Hay fever and the mind
Mar 21st, 2008 by spaceagesage
Hay fever season just hit me like a ton of bricks. Sneezing, itchy eyes, runny nose — ah, the fun of it all. I looked up the probable cause for hay fever in Louise Hay’s book, You Can Heal Your Life. Hay believes all illness has roots in how we view ourselves and the world, and for hay fever those roots are one or all of these: Emotional congestion. Fear of the calendar. A belief in persecution. Guilt.
Well, I can toss out the belief in persecution, but the other three ring a bell for me:
Emotional congestion: Having grown up in a family culture where emotions were buried or pushed aside in favor of keeping a stiff upper lip, I can understand this root to my hay fever. When I had some close family members die at an early age, I also shut down my ability to love fully because vulnerability became a no-no for me.
Fear of the calendar: I’m not sure what this means, but I would guess it means fear of not performing or producing in a timely manner, as in getting things done. I know I still need to complete my novel, my freelance work is lagging, and there are some personal growth issues that part of me thinks should be gone by now.
Guilt: I do feel guilt for not getting to the above mentioned issues, but I think I also feel guilt for not always being able to live up to what I write. In my relationship with my mother, for example, I have my good days and my not-so-good days. Yesterday I found myself unnecessarily pointing out some of her memory weaknesses to her. I don’t know why I did it — she could have gone without that knowledge and would forget it by the next day anyway — maybe I said them just because care-taking a memory deficient parent can be taxing. Anyway, I sometimes still feel guilt trying to bog me down even when I know moving into positive action would be better.
I plan to explore what Hay calls “probable causes” of hay fever with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing); NLP (Neuro-Linguistics Programming); and a few other leading edge therapies using the mind’s power to heal itself this hay fever season. The nice part about Hay’s work, whether I agree with it or not, is that I end up working on overcoming self-limiting areas of my life. As Hay writes:
“We all want to have our lives change, to have situations become better and easier, but we don’t want to have to change. We would prefer that they change. In order to have this happen, we must change inside. We must change our way of thinking, change our way of speaking, change our way of expressing ourselves. Only then will the outer changes occur.”