Inflammation as a Tool for Healing and Empowerment
By David Kitts
Tribe, these are crazy times. Almost all of us are confronting inflammation right now in our bodies, our minds and our attitudes and in all of our cultures, worldwide. Irritation, aggravation, righteous outrage. . .the list can feel endless. I myself can feel all of the trouble spots in my body light up when the issue of the day gets my mind roiling. Pandemics, wars, inflation. . .we are all dealing with so much intensity right now, and our bodies can’t help but to respond, too.
My body is no stranger to trauma. I had a personal episode last Christmas where my inner left knee twisted. Six months later, I wrenched my left ankle in a crater. I had my face mashed at age 17 in a drunken stupor, and my left neck and mid thoracic spine has suffered shingles outbreaks. My spine still shows the trauma of horrific bruising from smashing into the steering wheel of a VW van that nearly killed me at age 20. I bare the physical scars and pains of a life well lived.
I’m not listing all of this to complain, but rather to celebrate the level of awareness I’ve achieved after a lifetime of denying that anything was wrong, while nursing extreme anxiety from all the accumulated trauma. I’m sure you can relate to the desire to think your way to healing, only to discover, with hard earned awareness, that healing doesn’t happen in the mental spaces. Without awareness, nothing heals. So I lie in bed sometimes and literally watch my head heat up and start to ache a little when my mind starts grinding for a solution to the latest unfair, stupid and stultifying situation I’ve gotten triggered by. Then all the other spots kick in. As does awareness, which can lead me to the breakthrough.
Sometimes it’s enough to be aware that there are certain limitations that must be accepted because I have zero ability to change them. Just by seeing what lights up with any angry, achey anxiety I can learn about what feels threatened in me and breathe acceptance and love into the spot(s), which takes the focus away from my mind, helping it let go of trying to force me into some action my body really does not have energy for.
The core question I want to share with you today is: What are we using our precious life force for? There are a zillion ways we can make pain and inflammation worse. We try to distract ourselves and cover up our suffering with drugs, toxic food, polluted water, radiation from technology, people who drain our energy, inappropriate medication, various addictions, media. . .another seemingly endless list. It’s critical that we minimize or eliminate as much of these poisonous and unhelpful distractions as possible. We have absolute ability to control our exposure to some of these external issues and absolutely no control over others. We can eat clean food and supplements, eat more plant use more plant medicine and energy medicine, filter our water and graciously release people from our lives who aren’t evolving in a compatible direction with the way that we are. We have the power to fill our lives with healthy supportive lifestyle choices rather than succumb to increased pain and suffering.
There is thankfully one area of my life that I have an absolute ability to change and I am finding more and more confidence and relief in this modality: it’s called Human Design, and it’s one of my main techniques I use with the people I am blessed to work with. Human Design and the Gene Keys have helped me tremendously to heal on all levels, and take control of living a life that brings me happiness and good health. I’ve learned that my body is intelligent in a way that my my mind can never be. If I do not have the energy to do something, I do not force myself to do it any more. (I’m a Generator and my body wisdom is to “respond to life”. Generators produce life force and life knows what it wants to spend its energy on if we allow the process to happen naturally.)
The Gene Keys adds another layer of wisdom I can lean on: All of my genetically programmed characteristics have built-in evolutionary pathways that start with fear for personal survival which leads to mental behavior that creates competition, comparison, resistance and frustration, which paradoxically teaches me how I’d rather be living. Duality is magical that way; we learn as much about joy from suffering as we do moments of genuine bliss.
It’s oddly exciting to sit down and stare into the blackness of the unknown pains that previously succeeded in running my life, because I avoided confronting them. I know I’m freeing up vast amounts of energy I’ve used to deny I’m hurting. I also find great enjoyment in my Sacred Anatomy geekiness. I love finding where I’ve bound up my precious life force resources and liberating them for the purpose of becoming more exquisitely authentic so I can give my gifts to the world and help others do the same.
If the shadow of the fear of change is CHAOS , then giving the gift of my liberated self is INNOVATION and the divine purpose of this archetype is just the pure INNOCENCE of being. Innocence is what pulls me out of chaos into my playful genius creativity. We all have dozens of these archetypal/genetic pathways from fear to genius. Fear is always at the root of evolution. Once we have managed basic survival well enough, it drives us to find out who we really are and what we really want.
The primary driver of this evolution out of fear into genius is inflammation. This is where we come full circle.
We can’t live in fight/flight/freeze/fawn forever. Stress causes inflammation that leads to pain which wears us down and won’t let us rest or sleep or repair ourselves. My assertion is that our attitudes are the most powerful tools we have to reduce inflammation in our minds, emotions and our bodies. If I can, I always catch my rather easily irritated attitudes and complaints about so many events, laws, people and circumstances and just hold myself with tenderness. I let go of judging myself or anything or anyone else and pause, take a breath, realize that I’m changing nothing except my own internal environment (for the worse) by holding onto my righteousness, anger and upset. Then I breathe out. Often that helps immediately.
Of course there are many times I just can’t stop my reactions no matter how awful they make me feel and that’s when my healing practices really help me. In these cases the pause has to be as long as it takes to be with the inflamed parts of myself, to determine it’s origins in time and anatomy and what it was that conditioned me to cling to my irritation. Sometimes letting go of resistance-to-what-is brings up even deeper layers of resistance. Resistance is the very source of inflammation and it is always rooted in fear for personal safety, of being unloveable or of not being approved of.
The thing is, our inner children do not know that they can love themselves, approve of themselves and keep themselves safe. Somebody has to teach a child how to do those things. If you did not learn that (and most likely you cannot let go of your inflamed resistance because you were not taught these skills), then someone in your adult life will have to show you that you CAN love yourself and keep yourself safe.
One last thing to note: It is your CELLS that have to feel that they are safe. If you did not feel safe as a child, it may take as long as 7 years to replace all your cells so that you really feel that it is safe to let go of your resistance to certain people and circumstances. It’s a form of rebirth and requires immense patience, compassion and tenderness with yourself. So I encourage you to find the right people and skills and take the time you need to heal the inflammation in your life. Then you may find that the irritations of everyday life, no matter how collectively absurd or insane you find them to be, just aren’t as upsetting to your sense of inner well being and your physical health as they used to be.
If you are hurting from any level of inflammation and you need a partner to help you unlock your ability to create healing and safety for yourself, I would be honored to work with you.
