Throat & Stomach
HEALING THROAT AND STOMACH
Ailments - appetite, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, obesity, stomach, indigestion, nausea, stomach ulcer
The throat is where it all starts! What is the throat, what is it’s function and what does it represent or symbolise to us in our life. Well let’s look at what it does. The throat has two basic functions, namely: it is about taking life in - taking air in for our lungs and therefore, for our life; the other important function is that it takes in food and liquid and feeds us by sending it to our stomach for nourishment. Looked at differently it symbolises the ability to absorb what we need, and to let go of what we don’t need.
The other important thing is to see where the throat is situated. It is the bridge between the heart and the head or seen differently, it is the bridge between the mind and the body. Often neck problems stem directly from conflict between the mind and the body or the heart. That however, is a separate issue from this discussion.
So the throat has two major roles:
In this article my focus is mainly on nourishment and related issues.
So lets start with food entering the mouth – here it is under our control. We take it in and we chew it and if there is something wrong with it, then we spit it out if we so choose. However, once it is swallowed we have now surrendered it to the automatic process of digestion. This is where we have surrendered control to the stomach. The stomach sits in our energy centre of willpower, personal power and assertiveness. So here are issues to do with personal will and assertiveness. Issues like gagging on food or feeling as if we are force-fed are both conflicts of personal will.
In exactly the same way as we swallow food, we swallow our reality – thoughts, ideas, feelings, events, belief systems and experiences. Swallowing is about allowing change to happen. We can resist change by closing the throat – gagging, or we can trustingly open ourselves up to change.
When we struggle to believe something, we say: “we cannot stomach it”. In the same way when we swallow something, it is the same as saying “we believe it”. Therefore, when we swallow our reality we are accepting it into our being. If we don’t like what it is that we are swallowing or what we are forced to swallow, we may have to swallow hard and then it may manifest in our body as a swollen or sore throat.
So here again we can ask some pertinent questions, namely:
We may not want to swallow our reality or we may be holding back too many feelings, particularly if they are unacceptable and not appropriate to you. Such repression creates great tension and stress and can affect the rest of the digestive system. We need to get in touch with our feelings so that we can give them a voice in order to be heard. In other words, we need to be able to speak our truth!
Stomach
So now we have finally swallowed the food and it slips down the oesophagus into the stomach to continue the digestion process. This symbolises the ability to absorb what we need and what we need to let go of. So lets ask some more interesting questions, namely:
Having a healthy digestive system means that we are able to receive from others and give to ourselves. This is important and will be shown in the next section below.
Without this balanced giving and receiving there can be a constant craving, a longing to fill up our hidden needs or the opposite, which is a strong denial or rejection of those needs. As we all know the stomach is the place where we harbour worry – the digestive enzymes churning with anxiety until we can no longer stomach what is happening! Invariably, most of us use food to pacify what is happening on the inside, namely that anxiety.
Appetite
The way that we see food and how we treat food is the way that we see and manage our emotional nourishment. It is a direct reflection of what is going on inside us. The act of eating and swallowing is symbolic of taking in and absorbing our reality. A huge increase in appetite can be when we have a bottomless pit feeling in our stomach. Children often reflect this when they eat incessantly in an unconscious way in order to get a word of praise from the parents, because the love that they want is not readily forthcoming. Or put in a different way, a devouring or demanding appetite indicates a personality who devours information, experiences and/or relationships, yet may be missing the insights and/or wisdom offered, because they are being devoured so quickly.
A lack of appetite can indicate a desire to retreat from the world, not to take in any more. This often is a reflection of a relationship breakdown and then we may go for days without food, whilst nurturing the hurt on the inside of us - this then indicates an unexpressed need for love, attention and companionship.
Of course a low appetite can also occur when we are healing ourselves of some physical problem – here the energy is being diverted for use elsewhere. This occurrence is quite common.
Anorexia Nervosa
So, we have now made our way to this particular problem. Here very little food is consumed and the body begins to fade away, reflecting a condition of starvation. As can be seen from the foregoing, that this is intricately intertwined in the issues of love and nourishment. Here we secretly have the longing to be loved and nurtured and so we subconsciously decrease the size of our presence (weight loss) or reduce the presence of us, so that whatever little is passed on to us is ok, or the love that we demand and receive is so little that it cannot possibly be an inconvenience to others and/or it does not inconvenience them too much.
