Insofar as we observe
illnesses through a watching and a listening that are biological, we realize
that they all begin with a shock, a precise, punctual event in space and time.
8:01
8:02
8:03
8:04*
8:05
8:06 8:07
All is well until 8:04. There
is a before. There is an after.
This event, indicated with an
asterisk in the time line above, enters into the biology when it is not managed
by its subject. For example, one day I see my daughter slapped in the public
park. In a second, that enters me and becomes an agitation; through my senses
it makes contact with my history, which renders a meaning – a meaning that
becomes a sensation: "It's awful! Not right! Rotten! Embarrassing!
Unthinkable! Depressing!"
And if I am without an
immediately satisfying solution and this emotion does not get expressed, this
sense perception becomes a biological felt sense:
"It's
indigestible" (which would affect the stomach); "it's
suffocating" (which would affect the
lungs); "dismantling" (bones); "disgusting" (colon); "a
breakdown" (kidney).
Unspoken Emotions Reside in
Our Organs
An event becomes a sense and
then becomes a sensation. It enters through our five senses and then it tries
to leave.
When it is impossible for this sensation to be spoken, it moves into
the unconscious, into the biology, into the mind, the brain, the body, the
energy field.
Each of these elements tells us about the others.
Taking a Chinese pulse informs
us about the energy level of each organ.
Since each cell of the body is connected
to a group of cerebral neurons, which itself is linked to a biological
function, observation of the brain allows us to determine the type of felt
sense that has been hurt and remained unspoken and which organ is affected.
And
conversely, each type of illness, and therefore the cells that are affected,
tells us about which felt sense needs to be freed for healing to take place.
If healing does not take
place, the patient will remain under unconscious stress with respect to the
shocking event – sometimes for years at a time – and a part of his being, of
his energy, is appropriated.
As Carl Gustav Jung has
written: "Everything that does not rise into consciousness comes back as
destiny," and I would add that it comes back as a symptom, as an illness,
as an accident, as a failure, as a discomfort; and au contraire:
everything that rises into consciousness no longer comes back as destiny, as
fate, as illness!
Biological Dangers
In the real world, when an
animal swallows a bone (which is a biological danger for it), the animal has a
biological felt sense of something undigested, for which the solution is to
produce more hydrochloric
acid. That is the archetype.
If a morsel of bad meat ends
up in an animal's intestine,
the felt sense is one of something rotten that needs to be excreted.
The
biological solution for survival in this case is to make a tumor in the colon
in order to produce more mucus, so that this morsel of bad meat can slip away
toward the outside.
If the biological stress is
one of being attacked by the sun, the solution will be found at the level of the
dermis.
More melanin must be produced. We call that tanning, and it has the
function of protecting us from solar aggression.
If I'm in a critical situation
for which the biological felt sense is that I must do something very fast, this
affects a precise area of my brain that then orders my thyroid
to manufacture more thyroxine, which accelerates my metabolism and gives me
more chances for getting out of a conflict of slowness.
Biological Reality and
Reaction
Imagine an old stag who has
his territory and his herd of females.
This stag impregnates the females every
year.
Then one day in autumn a young rival arrives, and the two males fight.
The biological reality of the old stag is that he risks losing his biological
survival territory. He has to optimize, increase his chances for survival in
order to hold on to the territory that sustains him.
The coronary arteries
are the organs that can help him with this.
He will then ulcerate, scour his
coronary arteries in order to allow more blood to flow, increasing the
irrigation of his heart.
In doing this, it will be oxygenated more quickly and
fully, cleansed of all debris, and will be able to send more blood to his muscles,
which then will receive more oxygen and sugar.
In this way the old stag has
more energy to devote to holding on to his territory.
These are primordial,
biological reference situations, which we call archetypes.
A man came to consult me who
showed signs of problems with his coronary arteries.
He didn't have any issues
with his harem, no one had come to butt heads with him and take his wife. . . .
But just the same he did have a territory, or something he considered as such,
and that was his small business.
