In elementary school I was always going to the nurse's office. There was a little stash of books and a cot, and if you didn't feel well, you could curl up in there and read. This was way better than class. In class, I'd get bored, under-stimulated. So off to the nurse's office I'd go, complaining of a stomach ache or headache. This worked a few times, but I overplayed my hand.
One day the nurse sat me down and asked if I'd ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf. She explained it to me: If I kept pretending to be sick, who would believe me if I ever really was?
This stopped me cold. Faking sickness was off the menu from then on.
Sickness is a hot topic these days. Very zeitgeisty. A pandemic will do that, I suppose. The whole arena of health, illness, disease, and death has become politicized and subsumed into the culture wars—a ready reservoir for the quirks of our collective and individual anxieties, ideals, and values.
Masks, supplements, gluten-free diets, yoga, boosters, alternative medicine, fat acceptance, Big Pharma, Reiki: Any one of these has its enthusiasts and detractors, both camps generally harboring some level of mutual disdain.
Meanwhile, all-cause mortality is stubbornly high, average life expectancy is decreasing, we’re having a society-wide mental health crisis, and chronic disease is proliferating. If these are sensors on our cultural dashboard, they’re blinking pretty madly. If they’re symptoms of an underlying imbalance, they’re clearly flaring.
What do we do with multi-system symptoms in a person? In conventional Western medicine, we diagnose and medicate them individually. In other systems of healing, such as functional medicine, Ayurveda, and traditional Chinese medicine, we look for the underlying pattern that connects them, and try to address that.
In my early 20s, I was in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, and I was having a tough time of it. I had a hard time connecting with any of my fellow volunteers, and I grew increasingly lonely, longing for home and the friends and family I'd left behind. I felt useless. I couldn't see how I was helping anyone by being there—how what I had to give was lining up with what anyone there needed.
I thought all the time about bailing, declaring it a failed experiment and requesting to come home—which we were allowed to do at any time. But I was too stubborn. I didn't want to be a quitter. I kept thinking maybe it would get better, maybe I'd make more connections and find a way to be useful.
One night, four months into my service, I woke up in the middle of the night with a terrible pain in my chest. I thought there might be something wrong with my heart. First thing in the morning, I got a ride to the nearest town with a bus stop. I spent 10 days in the capital, where the head Peace Corps nurse did everything she could to figure out what might be wrong with me. But the cause remained unclear.
In the meantime, the pain in my chest continued, day and night, and when they eventually decided to medevac me to D.C. for more thorough testing, I didn't object. I tried to hide my relief. I still didn't know if I'd be coming back or not, but I was grateful for the chance to go home, at least for a while.
In D.C., an endoscopy revealed that the valve between my stomach and my esophagus had gone slack, allowing stomach acid to flood my chest. The pipe that literally connects my stomach and my head was on fire. Messages from my gut rising like fireworks, grabbing the attention of my mind and not letting go.
My thyroid had also crapped out. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis and told I wouldn't be able to return to Africa. The Peace Corps doctor told me I had something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder with a wide range of severity. By then I was so shut down I didn't know how to feel.
Autoimmunity happens when the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking the body's own tissues. Some of the most common triggers include infections and extreme stress. Multiple studies have found that up to 80% of autoimmune patients reported uncommon emotional stress before disease onset.
In Ayurveda, we're believed to have multiple layers of the body, moving outward from the subtle (or energetic) to the gross (or physical).
The outer body includes the physical structures of the organs, bones, muscles, and tissues. Just below that, the subtle body includes the mind, emotions, and senses; it governs the assimilation of our experiences, and it constantly creates and shifts the way the body functions at a biochemical level. Finally, the innermost body is where we transcend the self—it’s the state of bliss, love, joy, peace, and oneness with all things sometimes achieved in deep prayer, meditation, or transcendent experiences.
Western medicine tends to limit itself to the physical layer of the body—the one that can be measured, scanned, opened, rearranged, and sealed back up—as well as the biochemical elements that can be manipulated with drugs. That’s great. It’s amazing what we can do working with those factors alone.