So we can see that there is a chronic sense of lack of self-worth, so much so, that our own feelings are considered unimportant. The trigger for this is often guilt or shame. Some of the things that spring to mind are that love was always conditional, based on performance and success, or dependent on giving to others. (The others are always the ones on whom we are dependent on for recognition in some way.) Yet, there is a longing to be loved unconditionally for who we are.
Here again we ask some pertinent questions, namely:
Often we feel that we have to stay small or to be less than or should not to be noticed - to fade into the background. Let’s look at that:
Anorexia often arises as a result of feeling out of control to what is happening to us – we feel that we can’t control what is happening. Deep inside is a boundary issue that needs to be resolved. This often dates back to times that we were subjected to domineering parents or teachers and/or to life changing circumstances. This constantly plays out in our life until we undertake to face and confront it. To act out our subconscious desire to control, we clamp down on food, which is a way of clamping down on our own feelings. Where there is no expression of emotion there is complete control.
This is most common in girls. When we as a young girl, are not adequately prepared of the changes that come in puberty (and we have been subjected to this kind of emotional background), this can be a period of emotional turmoil for us. For many it is overwhelming, especially the physical changes taking place that appear to take control over the body and therefore we feel that we can’t control it. In some people, becoming very thin takes away their feelings of being exposed, to being noticed by the opposite sex and therefore their sexuality (which is the ultimate of personal exposure), their sensuality, desirability or impending womanhood. Menstruation can even stop as such is the subconscious process of not wanting to be recognised or acknowledged. There is a desire to escape completely from reality of the body and all the feelings that go with it – especially from becoming a woman in her own personal right and power.
Some of the roots that can contribute other than those mentioned already, are growing up too quickly, social pressures such as models who are super thin and hence acknowledged by the media as the ultimate, such can be the social pressures that our young girls are subjected too. These are very powerful, especially if there is not support of you as a young growing woman in your earlier years.
The bottom line in this dis-ease is about loving us as we are; it is absolutely essential and fundamental. When we do this then deep healing can take place.
Bulimia Nervosa
Here the combined inner feelings that are running around within oneself, is the driving force. Inside there is the desire to be perfect (appear perfect in our body i.e. ideal so called super thin) and hence the starvation and coupled to this is the great longing for life and love (and hence the desire for food). The drive for love is supreme amongst all of us and is deeply inherent within all of our natures. Here the body acts out as a longing desire to be free and yet to consume. This is a vicious place to be and we become filled with self-dislike, if not self-loathing and guilt.
The body’s cravings become unmanageable. There are cravings in the middle of the night (where no one can see us and see what we are doing), we are desperate to be normal, we long to eat a normal meal and then we find that later we throw up our longed for meal. This is a direct reflection of our inner emotional world, i.e. how we repress our emotional world. The act of throwing up is a direct rejection of nourishment for ourselves, a refusal of allowing anything to touch us on the inside. It is a desperate attempt to maintain control over our feelings.
So we know that food represents emotions. Just as you are about to throw up ask yourself the following:
Obesity
Food and love are intimately bound up, so at times of emotional loss or confusion, the stomach appears as a big hole that needs filling. The food squashes down our real feelings – the more we eat, the less we feel. At the same time we build a wall around ourselves that few can penetrate.
Many cases of over-eating develop, following deep emotional pain or loss and the excess weight is like a protection against further hurt. The hurt can be from many things such as: Sensitivity to criticism, sexual attractiveness that is abused, ridicule, exposure, past relationship failures or a special love failure, non acceptance of womanhood, a feeling of it not being safe to be a woman, or not safe being a person speaking your truth and/or a shameful experience not spoken about, etc.
It also blocks out our own feelings and we become numb to what is really being felt inside. Grief or shame is often hidden beneath and many women put on excess weight around their hips and thighs following sexual assault. By covering the sexual area the feelings are shut away. Obesity is about a longing for love, combined with a fear of loving or being loved perhaps due to past hurt, loss or pain.
