By Michele Tenney
Here’s To Your Health
Michele Tenney
Our bodies have an incredible ability to protect us. When we experience repeated injury, they often adapt in remarkable ways.
The same can be true of our hearts and our minds. After enough disappointment, loss, fear or stress, we sometimes stop noticing what once deeply affected us – not because we don’t care, but because becoming numb can feel safer than remaining vulnerable.
Medicine uses the term “cauterized” to describe tissue that has been burned or sealed to stop further damage. While this procedure can be lifesaving physically, it presents an interesting metaphor for our inner lives. If you’re a regular reader of my column, you have read the phrase: you are a spirit that has a soul that lives in a body. What if parts of our spirit, soul or emotional well-being have become cauterized – not through a single event, but through years of disappointment, busyness, conflict or compromise?
Health has often been reduced to blood pressure, cholesterol, weight or the absence of disease. However, true wellness includes something much deeper. We are not simply bodies that think; we are people who experience life physically, emotionally, mentally and for many, like myself, spiritually. When one part suffers, the others rarely remain untouched.
A healthy body can still carry an exhausted soul. A sharp mind can still wrestle with anxiety. A successful life from the world’s standards can still leave a restless spirit asking whether something meaningful has been lost along the way. Perhaps the most important health questions aren’t found on a medical questionnaire.
Maybe they should sound more like this: When was the last time something genuinely moved you? Have you become too busy to notice beauty, kindness or suffering? Have you confused being comfortable with being truly alive? Are you reacting from wisdom, or simply from habit?
None of these questions require someone else to provide the answers. They simply invite honest reflection. Honest reflection can be uncomfortable because when we ask ourselves what we have slowly accepted that we once questioned or what have we stopped noticing because it has become so familiar, we may not like our inner responses.
Many spiritual traditions speak about the importance of guarding the heart. That’s not because the heart is fragile, but because it quietly influences every decision, relationship and priority. If our hearts gradually become hardened, or cauterized, we may continue functioning quite well on the outside while losing sensitivity to compassion, gratitude, conviction or hope on the inside.
Numbness doesn’t have to be permanent. Our bodies possess an amazing capacity to heal under the right conditions. Rest, nourishment, movement and time can restore what once seemed depleted. I believe our inner lives work similarly.
Moments of silence. Genuine conversations (like in the good old days where it was okay to agree to disagree). Forgiveness. Gratitude. Prayer. Self-reflection. Acts of generosity. Checking your thoughts on what they line up with.
These practices may not change our circumstances overnight, but they can often restore something more valuable: our ability to feel, to discern and to respond with purpose instead of merely reacting.
This is not an invitation to adopt someone else’s conclusions. It is an invitation to become somewhat curious about your own. To pause long enough to ask whether there are places within you that have grown quietly numb and whether they were ever meant to stay that way.
This column was inspired by my experience on the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky where my husband and I walked through a life-size Noah’s Ark built to the dimensions specified in the Bible. This experience had me in awe and asking myself some very serious questions, both scientifically and spiritually.
Health is more than maintaining a healthy body. It also involves recovering a healthy spirit, a peaceful soul and a heart that is fully alive. The greatest healing isn’t when we find all the answers, but when we become willing to ask the questions. In a world with such great divide, it’s more important now than ever to honestly examine any “cauterized” areas of our lives.
I believe in you, but it’s more important for you to believe in yourself, ask questions and honestly answer those questions to yourself in truth and with love. Here’s to your health.
Michele Tenney is a Certified Personal Trainer and Nutritionist & Wellness Coach. She is a member of the Orange Board of Health. She can be reached at 203-668-2969 or email at Hmgbrd3@gmail.com.