In my early career days just out of college, I had it made. I got a great corporate job as a travelling business consultant on an expense account. I spent my weekdays living out of upper end hotel rooms, getting upgrades to first class and eating out at five-star restaurants. Having just graduated from cafeteria food and ramen noodles, this seemed like hitting the jackpot. We ate steak dinners with a bottle of wine several times a week. During one project in Philadelphia, I made sure to eat plenty of their famous cheesesteaks. Oh, and the street cart sausage egg and cheese, every morning, was a perfect remedy for the unsteadiness my body felt from the previous night’s wine. We worked long hours in those days, so there wasn’t much time for exercise. It didn’t take long for the formation of these bad habits to catch up with me.
Being young and feeling invincible, it took a doctor to explain to me why I was starting to develop pain in my chest. I thought there was something wrong with my heart. Thankfully, it wasn’t my heart. My doctor’s diagnosis was heartburn, which is essentially what happens when stomach acid backs up into the esophagus. No problem. He wrote me a prescription for Prevacid, a medication for treating excessive stomach acid. I followed doctor’s orders. A few month’s later, I received a notice from my health insurance company letting me know that my premiums were going up because of this new condition that had developed. Rather than listening to my body, I waited until my ignorance hit my wallet before I was ready to wake up.
I’m in my mid-twenties, in otherwise perfectly good health and I’m taking prescription acid reflux medication, caused by overindulgence. Except my doctor didn’t tell me this. I had to wait for my insurance premium to go up in order to figure it out. I decided that paying for Prevacid wasn’t going to work for me. Intuitively, I somehow knew that my eating habits needed to change. I started watching what I consumed, I stopped taking the antacids, and my heartburn subsided.
Now, in my mid-forties, I look back at that time in my life and have to ask, “What the #%$&*???” Why did the doctor write me a prescription for drugs instead of encouraging me to change my diet and start exercising? In his defense, in those days I was afraid of the doctor, so I may have downplayed the extent of my bad habits for fear of judgment. I don’t blame my doctor, but I do think we have a cultural problem of treating symptoms instead of evaluating the source of the problem in our society. I believe that medication plays an important role in healthcare, but I am suggesting that perhaps we are too quick to treat instead of working to solve the problem.
Our bodies tell us what we need, but we have to pay attention. When we get out of alignment, when our body, mind, and soul aren’t in connection with one other, we often ignore the source of the problem. When we are aligned, the answers come much more easily. I was misguided in my twenties and there were lessons about health that I needed to learn to bring myself back into alignment. I’m happy to say that I’m in better health today than I was twenty years ago. But this is a process that is ongoing and never ending. I’m sure that twenty years from now I’ll look back at unhelpful things I was doing in my forties, (the present right now), that should have been obvious to me.* Yet this is the Hero’s Journey, the Path to Personal Mastery, and the essence of becoming whole.
* If you know me, and these things are obvious to you, would you please point them out to me so I can save years of my life figuring it out on my own!??
Photo by Sander Dalhuisen on Unsplash
