Note to self: There is a difference between seeing a health problem as something external that is threatening your body, and seeing your body as itself as the problem. Your body is not a threat. The illness/problem is a threat. Your body is on your side.

I guess I have a habit of thinking about body and soul as two different things – I think of the body as being some sort of evil prison when it’s doing something wrong, and I think of the soul as inhabiting the
body, with no control over it.

Perhaps this is my way of dissociating or disconnecting from my body, in an attempt to get away from it. “I don’t want it. It is not
mine. It is not me.” Because I am not *whatever illness*. I don’t want to identify as that. There is more to me.

So I mentally separate the two. Me, and the thing that feels broken. I am not broken; I just live in a vessel that is broken.

Maybe seeing the body as a separate entity is also a way of trying to get away from a memory, or from the threat of it happening again, or
from current anxieties. Or, you know, trying to get away from illness itself, quite literally. I am scared of it happening so I mentally separate myself from the threat. But as I said: my body is not a threat. Illness is a threat, and they are not the same. My body is not illness. My body is inherently good.

The point is, there is only one of me. All of me is me. I don’t think I quite realised just how much I think of my body as something separate to my actual self. It has become normal, and maybe that isn’t right. Maybe I can change that.

Maybe I need to cultivate love for my body by claiming ownership of it again. By uniting with it. By telling it that nothing that happened was its fault. By forgiving it.

I have known for a while that I think more kindly towards my body, but I didn’t know how to do that. Perhaps this is it.

Happy Valentine’s Day, me.