Excess flesh indicates a holding on, an attachment or clinging particularly to attitudes and thinking patterns that justify our behaviour. It provides a false sense of security – a belief that we are safe from feeling or being hurt. It also implies a loss of control and an inner hopelessness or lack of self-respect. To shift the weight we need to explore our attitudes, what being heavy means to us and what feelings the weight is hiding. What may happen to us if we start to lose weight? Would we now be seen or would we now feel exposed? How do we manage this?
Some ideas on what to do to address your weight and some pertinent questions
Rather than focusing on what is wrong with being heavy, start exploring the benefits. Try writing down all the ways that being heavy is OK for you.
Then explore how it would feel to be thin:
The bigger we get, the more likely we are to reject ourselves and feel ugly or unlovable. Losing weight occurs through a deep shift in attitude, starting with an acceptance of ourselves just as we are – we need to give ourselves the love we long for. Then we can start working on the layers of fear that lie beneath the excess weight.
Indigestion
This is the stage where we have swallowed the food – swallowed the events and it is now becoming too much to bear, what the reality is that we are trying to digest is just too bitter or sour and we literary cannot stomach it any more. The stomach acid is stimulated and activated and we feel uncomfortable and/or may get heartburn.
The pertinent questions that we need to ask here are:
When we are get heartburn, then the suggestion is that we need to find out what the heart is really telling us / burning us / or getting upset about?
Nausea
This is a direct indication that something is churning within us in the wrong way. Often when we vomit we feel immediate relief. The trick to solving the problem is to find out what it is that we are feeling at the time that we vomit? That is our direct indication of finding out what it is that we need to address and sort out if it is an emotional issue.
If we throw up because the food is off, that is another matter and not part of this discussion. When we vomit there is something that is making us want to throw up. This is the physical, bodily expression of us experiencing rejection or even repulsion. Is there perhaps something that we don’t want to absorb, integrate or deal with?
Now we can ask some more pertinent questions that may help in solving the issues, namely:
Stomach Ulcers
This is a wide spread phenomenon. It is when the reality that we are dealing with becomes or starts to become too corrosive for us to bear and eats away at our stability or our coping mechanism.
A virus may bring on the ulcer but the virus is all around us most of the time anyway, why then does it only come at a particular time. The answer to that is through the worry process and worry is the key word here - we have weakened our immune system to the extent that we allow in the virus. The virus carries with it a very important message in that it comes from the outside that is deeply affecting us.
We may be taking in too much acidity from others or our own feelings are eating away at us. The digestive juices in the stomach look for something to digest. When there is too much of the juices or we have not fed ourselves adequately, the digestive enzymes look for something to digest. The enzymes are stimulated by our worries, which may be from too much pressure, worry about financial pressure, about work situations, relationships or even our role in the world.
Ulcers create a feeling of being raw and exposed - as if there is nowhere to hide. There may also be repressed aggression, a desire to get revenge or to lash out at someone. There is a deep need to be soothed and nurtured, to return to safety, of being cared for (as in having baby foods).
Positive thinking on it’s own will not solve all of your problems, however it is one of a series of things that we all have the power to implement which will get us on the path to leading the life we want.
To book a session, please see contact details in the footer.
Ailments - appetite, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, obesity, stomach, indigestion, nausea, stomach ulcer
The throat is where it all starts! What is the throat, what is it’s function and what does it represent or symbolise to us in our life. Well let’s look at what it does. The throat has two basic functions, namely: it is about taking life in - taking air in for our lungs and therefore, for our life; the other important function is that it takes in food and liquid and feeds us by sending it to our stomach for nourishment. Looked at differently it symbolises the ability to absorb what we need, and to let go of what we don’t need.
The other important thing is to see where the throat is situated. It is the bridge between the heart and the head or seen differently, it is the bridge between the mind and the body. Often neck problems stem directly from conflict between the mind and the body or the heart. That however, is a separate issue from this discussion.
So the throat has two major roles:
- It takes in air, food, liquids and reality
- It gives out or expresses outwardly our thoughts and feelings through the process of speaking, shouting, singing, etc.
In this article my focus is mainly on nourishment and related issues.