His son wanted to take over this business and
told him one day, when he was in the midst of transmitting an order to one of
the suppliers, "You don't have to order anything.
This isn't your place
anymore."
The father found nothing to
say in reply.
From one point of view he was happy that it was his son who was
carrying on the business.
But in one fell swoop he was confronted with the
reality of the fact that he was losing his territory.
But there was nothing to
say.
There was no solution.
His felt sense at that moment was that he was
losing his territory.
And at that moment he activated an area of the brain in
the right temporal cortex – the peri-insular area – which then ordered his
arteries to be scoured.
It was senseless since it
wasn't going to help him get his business back, but the order had been
transmitted.
To use a metaphor, it's a little like someone who shoots an arrow.
Once the arrow has been released, it can no longer be stopped.
At a given moment, there was a
felt sense and that was it – the coronary arteries were activated.
This is the
solution of biological adaptation that had been programmed into him, one that
has been a solution for survival for millions of years and which has allowed us
to adapt to the real world.
Real or Virtual: The Reaction is the Same
But sadly, our man was in a virtual world, only
his brain didn't know that. His brain didn't know how to distinguish between real
and imaginary.
Just imagine . . . One day I found myself among
delightful friends where there was a stunning cocktail.
The cocktail I'd been
served consisted of lemon juice with a dash of strong mustard.
If I tell you
that I've prepared this same cocktail for you, some of you are going to wince.
Why? Does it burn?
But it hasn't touched your mouth!
You're completely in the
virtual world and yet you're already disgusted.
For this businessman it was just the same.
All
at once, his mind, his brain, and his body received a shock.
All at once, there
was a memory, an association with an ordeal; in the second that followed, a
belief appeared that consisted of: "Without territory, life has no
meaning."
There was this felt sense: I'm losing my
territory. There was a void. There was nothing left.
Then came the survival
solution in the biology: I scour my coronary arteries, I get the blood
flowing.
Down the road our man managed to resolve his
conflict. After a few months, he was finally able to say, "How wonderful
after all – I don't need this business anymore!"
He dropped it, he let go.
He could then begin to reline his coronary arteries, because there was no
longer a conflict with the young stag. He also healed his right temporal
cortex.
A little cholesterol came to the help of this relining; it's a
reconstruction material that allows the body to be repaired.
What Is the Illness Intended to Heal?
Jung said we aren't here to heal our illnesses;
our illnesses are here to heal us.
A woman came to consult me one day because she
had a tumor in her left breast.
We looked for the strongest, most dramatic
event she had lived through and was able to speak about, because once we speak
of something, it is expressed.
If it is not expressed, it is imprinted. In
biology what is not expressed is imprinted.
The first breast that a right-handed woman
usually gives to her baby to nurse from is the left breast.
The infant then has
its right ear over her heart, it hears the cardiac rhythm and it is calmed by
that.
But what is the biological meaning of the breast?
The breast is the only organ that has no use
for its owner – it is for someone else.
If both breasts are removed, a woman
can continue to live. The breast is for someone else.
A problem in the breast
is therefore a problem in relation to someone else.
The breast is there to make
milk, to nourish someone else, to give of oneself.
So I explained to the woman, Mrs. L, that with
this felt sense there was someone else, a child or someone in maternal relation
to her, who had been in danger.
We moved back in time, Mrs. L
"rejuvenated" and suddenly she collapsed in tears.
She then related
this story:
She had been at a fairground with her grandson.
Wanting to ride on the ghost train, the child had rushed forward and fallen
with his hands on the rail just as the train arrived.
Within
one second, Mrs. L envisioned the child's hands cut off, and all the problems
this handicap would cause, including her daughter's depression.
Mrs. L
immediately saw one thousand and one things and felt guilty for each one. It
was unthinkable.
She would have wanted to do something, give something of
herself, but there was nothing that could be done.
She was caught in a maternal
impossibility.
What she told me in the course of half an hour took place in her
head within one or two seconds.
In fact, the child was unharmed.
He had long
sleeves and his hands were not on the rail, but she hadn't seen that. He was
just fine, with only a few scratches on his knees.
