Fibromyalgia is puzzling to medical science, but it makes perfect spiritual sense.

My colleague Dr. Nancy Selfridge, with whom I taught classes on Fibromyalgia, has said, “Doctors don’t know what to do with their fibro patients. Physicians hate to be unsuccessful, and they are almost always unsuccessful when they try to heal fibromyalgia with conventional medicine.”

 Fibromyalgia is a perfect example of a “spiritual dis-ease” in the body-mind-spirit system. The symptoms of fibromyalgia are fatigue, sleep disruption, pain, depression. As Gary Craig, the developer of EFT, said to me once, “Fibromyalgia is to the body like low self esteem is to the personality.”

 But how could fibromyalgia have anything to do with spirituality?  Much of our religious heritage implies that the soul is “somewhere else,” in a different realm from the body. But I believe that the body is “distilled soul.” Wouldn’t it make sense then that the fatigue, pain and sadness of fibromyalgia could be a physical and emotional response to our soul feeling blocked from its natural joy, love, and creative spiritual expression?

 Here are some of my thoughts about this.

Even though it is not scientifically possible to fully prove this yet, there is ample clinical evidence that the symptoms of any disease in the body can be framed as a response to some kind of inner mental, emotional and spiritual constriction.

Each of us carries a unique-to-us quality of energy or presence with us throughout our day. This energy has the capacity to form empowering, nourishing, co-creative, and liberating connections to other people, to the land, to animals, to the world itself.

All humans are open flowing systems, capable of drawing in and transforming energy from the infinite into the particular. Our actions and our choices form our individual bodies and lives. We are also able to flow our own energy from ourselves into the infinite. As highly sensitive people we are more open than most to this flow.

However, we also may hold within ourselves smaller, tighter patterns of belief. These constricted systems are more closed than open. They translate into emotional energy that diminishes our natural open inner flow. We begin to feel more isolated, separated, and alienated from the world around us.

When we have a wound, a memory, a rigid habit, a restrictive belief, it is as if we constrict ourselves around it. Like the grain of sand in an oyster, these particles of ourselves are where we become less flowing, less open, more self-protective or even self-denying. Living each day gives us lots of opportunities to run into situations that can cause such constrictions.

Here is another thought—what if we are constricted around being ourselves?

For some of us the very idea of being a self, of being a unique person—of being a person at all—is seen as a condition of separation and constriction. Many people feel shame, for instance, about being a human being, or about deserving to take up space in the world. Many of us struggle with having such a sensitive physical body, with its reactivity, its instincts, fleshy-ness, etc.  It is hard to be so sensitive in a harsh world!

Constricting around our sensitivity begins to shut us down, so that we are less of an open a system than we can be. The flow of life energy, of light, of power within us is diminished. Now, all the other ways we create constriction and obstructions in our lives become that much more powerful, that much more difficult to work with.

In the same way, when we feel alienated for some reason from ourselves, or that being our “self” is a bad thing—it is like spiritual congestion. If this feeling is denied or “stuffed” so we don’t have to feel it, it can show up in the body as pain…and now it can get diagnosed as fibromyalgia.

An original meaning of the word “breath,” in ancient languages like Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew, is “spirit.” You could say that the movement of spirit and life throughout the cosmos is the “breath of God,” the respiration of co-creation. Ideally this breath should move in us and through us freely. We are each a “lung of the sacred,” and we expand and contract so that spirit moves freely and empoweringly through us to all of our world.

We can learn to re-imagine ourselves, see ourselves as sacred, spiritual beings, not in spite of being here as us, but because of being here as uniquely us.

We can learn to experience ourselves in a way that expands us, and restores us to a feeling of openness and flow. It doesn’t mean we become completely free of wounds, challenges, problems, pains, doubts, and all the rest of those feelings and experiences that constrict us.

It does mean that these constrictions take place within a larger context of flow. They are capable of being healed, transformed, and restored to openness and flow themselves.

Now we can engage and co-create with others in ways that feel right to us. Now our actions and choices can carry and assist the power of the flowing energy of the universe itself. This is true healing. I think it is the true basis for healing from fibromyalgia.

I believe that fibromyalgia is a message to our humanity.  It is a cry to the best in us, to say that we are selling ourselves short.

People with FM are like the canary in the coal mine. Remember how the old time miners used to send a canary in a cage down into the mine to see if there was enough oxygen down there to support life? If the canary lived, the miners would be sent on down to work.  If the canary died, well, I guess it was too bad for the canary…

Perhaps like all illness, fibromyalgia in our times is a message
that our bodies are sending to our conscious awareness:
“We are not getting enough spirit in here! Open up! Relax and enjoy yourself!  Live your purpose.”

For more of this approach to fibromyalgia and spirituality, check out
Tapping to Restore Harmony of Spirit: Healing from Fibromyalgia here: https://www.intuitivementoring.com/books-dvds/eft-and-fibromyalgia/