1 DiseaseRosa's caseA woman has kidney cancer. The doctors want to remove the kidney, but she resists. She has two reasons for this. One is that she fears she will then have to go on dialysis because her other kidney is only functioning for 20% due to recurrent kidney stones. The other reason is that she has little confidence in this therapy because her father and a cousin had the same symptoms and were treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation and both died within six months.
For the past three years, she has been in a legal battle with a man who has cheated her financially, brought her good name and that of her family into disrepute, and owes her a large amount of money that he is not paying back. This is an enormous stress for her.
She has always worked hard and run a big family business. She has always done it as honestly and as well as she could and always tried to find good solutions for her clients. She was very creative and looked for solutions to their problems. She had a very good contact with her father, felt very close to him and also resembled him in character. Like him, she is a central figure in her family. Many cousins come to her for advice or help with their housing and financial problems.
HealthSickness and health are indispensable for human beings. Many people therefore say: "As long as we are healthy". When serious illnesses appear, it suddenly becomes clear that everything in life is relative. Then the world can collapse for us. The question arises why this is so, what is the meaning of illness and what is the meaning of life? Health is the normal state. One only becomes aware of the importance of health when one becomes ill.
QualitiesThe name for illness is also beautiful: dis-ease, it is "no longer easy", life no longer goes by itself. "Dis-ease" means fallen out of ease.
Disease is heavy, something that weighs you down, that makes life difficult. Sickness takes away one's energy, makes one tired, weak and listless. Diseases are limiting, making one handicapped and dysfunctional. It leads to depression and makes life dark and grey. Illness is an imbalance, physically and psychologically.
Robert Burton expresses it as: "Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples."
SignalIllness is usually perceived as something negative, as a limitation or unpleasant experience. Illness can also be understood as a message, a signal that something is out of balance in the organism, in the whole system.
Depression, for example, is usually seen as a disease, even a diagnosis. But it is a symptom that the system is going in the wrong direction and a rethink is needed.
Depression leads to doing less or doing nothing at all. To restore balance, one has to examine one's motives in life. In this sense it is something positive. The illness is taken back into the whole, there is a cooperation between illness and person. This is in contrast to the rhetoric of fighting diseases, the rhetoric of war. Illness becomes a learning process.
UnfairIllnesses are often experienced as unfair. But are they really? The feeling of injustice is even more pronounced in congenital diseases and diseases of children. Children and especially babies are seen as innocent, so why do they deserve a disease?
Diseases usually make people unhappy. When someone feels he has a right to happiness, diseases are in contradiction with that right. There is an association of diseases with punishment. One quickly feels being a victim, a victim of the disease.
But it is not about punishment, it is about imbalance. Illness actually makes it clear that something is out of balance. The problem is that initially one usually does not know what the imbalance is. One often forgets one’s own part in it.
The view in this book is that disease is a wake-up call. The aim of the disease is to start discovering oneself, to start a learning process.
In Appendix 1, the chapter "Illness as Creation", different views on illness are presented.