So lets start with food entering the mouth – here it is under our control. We take it in and we chew it and if there is something wrong with it, then we spit it out if we so choose. However, once it is swallowed we have now surrendered it to the automatic process of digestion. This is where we have surrendered control to the stomach. The stomach sits in our energy centre of willpower, personal power and assertiveness. So here are issues to do with personal will and assertiveness. Issues like gagging on food or feeling as if we are force-fed are both conflicts of personal will.
In exactly the same way as we swallow food, we swallow our reality – thoughts, ideas, feelings, events, belief systems and experiences. Swallowing is about allowing change to happen. We can resist change by closing the throat – gagging, or we can trustingly open ourselves up to change.
When we struggle to believe something, we say: “we cannot stomach it”. In the same way when we swallow something, it is the same as saying “we believe it”. Therefore, when we swallow our reality we are accepting it into our being. If we don’t like what it is that we are swallowing or what we are forced to swallow, we may have to swallow hard and then it may manifest in our body as a swollen or sore throat.
So here again we can ask some pertinent questions, namely:
- What are you not wanting to swallow?
- What is making you so sore?
- Are you swallowing your pride?
- Are you swallowing hurt feelings, failure, guilt, shame or disappointment?
We may not want to swallow our reality or we may be holding back too many feelings, particularly if they are unacceptable and not appropriate to you. Such repression creates great tension and stress and can affect the rest of the digestive system. We need to get in touch with our feelings so that we can give them a voice in order to be heard. In other words, we need to be able to speak our truth!
Stomach
So now we have finally swallowed the food and it slips down the oesophagus into the stomach to continue the digestion process. This symbolises the ability to absorb what we need and what we need to let go of. So lets ask some more interesting questions, namely:
- Do you know what is good for you?
- Do you have a tendency to be influenced by things or someone else that is not good for you?
Having a healthy digestive system means that we are able to receive from others and give to ourselves. This is important and will be shown in the next section below.
Without this balanced giving and receiving there can be a constant craving, a longing to fill up our hidden needs or the opposite, which is a strong denial or rejection of those needs. As we all know the stomach is the place where we harbour worry – the digestive enzymes churning with anxiety until we can no longer stomach what is happening! Invariably, most of us use food to pacify what is happening on the inside, namely that anxiety.
Appetite
The way that we see food and how we treat food is the way that we see and manage our emotional nourishment. It is a direct reflection of what is going on inside us. The act of eating and swallowing is symbolic of taking in and absorbing our reality. A huge increase in appetite can be when we have a bottomless pit feeling in our stomach. Children often reflect this when they eat incessantly in an unconscious way in order to get a word of praise from the parents, because the love that they want is not readily forthcoming. Or put in a different way, a devouring or demanding appetite indicates a personality who devours information, experiences and/or relationships, yet may be missing the insights and/or wisdom offered, because they are being devoured so quickly.
A lack of appetite can indicate a desire to retreat from the world, not to take in any more. This often is a reflection of a relationship breakdown and then we may go for days without food, whilst nurturing the hurt on the inside of us - this then indicates an unexpressed need for love, attention and companionship.
Of course a low appetite can also occur when we are healing ourselves of some physical problem – here the energy is being diverted for use elsewhere. This occurrence is quite common.
Anorexia Nervosa
So, we have now made our way to this particular problem. Here very little food is consumed and the body begins to fade away, reflecting a condition of starvation. As can be seen from the foregoing, that this is intricately intertwined in the issues of love and nourishment. Here we secretly have the longing to be loved and nurtured and so we subconsciously decrease the size of our presence (weight loss) or reduce the presence of us, so that whatever little is passed on to us is ok, or the love that we demand and receive is so little that it cannot possibly be an inconvenience to others and/or it does not inconvenience them too much.
So we can see that there is a chronic sense of lack of self-worth, so much so, that our own feelings are considered unimportant. The trigger for this is often guilt or shame. Some of the things that spring to mind are that love was always conditional, based on performance and success, or dependent on giving to others. (The others are always the ones on whom we are dependent on for recognition in some way.) Yet, there is a longing to be loved unconditionally for who we are.
Here again we ask some pertinent questions, namely:
- Do you feel that you are not good enough?
- Do you feel that that you do not deserve to be nourished or loved?
- Do you believe that you have to help others and deny yourself?
