The Healing Power of Illness - S1E1

This Heilkunst Life is a show designed to bring the deeper philosophy of Heilkunst medicine out into a practical, usable understanding for your daily life.

In our first episode, we go into the heart of a key part of the definition of health : What is the MEANING of your symptoms of illness, and why does a complete healing process require a full understanding and integration of this content?

Rather than seeing symptoms as random and annoying occurrences, they are, in fact "words" or "sentences" being spoken to us in the language of the phenomenology of symptoms. These "words" are powerful expressions of parts of ourselves that we have banished from our waking conscious mind, and they are now attempting to return home with the annoying forcefulness of a symptom or health problem. This is what is called "shadow work" in a Jungian context, or the "heilen" process of full integration brought about in Medical Heilkunst.

Human nature has a tendency towards one-sidedness, or "choosing sides" between what we perceive as good versus evil, or beautiful versus ugly. We need to constantly fight our way beyond this one-sidedness back towards our wholeness (to "heal" is to be "whole"). Our general susceptibility to illness and mortality is precisely a function of this one-sidedness. Our symptoms are usually unwelcome reminders as to the sides of ourselves we'd rather have nothing to do with.

In Heilkunst terms, we differentiate the actions of medicines which are "curative" versus "suppressive", under the umbrella concept of "direction of cure". This is colloquially referred to as "better out than in". The "out" part of this requires a process of fully engaged, conscious expression of whatever is the issue at hand. In other words, we need to foster a new form of literacy for ourselves - the literacy (and phenomenology) of symptoms and what they actually mean to us.

Those who choose to remain illiterate in this arena will suffer the fate of symptoms that return over and over and over again...they will keep knocking at the door until they are finally acknowledged, and properly integrated. Or worse - and we see this all the time - illness keeps progressing and taking over the former state of health, until chronic illness eventually leads to a patient's untimely death. As the old saying goes - "What you resist, persists".

Explore these themes with us in this episode, and then take the discussion even further with us by joining our Inner Circle at https://www.thisheilkunstlife.com/support/

Resources cited in this episode:
- "The Healing Power of Illness" by Thorwald Dethlefsen https://amzn.to/3SOcjys

- "Messages From the Body" by Michael J. Lincoln. https://amzn.to/3TlbrBz

Watch the video of this episode here : https://youtu.be/a-mH8xtZZk0