What Your Aches and Pains Are Telling You (Cries of the Body, Messages from the Soul)

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Our body speaks. Physical complaints-allergies, fever, sore throat, inflammation, cysts, back-ache, migraines, sinus problems, sciatica, dizzy spells, and even cancer-are all signs of deep tensions inside of us that are seeking expression. 'This is why, given the same genetic foundation, one individual develops a specific illness while another remains in good health.

Drawing on 20 years of experience and thousands of individual consultations with patients, Michel Odoul provides "proof" of the clear correspondences between emotional and mental tensions and specific ailments. The author reveals how every illness or trauma is a signal of incredible precision: the part of the body affected pinpoints what your inner being is trying to tell you and what you need to work through emotionally. Providing a reference grid of body-mind connections, he explains, for example, how skin conditions reflect difficulties with aggression from the outside world and knee problems indicate inflexibility or tension in relationships. He shows not only how each side of the body has specific connections to emotions, relation-ships, and family but also how the upper and lower halves of the body do as well-together forming four quadrants with unique yin-yang balances, where yin represents emotional issues and yang represents action/inaction. Odoul also explores the role of the meridians of Chinese medicine in distributing emotional and mental energy throughout the body.

Offering keys to decipher what the body is trying to tell us, the author shows that we can learn to see physical ailments not as something caused by chance or fate but as a message from our heart and soul. By releasing the energies and patterns they point to, we can return to a state of health and forward movement on our path through life.

M ICHEL ODOUL is a shiatsu and psycho energetic medicine practitioner as well as the founder of the French Institute of Shiatsu and Applied Physical Psychology. He has appeared at numerous health conferences throughout the world, including the 2013 international meeting of Acupuncturists without Borders. He lives in Paris.

We are living in times in which the tools of communication have never been as powerful, what with cell phones, laptops, and tablets that allow us to write, text, or speak to anyone in the world at any moment through the all-pervasive internet. However, this picture is not quite so rosy as it seems. Our communication is too often empty, vague, or misleading, only pretending to be real communication. All our gadgets are frequently only devices we use to compensate for our inability to have real, meaningful exchanges with others.

The way we conduct our lives, what with the pervasiveness and power of the media, the trap of materialism, and the accelerated pace of daily life, has gradually led us to believe that merely existing is living, that agitation and frenzy is energy. This has happened with our implicit consent. In fact, we even ask for it-always more, always faster; that's how we feel. But to what end? Is it to wake up one day at whatever age, sick and depressed, only to realize that we have missed out on life?

We have been conditioned by modern society to try to satisfy our desires through external means, so we have learned how to manage, master, control, and communicate with what is outside of us. Every day this rat race takes us further from our true, authentic self, eating away at our essence. It is only death or illness that seems to bring us back, forces us back, to face ourself. And when this happens, as it inevitably does, we feel helpless. Who is this unfamiliar person we sadly discover in the mirror? What does it mean that this body hurts? Who is this almost total stranger languishing in bed? And yet this stranger is our first and only true self, the one we've never really spoken to or taken the time to get to know. Discovering this unfamiliar self can be so disturbing that we'll ask the doctor to give us whatever it takes to silence the suffering that we reject. And yet, if we only knew! The issues that underlie pain and suffering are nothing more than desperate cries for recognition that our life and our body are sending us. They are warning signs, indications that we are out of balance with our true nature, but all too often we are unable to hear these warnings, much less understand them.

This book proposes to mitigate this deficiency by helping us open to the messages that our body is sending us when we are in pain. In this book we will position the human being in terms of the structures of life so we can understand how to embark on the path of wholeness. We will be studying the rules of functioning and the reasons behind this incredible game called life. We are going to learn to recognize and understand pain, tension, and suffering so that we can do what we need to do to bring ourself back into harmony and balance.

After many years of practicing energy techniques, specifically shiatsu, I have been able to realize to what extent, for each one of us, our body speaks to us (shouting even) about what we are really experiencing in the depths of ourself. Our deepest reality, our nonconscious, our mind, our soul-whatever your preferred term is-speaks to us constantly, telling us what isn't working. But we don't listen and we don't understand. Why? The reasons are twofold.

**Contents and Sample Pages**