Cancer and Respecting Your Body Picture

One of the common things I've seen in both children and adults is the joy of coloring. The first attempts seem to be uncontrolled splashes of color that have little resemblance to the picture underneath. Then as children become more aware, all of their efforts are focused towards staying inside of the lines. With more practice comes an understanding of color as a representation of real life ... brown bears, black and yellow bees, the deep blue sea.

Concurrent with this awareness is self-awareness and children have experiences that bring about an understanding of limits, boundaries and an acute awareness of their body. Children have both a fear of and a respect for limits. This is in large part due to the role that injury and illness play in our lives. But as we get a little older, we begin to rebel against limits and boundaries. We push against the constraints of the world and we begin to lose our fear of and often our respect for limits. So it's as if we return to coloring outside of the lines with big splashes of color.

This is really what defines our health as we go through life. Each of us are given a life picture when we are born. We then spend our lives filling it in, creating color and both respecting some lines while blurring or coloring over others. We do this with our choices, our lifestyles, our habits and our experiences. The more we blur the lines of our picture, the less we can see what the picture actually is. This may be what subconsciously allows someone who is struggling with illness to lose their identity, to allow the illness to become their identity. Because now they can't see the lines of their body picture. The more we color outside of the lines, the more our picture becomes blurred, lost.

This is the very definition of cancer. It's when our body's cells lose their genetic program and devolve into shapeless, formless tissue that cannot produce protein, nor can it function as it was meant to. In cancer, not only have the lines become blurred, they are actually erased, making it difficult to restore health to the body. Because in order to restore health, we have to have the picture to go by.

So how do we recover our picture? We begin by trying to understand when and how you crossed the lines. Often by retracing your steps we can find the missing lines, uncover the original life picture. We want to help remove all of the color that is not an inherent part of your body picture, but at the same time we want to address why you were coloring outside of the lines in the first place. This entails teaching you what your picture actually looks like. This is a process of discovery, challenge and honesty. It's admitting and realizing what aspects of your daily life and which choices do not respect your body picture. As we discover more of the lines, we begin to gradually restore the picture. Then it's about adjusting the colors to your life on every level.

This process of uncovering the picture is also what begins to uncover the emotional stressors and triggers that drive you to splash color all over your body picture. Emotions, nutrition, physical activity, toxic exposure, are all essentially colors that can entice us to cross the body line. A cupcake here, a latte there, a winter of just sitting comfortably in an easy chair, a devastating loss, a sudden move, cleaning out the basement, a car accident.

So what we are really talking about here is the concept of regulation. Regulation is actually the body's inherent ability to control. It is also our ability to subconsciously control our coloring, the decoration of our body picture. When a patient struggles with the need to control everything around them, then we know that they have lost their inherent regulation. Once this control is lost we begin to color outside of our body picture lines and the normal regulation of a tissue (nutritional intake, oxygenation, excretion/detoxification and reproduction) becomes disturbed. The more we splash color over our picture, the more dysregulated the body is, affecting more tissues and systems. Over time, illness begins. Much of this is hidden, without significant symptoms, and we only begin to notice when occasional symptoms become frequent, uncomfortable. Symptoms are our body's way of communicating to us that we are outside of the lines, that the picture is losing its shape, that we are losing our identity.

By bringing our focus to core regulation and the symptoms that we are experiencing, we are focusing on our body picture. By interpreting the symptoms, we are uncovering the underlying lines. By paying attention to foods that bother us, how we feel with exertion, how much stress affects us, we are respecting the lines, the limits. In this way our body picture is the map to our individual health and longevity. By understanding our picture, we can make decisions that strengthen that picture and our body's inherent ability to control regulation. Our health shouldn't have to be at the front of our consciousness all the time, but it certainly can't be ignored.

You are never too young, nor too old to learn how to color inside the lines.