- Is it wrong to acknowledge yourself? Or taken a step further acquire-knowledge (acknowledge) about yourself and about the rights that you have on this planet that is equal to others!!! You are not less than or more than anybody else!
Often we feel that we have to stay small or to be less than or should not to be noticed - to fade into the background. Let’s look at that:
- To be less than what?
- Are you denying your need for affection?
- What happens when you are noticed?
- What is the secret exchange for you when you give to others?
- How do you benefit when you do this?
- Why do you consider this to be the right way to do things for others?
- What is it that you hope to get and why do you think that is enough?
Anorexia often arises as a result of feeling out of control to what is happening to us – we feel that we can’t control what is happening. Deep inside is a boundary issue that needs to be resolved. This often dates back to times that we were subjected to domineering parents or teachers and/or to life changing circumstances. This constantly plays out in our life until we undertake to face and confront it. To act out our subconscious desire to control, we clamp down on food, which is a way of clamping down on our own feelings. Where there is no expression of emotion there is complete control.
This is most common in girls. When we as a young girl, are not adequately prepared of the changes that come in puberty (and we have been subjected to this kind of emotional background), this can be a period of emotional turmoil for us. For many it is overwhelming, especially the physical changes taking place that appear to take control over the body and therefore we feel that we can’t control it. In some people, becoming very thin takes away their feelings of being exposed, to being noticed by the opposite sex and therefore their sexuality (which is the ultimate of personal exposure), their sensuality, desirability or impending womanhood. Menstruation can even stop as such is the subconscious process of not wanting to be recognised or acknowledged. There is a desire to escape completely from reality of the body and all the feelings that go with it – especially from becoming a woman in her own personal right and power.
Some of the roots that can contribute other than those mentioned already, are growing up too quickly, social pressures such as models who are super thin and hence acknowledged by the media as the ultimate, such can be the social pressures that our young girls are subjected too. These are very powerful, especially if there is not support of you as a young growing woman in your earlier years.
The bottom line in this dis-ease is about loving us as we are; it is absolutely essential and fundamental. When we do this then deep healing can take place.
Bulimia Nervosa
Here the combined inner feelings that are running around within oneself, is the driving force. Inside there is the desire to be perfect (appear perfect in our body i.e. ideal so called super thin) and hence the starvation and coupled to this is the great longing for life and love (and hence the desire for food). The drive for love is supreme amongst all of us and is deeply inherent within all of our natures. Here the body acts out as a longing desire to be free and yet to consume. This is a vicious place to be and we become filled with self-dislike, if not self-loathing and guilt.
The body’s cravings become unmanageable. There are cravings in the middle of the night (where no one can see us and see what we are doing), we are desperate to be normal, we long to eat a normal meal and then we find that later we throw up our longed for meal. This is a direct reflection of our inner emotional world, i.e. how we repress our emotional world. The act of throwing up is a direct rejection of nourishment for ourselves, a refusal of allowing anything to touch us on the inside. It is a desperate attempt to maintain control over our feelings.
So we know that food represents emotions. Just as you are about to throw up ask yourself the following:
- What is the feeling at the time that is urging you to throw it out?
- What do you want to throw out before it can influence you?
- What part of yourself are you rejecting so violently?
- What are you so fearful of?
Obesity
Food and love are intimately bound up, so at times of emotional loss or confusion, the stomach appears as a big hole that needs filling. The food squashes down our real feelings – the more we eat, the less we feel. At the same time we build a wall around ourselves that few can penetrate.
Many cases of over-eating develop, following deep emotional pain or loss and the excess weight is like a protection against further hurt. The hurt can be from many things such as: Sensitivity to criticism, sexual attractiveness that is abused, ridicule, exposure, past relationship failures or a special love failure, non acceptance of womanhood, a feeling of it not being safe to be a woman, or not safe being a person speaking your truth and/or a shameful experience not spoken about, etc.
It also blocks out our own feelings and we become numb to what is really being felt inside. Grief or shame is often hidden beneath and many women put on excess weight around their hips and thighs following sexual assault. By covering the sexual area the feelings are shut away. Obesity is about a longing for love, combined with a fear of loving or being loved perhaps due to past hurt, loss or pain.
