Acceptance and self-love

By Nathalie Khalaf
Holistic counsellor

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become”. Many of us may have read or heard this quote by Carl Jung, or something similar, indicating that we are somewhat responsible for our life circumstances. I could not understand nor accept such a concept for the longest time as a young adult.

My biggest questions were: “How is this even possible?” and “How would I have desired to have a disturbed gut leading to Irritable Bowel Syndrome [IBS], or acne on my face for so long past my teenage years, colds and coughs which would turn asthmatic and last for a minimum of three months?” It took three rounds of severe depression to finally understand it!

The tipping point

It was only when I drove myself over a tipping point and “fell” into what I call “the abyss of my own darkness” that I came face to face with my life and how it was not going well for me.

I was not happy yet pretending everything was fine. I had developed all these diseases but could not see how unhappy I was and how that was contributing to my diseases! The truth is that if I hadn’t driven myself into a “brick wall” and hadn’t fallen deep into depression, I would really not have chosen to face the reality of my life nor fixed anything.

Up until the age of 36 I was just looking at my physical diseases as just ‘physical diseases’ with no idea nor concept that they may have been linked to the way I regarded myself; all the fears and doubts about life, all my negative thoughts about myself, the lack of self-support, and above all, the lack of self-love.

Little did I know that all of these negative thoughts (which are energies) were triggering emotions in me (also energies) which I did not want to “feel”. So, by suppressing what was happening in my body and pretending I was feeling good, I had stopped the natural flow of energy in my body, thus creating dis-ease in the energy flow: I had created my own disease in a physical sense.

Desperate to survive

I reached a stage where I was so desperate to “survive” and return to happiness, along with a realisation that the medication I was taking, in specific for my depression, was not really curing me, but just making me “believe” all of my anguish and problems were gone. 

I was not ready to face nor handle anything yet

It was only when I was weaned off the anti-depressants that I realised my life was still the same! Anti-depressants (from my own personal experience and having taken them three times over a long period of time) proved to simply ‘sweep things under the carpet’ if you wish, by numbing some emotions in my body. If I wasn’t feeling sad or afraid, it didn’t mean my issues were resolved, it just meant the flow of energy in my body had been further suppressed in order for me to be able to manage my life. And for that, I do thank those numb moments of absence of clarity-I was not ready to face nor handle anything yet.

Emotions are energy in motion

Our emotions can of course be challenging, especially the ones we do not wish to feel, such as sadness, anger, jealousy and fear. But they are a fact we need to deal with. The more we suppress what we do not wish to deal with, the more those energies “persist”. Emotions are “energy in motion”. The more we resist an energy, the more it will persist and over the years accumulate until we have to deal with it.

By feeling our way through life, and releasing emotions, we allow the natural flow of energy through our bodies and help our organs stay healthy.

Understanding our internal system

Why wait for a disaster to understand and use our internal system at all levels? Our emotions are the fuel our bodies need in order to stay healthy. By feeling our way through life, and releasing emotions, we allow the natural flow of energy through our bodies and help our organs stay healthy. My body became used to the medication I was taking so much so it had to be increased over the years. I “thought” I was “feeling” better. In fact, I was not really “feeling” anything.

Health and wellness

Holistic wellness means we are able to look into all levels of our health and well-being. These levels are: the spiritual, the mental, the emotional and the physical. They are all inter-connected. Once we understand how these levels affect our health and well-being, it becomes a matter of choice, and then a matter of will for us to create health and wellness in our lives.

Understanding the mind-body relationship requires commitment and determination to dig deep into our psyche and uncover long-established images and beliefs, as well as heavily suppressed emotions we were never taught how to deal with as youngsters and children. These heavy emotions are mostly sadness, abandonment, fear, guilt, shame, jealousy and anger.

Everything is energy and it needs to be in continuous vibration. If energy flow is suppressed then it creates stagnation and that’s where our physical diseases come from. Our thoughts, beliefs and emotions are all energy. Shedding light on our thoughts, self-talk and bringing all of this into our conscious mind, and looking at them through adult eyes, helps us understand where it may have originated from during our early years.

What we think and believe becomes our reality. We react to our belief system by allowing or suppressing feelings. The latter creates what is called an energy block or dis-ease in energy flow. Most energy blocks start when we are young children and remain with us in our physical body until we are adults. When we understand and commit to creating health and wellbeing in our lives by taking responsibility for our thoughts, beliefs and self-talk, then we can slowly work on releasing the energy blocks, and, with the help and support of a professional, we can bring health into our lives.

Self-acceptance

Once I understood that I had never loved nor accepted myself as a child, always comparing myself to others and never believing I was good enough, my self-confidence grew, my digestive system improved and my IBS disappeared and so did my acne.

When I started talking to my counsellor about my childhood, I started to release so much of the sadness, anger and grief that I had held on to as a child and teenager. I learnt I had the right to all those feelings. That nothing we feel is wrong or something to be ashamed of. By releasing all past hurt, all sadness from my chest and my heart, releasing all the choked-up words and pain from my throat, I stopped getting sick, I no longer got colds, and I no longer suffered from chronic coughing. We are all capable of holistic wellness. It is free and it is liberating. It needs commitment, determination (from ourselves to ourselves) acceptance, forgiveness and a lot of self-love.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine