When my body knows things my mind hasn’t realized yet: I always had a huge love for mussels, in any form and shape. I would buy them in 5 kilos bags, come home and clean them one by one, then put them in a large and tall pan, turn on the flame and add a bit of white wine, some garlic and some fine black pepper…and share with my family
Never understood this love for mussels, though. My mum hates them, my dad liked them but with no particular “addiction”, and only recently I found out I have a lack of intrinsic factor which is an enzyme that processes vitamin B12 and makes it available to the body. Guess what mussels are rich in?? I should listen more to my body, it knows best!
What is the signal you tend to ignore? The same way our bodies metabolize food, it also processes emotions and if there any of them that it can’t digest (the death of a loved one, losing your job, a nasty divorce…) that emotion with be sitting in some parts of your body and sooner or later will pop out in various forms, from a simple cold to more serious diseases.
In the same way, there are diseases that the body manifests and sends us signals about way before they are visible to any medical examination or specialized doctor: this is how easter medicine works, especially Ayurveda, in assessing illnesses of some parts of the body based on tiny signals from other parts of the body seemingly unrelated.
What can we do, then? Listen, with attention. Create silence even for a few minutes a day, nothing fancy, just absence of noise. And open your “inner ears” paying attention to hints and clues that would go otherwise unheard until the disease manifests itself.