But at that moment, a very sharp emotion had
entered into her.
The arrow had been released.
After the incident, using her
reason, she convinced herself that all was well and the child was safe.
But the
important element was not what she thought in her head.
What counted was what
she'd felt in her body – what happened in her "gut."
This accident
could well happen again, and this time for real. She began to have nightmares
about it.
She relived these possible events in her guts. In her head, she was
settled; there was no problem. In her gut, she was no longer living in the
present; that moment in time was fixed, frozen.
When scientists drill into an ice floe, they
discover dust and gas that date from prehistory.
Similarly, all the stories are
present in the history of a person, in the deep layers. Everything remains.
And for this woman, if a few years later she
happens to see something on television – a child in trouble, who falls or is
knocked over, anything like that – that's all it will take for there to be an
effect, for that previous experience to be awakened and unleash a symptom of
adaptation.
Someone else who has not experienced the same
ordeal and has not then been programmed for that event will not experience the
events in the same way.
Mrs. L, on the other hand, has been programmed and she
carries within herself the thought that it could happen.
She has this
program in her mind, in her memory, in her cells, in the nucleus of her cells,
in the genetic code of the nuclei of her cells – which eventually manifests as
a tumor in her breast.
If she were to conceive a child following this
event, she would unconsciously assign the child a mission: she must give the
child all the winning solutions, all the things that helped her, everything
that was important for her.
One of the winning solutions for her is always to
be ready to help others, to be a mother for others.
That's in her neurons and
in her genes. In giving birth, she would transmit this program, either through
her genes or through education, or from brain to brain. . . .
And perhaps this
future child would be named Christian, Christine, or Christopher. . . .
That
is, he or she would be like Christ in caring for others, in his disregard for
self.
Perhaps he or she would become a nurse, a therapist, or a social worker,
but, in any case, he or she would be a pair of breasts.
In a
professional way and in a physical way, he or she would incarnate unconscious
fidelity, unconscious loyalty to this survival program.
This explains how we can meet people, both men
and women, who have a strong chest and are very sensitive to the troubles of
the world without their knowing why this is so. When we look into the line of
their ancestors, we can find the program that was installed at a given moment.
I remember another patient who had been told
that her son was autistic.
That very evening, she had milk flowing from
both breasts. One diagnosis was enough and no follow-up was needed.
In some
cases, the shock is so strong that, right away, the biological program appears.
The Onset and Phases of Illness
The following list summarizes the biological
progression of the onset of illness:
1. The external event occurs
2. The event is perceived by the
five senses
3. Immediately, the
unconscious memory of another event having something in common with
this event floods in
4. Beliefs rise up
5. Feeling is invoked
6. Feeling is transformed into biological
coding in the brain, which has a finite assembly of options that
correspond to our biological reality
7. In the final analysis, these options
consist of everything that relates to the body, which expresses the
adaptation program
8. Whenever the dramatic intensity is
strong, the biological program may be transmitted to the gametes (ova,
spermatozoa) and any subsequent child will be unconsciously faithful to this
coding through his illnesses, through his name, through his job, and so on
The Phases of Illness
All illnesses have two phases: The first phase
extends from the shock to the resolution of the shock.
This is the stress
phase.
The second phase extends from the resolution until the return to normal.
This is the inflammatory, healing phase.
All of our biological reality, whether it's the
mind, the brain, the body, the energy meridians, the Chinese pulse, the spots
in the iris – all develop at the same tempo.
If the person is in conflict, then
the whole is in conflict.
If the person resolves things, then the whole is
resolved.
One day a man came to see me because he had
developed a rectal tumor. He had been passing blood from his anus since the month of February.
I asked him what
was the positive thing that took place for him in February.
The man was stunned. It didn't seem logical to
him.
But if there's blood, if there's a large inflammation, it means that
someone is in the process of resolving something.
He was in the second phase.
He found the ordeal, which had happened one
year before. He had five children, and his second child (who was like him and
with whom he got along the best) brought his fiancée home with him for the
first time.