But all we have to do is look around to see that it’s not enough. And I think most of us can point to times when both sickness and healing seem to have sprung from those farther, invisible reaches of the mind and spirit.
Sometimes an imbalance in the realms we can’t touch or measure bubbles up into the physical body as immune, nervous system, or hormone dysregulation, pain, inflammation, and mysterious symptoms that we might be able to suppress with drugs, but not cure. And sometimes—not always, not reliably, but sometimes—physical healing originates with a shift in consciousness or circumstance that unleashes forces we don’t fully understand.
After my diagnoses in D.C., they put me on proton pump inhibitors and synthetic thyroid hormones and sent me home, telling me I’d have to be on the thyroid meds for the rest of my life. But within a year, I didn’t need them anymore. My body had regained homeostasis on its own as my circumstances shifted, along with my sense of purpose, agency, and social connection. Of course, I’d also started eating a balanced diet again, and my gut had healed from the constant onslaught of infections and antibiotics.
For a long time, I nursed a secret shame that I could barely even acknowledge to myself—a suspicion that I had conjured the whole thing into being because I wanted to go home, and being sick was the only way to do that honorably. I knew I couldn’t cry wolf. So my body manifested an excuse for me to quit.
Because let’s face it: sickness (or fear of it) can be a way to opt out. Especially if you start leaning into it as your identity.
20 years later, I’ve made some peace with this. What if the layers of my being did conspire to manifest symptoms? What if they did it for my own good, because I was out of alignment, on the wrong path, and at war with myself? What if that’s what it took to get me to honor my inner knowing, even if it meant abandoning my sunk costs and carefully constructed identity? Even if it meant a total reorganization of myself and my life.
I still have autoimmune antibodies against my thyroid that I have to keep an eye on. And in times of stress I’ll still sometimes get that burning in my chest. I treat these signals now as emissaries, messengers from a wiser part of myself, and I listen.
More and more, I’m drawn to telling stories about the mind-body connection. This one, for Minnesota Monthly, focused on a woman with multiple sclerosis who resolved her symptoms through diet, lifestyle, and nervous system modulation. This one, for Experience Life, is about functional neurological disorder (FND), a fascinating hybrid disorder of the brain and body that highlights the futility of trying to separate mental and physical health.
I feel strongly that our current collective ailments are urgently pointing us in this direction: away from silos and separation, toward integration. Away from escalating angst and anxiety, toward calm and connection.
I think a lot about the phrase, “As above, so below.” About how an atom resembles a tiny solar system, and both are mostly empty space. How each of us is a world unto ourselves, and together we create a universe. I think about that seemingly empty space—between our cells, between our selves—and how it might be the key to everything. The energy coursing through it that we can’t see, but that organizes everything we can.
This is where I am now: intensely curious about the empty space. Intensely interested in energy and its organizing and healing potential. Intensely committed to opening to that healing energy, that I might contribute some measure of it to the whole.
I think the mind-body “split” (I agree that there isn’t one) is perpetuated by the addiction to our story of cultural and tech supremacy. It’s the story that we progressed past all the “superstitions” of the past, that we replaced the beliefs of cultures we dominated with our superior ones...without really looking to see if some of those framings of reality might perceive a thing or two we missed.
A practitioner I worked with pointed out that my chronic illness was protecting me by allowing me to say “no”. For all the misery and lost opportunities my illness created, I had to sit with the thought that maybe there was something deeper going on, maybe there are desires and protections at multiple levels of myself that I don’t consciously control, and my body will protect me in the best way it knows how. Our systems are amazing, mysterious and have a primal-intelligence that I’ve found can’t really be controlled, but can be danced-with 😄
Really enjoyed this article, Mo. I have definitely been shifting my perspective of our bodies to ecosystemic things vs isolated silos. Frankly it just makes a ton more sense!
We must be on the same wavelength this month! I just finished reading The Sleeping Beauties (which I believe you recommended to me last year) and have been thinking a lot about psychogenic and functional disorders, in me and around me. When you think about it, the idea that we even *could* separate mind and body is kind of insane. It doesn't seem surprising that we're struggling so much on so many levels lately. Thank you for sharing your insights! xo