Internal Work - A Deep Dive Into Chiari
In everything I’ve learned about living with Chiari, doing internal work is the hardest to explain.
There is always an emotional and/or spiritual component to any illness or affliction. Some have said that the body is the last place to manifest illness; that you’re “sick in the head or the heart” before you’re sick in the body. And I believe that’s true. It also might explain why some of us go decades without symptoms only to have them appear out of nowhere as adults, despite being born with this condition. The farther we get from the person we want to be, the louder the message our bodies try to send.
I made it a mission to learn as much as I could about what the Chiari meant on an emotional and spiritual level. If you think this work isn’t for you, trust me--it is. The Chiari in my brain is a blockage, so one of the first questions I asked was: Where in life am I blocked?
The answer to that could fill a book (and might someday).
On a basic level, I looked seriously at how I was living when the symptoms started taking over. I hated my job, my diet was shit, I drank every day, I wasn’t doing anything good for me…I needed the wake-up call of the Chiari to force me to confront how I was treating myself (which wasn’t good) and the person I was being (which was even worse).
Deeper, I had to look long and hard at how the Chiari actually served me. I make a point of talking about how I served Lord Chiari, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized, we served each other. I could only keep serving Lord Chiari because I was getting something in return for living in constant pain: an Escape. The Chiari was the ultimate excuse not to live. No one—including myself—expected anything great from the woman who was always in pain.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
The more questions I asked, the more I realized that the Chiari was a condition tailor-made to my specific emotional hang ups. It told me who I was being.
And who I never want to be again.
The Life Inventory I suggested in the beginning gets you thinking. But you need to go deeper. How deep? As deep as you can. This work is ongoing and never ending for me. The more I uncover about who I am and who I want to be, the better I feel.
Deeper questions to get you probing:
If I died tomorrow, what would I regret not doing?
If I designed my ideal life, what would that look like?
If I designed my PERFECT life, what would that look like?
What do I believe about myself as a person?
What do I believe about the Chiari/illness?
What beliefs make my life better?
What beliefs need to be released?
If anything was possible, what would I do? Where would I go? How would I live?
What am I most afraid of?
What am I doing to feed my soul?
What dream do I feel stupid about/am ashamed to admit?
If I didn’t have Chiari symptoms, how would I want to spend my time? Live? Work?
Where am I blocked in life?
Where am I not expressing myself/what do I need to say and who do I need to say it to?
Asking questions opens doors.
The more doors I opened, the more life opened too.
I don’t have all the answers. But I do know that I feel better than I have in years. I never thought I’d go a day and actually forget about the Chiari. Now I choose to think of it in fondness for all the gifts that it’s given me. There’s still so much more to come.