And all during the meal, she continually made jabs at his son by
making embarrassing remarks about him.
It was the father who experienced a
shock at that time, but he was unable to say anything about it.
She was his
son's choice and he loved his son and respected his choice. But when he spoke
to me about it, he said, "Oh, my goodness! It was hard."
And he made
certain movements with his hand.
So I asked him, "What is your hand
telling us?"
"Well, I wanted to get rid of it. It was
crappy what she did in my home."
This man was speaking to me with his
rectum. His felt sense at the time of the ordeal was that someone had deposited
a rotten bit of meat in his home, in his territory, and he wanted to get rid of
this rotten bit but he couldn't. It was stuck.
Then, at the end of January, his son called him
saying, "It's over.
She's a pain in the ass.
You'll never see her
again." He had no idea it had been an ordeal for his father, who was no
doubt delighted at this breakup.
The next day, the father began passing blood.
Because at that moment, he was resolving his crappy conflict.
There was no
longer any need to manage a filthy, rotten item. He had moved on to the repair
stage, to the solution.
The delay in the appearance of symptoms is very variable depending on the felt sense.
It is unleashed in the same second as the original event, but the symptom
itself appears after a delay.
For someone who has a conflict that is at the
level of the skin, the symptom appears quickly, since the skin
is immediately visible.
If it's a decalcification at the level of the bone, it
will take time, months even, before it's noticed.
The delay depends on the
organ, and therefore on the felt sense.
Sometimes it seems to me that the human is like
a passenger seated in a vehicle.
A woman came to see me, saying, "I want to
have children." At that moment, it's the passenger in her who is speaking,
and who is suffering from being sterile.
She wanted to go to the right, toward
the forest of fertility, and yet her car kept taking her to the left, into the
desert of sterility. I explained to her that it was her unconscious that was
driving the car.
This sterile woman carried in her unconscious mind a memory
that was a message: there is a danger in being pregnant, even a danger of dying.
Her grandmother
had died in childbirth; therefore, in her unconscious mind, pregnancy was
dangerous.
Within it's own system of logic, the unconscious mind is always
right. It goes toward life, and in this case, life meant not being pregnant.
Once she understood that, she could deprogram, and then make babies
with the conviction that this problem was a "granny" problem and that
there were lots of other women who make babies and survive!
So, it's a question of becoming aware
of who is driving, who is at the wheel.
When I do this or that, when
I produce a symptom, who is directing my life, and why?
Another woman was into bodybuilding. She went
to the gym every day for an hour.
One day, right in the middle of a workout,
she became aware that she was doing this as a compensation, connected to her
father, who put her down all the time, telling her, "You're ugly, you're
thin. . . ."
She had forgotten that but it was still there. Right in the
middle of a workout, she realized, "I'm doing all this for him! I'm boring
myself stiff just for him."
She took off her outfit, took a shower, and
never went back. She was doing it only in terms of a compensation. That's what
was driving her car.
There was no passenger inside who wanted to do bodybuilding.
Bodybuilding could be continued if there was another reason.
But when it's just
that one part that wants to do bodybuilding or that wants to be sterile, for
example, in such circumstances there's no reason to go on.
The Electrochemical Whispering of My Cells
The appeal and specificity of the biological
decoding of illness is to propose a biological meaning – in the
emotions, never in the intellect.
If we could find meaning only at the
intellectual level, it would be annoying or amusing.
But when it relates to our
personal history, it's no longer intellectual, it's emotional.
Emotion is the song of the
cells, it's their whispering; it's the electric light, warm and chemical, the
subjective reality of the nuclei of the cells.
Emotion is a little cell speaking
about itself and showing itself to be fierce animal, modest monk, naked artist.
It tells itself this openly, with satisfaction or in frustration.
Article Source:
The BioGenealogy Sourcebook:
Healing the Body by Resolving Traumas of the Past
by Christian Flèche.
©2008. Reprinted with
permission of the publisher, Healing Arts Press, a division on Inner Traditions
Intl. www.innertraditions.com