Excess flesh indicates a holding on, an attachment or clinging particularly to attitudes and thinking patterns that justify our behaviour. It provides a false sense of security – a belief that we are safe from feeling or being hurt. It also implies a loss of control and an inner hopelessness or lack of self-respect. To shift the weight we need to explore our attitudes, what being heavy means to us and what feelings the weight is hiding. What may happen to us if we start to lose weight? Would we now be seen or would we now feel exposed? How do we manage this?
Some ideas on what to do to address your weight and some pertinent questions
Rather than focusing on what is wrong with being heavy, start exploring the benefits. Try writing down all the ways that being heavy is OK for you.
- What does being heavy enable you to do or not do?
- Does it make you feel safe?
- What attitudes or feelings you are clinging to?
- What was happening for you emotionally when you first got heavy?
- Were you being fed instead of being loved?
- Did you feel you had no personal power, or had lost control and didn’t know how to regain that power?
- Do you enjoy feeling powerless?
- Were you in need of love?
Then explore how it would feel to be thin:
- How would it change you?
- How would it expose you should you lose weight?
- What would you do that you are not doing now?
- What parts of your being would be exposed if you lost weight?
- Would it expose your sexuality?
- Does this feel scary or unsafe?
- Would it feel as if you had nowhere to hide?
- Does being thin imply having to be responsible for yourself?
- Does it mean emotional involvement?
The bigger we get, the more likely we are to reject ourselves and feel ugly or unlovable. Losing weight occurs through a deep shift in attitude, starting with an acceptance of ourselves just as we are – we need to give ourselves the love we long for. Then we can start working on the layers of fear that lie beneath the excess weight.
Indigestion
This is the stage where we have swallowed the food – swallowed the events and it is now becoming too much to bear, what the reality is that we are trying to digest is just too bitter or sour and we literary cannot stomach it any more. The stomach acid is stimulated and activated and we feel uncomfortable and/or may get heartburn.
The pertinent questions that we need to ask here are:
- What reality are you swallowing that is to sour?
- What is so difficult to absorb that it is making you feel so acidic?
- Are you swallowing aggressive feelings such as anger or irritation?
- Are you inner aggression towards someone or something rising up?
When we are get heartburn, then the suggestion is that we need to find out what the heart is really telling us / burning us / or getting upset about?
Nausea
This is a direct indication that something is churning within us in the wrong way. Often when we vomit we feel immediate relief. The trick to solving the problem is to find out what it is that we are feeling at the time that we vomit? That is our direct indication of finding out what it is that we need to address and sort out if it is an emotional issue.
If we throw up because the food is off, that is another matter and not part of this discussion. When we vomit there is something that is making us want to throw up. This is the physical, bodily expression of us experiencing rejection or even repulsion. Is there perhaps something that we don’t want to absorb, integrate or deal with?
Now we can ask some more pertinent questions that may help in solving the issues, namely:
- What is making you so emotionally repulsed?
- Is it a part of you that you are rejecting?
- What does that part need to be accepted?
Stomach Ulcers
This is a wide spread phenomenon. It is when the reality that we are dealing with becomes or starts to become too corrosive for us to bear and eats away at our stability or our coping mechanism.
A virus may bring on the ulcer but the virus is all around us most of the time anyway, why then does it only come at a particular time. The answer to that is through the worry process and worry is the key word here - we have weakened our immune system to the extent that we allow in the virus. The virus carries with it a very important message in that it comes from the outside that is deeply affecting us.
We may be taking in too much acidity from others or our own feelings are eating away at us. The digestive juices in the stomach look for something to digest. When there is too much of the juices or we have not fed ourselves adequately, the digestive enzymes look for something to digest. The enzymes are stimulated by our worries, which may be from too much pressure, worry about financial pressure, about work situations, relationships or even our role in the world.
Ulcers create a feeling of being raw and exposed - as if there is nowhere to hide. There may also be repressed aggression, a desire to get revenge or to lash out at someone. There is a deep need to be soothed and nurtured, to return to safety, of being cared for (as in having baby foods).
Positive thinking on it’s own will not solve all of your problems, however it is one of a series of things that we all have the power to implement which will get us on the path to leading the life we want.
To book a session, please see contact details in the footer.