around the world how to do the same. And so does Dr. Deepak Chopra.

But let’s get back to me. When I’m stressed, I feel that stress in my intestines, and that’s where the illness resides. For years I’ve been looking for an answer to what the root cause of it is, and now I have it: stress.

And I don’t look at my illness as to a negative thing anymore.

I’m grateful for it. Why?

Because, if it hadn’t been for my illness, I would have been dead a long time ago.

razvancostea.com