Quick note first: There’s just 1 spot left for The Awakening—the intimate experience I’m hosting in Portland from June 26-28. If you’ve been feeling the call, this is your moment. Grab the final spot before it disappears.
I got sick last week.
Not a little sniffle-sick. The full-body shutdown kind.
In the past, I would’ve gone into battle mode: Fever? Ibuprofen. Stuffy nose? Decongestant. Whatever it took to restore the illusion of “normal.”
Because “normal,” I thought, meant okay. “Normal” meant in control.
But lately, I’ve been taking a different approach.
When I get sick, I don’t automatically medicate to suppress the symptoms. I don’t try to “push through.” I fully rest, drink lots of water, cancel what I need to cancel, and let my body do its thing.
And when I stop fighting symptoms, something new begins to surface—not just healing, but meaning.
Take this last bout of sickness: my voice—my literal voice—disappeared.
In the past, I would’ve reached for lozenges, pills, anything to bring my voice back. But this time, I didn’t try to fix it. I leaned in. I got curious. I let the symptom speak instead of silencing it—and I started to wonder what was going on underneath.
Here’s what came up: Over the past year, I’ve been letting go of old habits of self-suppression—speaking up more, sharing more, showing more.
So when my voice vanished, it didn’t just feel physical. It felt symbolic.
It was as if my body said: “Oh, you’ve decided to stop hiding? Great. Now let’s fully unplug the old system. We’ll take your voice offline while we process the updates.”
The whole thing felt less like “I have a cold” and more like “I’m shedding.”
I had lost my voice—not because something was wrong, but because something was finally being made right.
The old me would’ve missed all of that. Because I would’ve been too focused on “fixing” the illness. Controlling it. Numbing it. Pretending it wasn’t happening.
That’s the thing about control: it often backfires.
You can spend all your energy trying to patch symptoms, restore order, and return to “normal.” But in doing so, you miss what’s underneath.
Obviously, I’m not anti-medicine. If the symptoms are too much, I’ll make the appointment, take the pill, do what I need to do. And no, I don’t think every sore throat is a spiritual awakening.
But I do think our obsession with fixing things fast is costing us.
We lose the deeper message. We miss the transformation that might only come if we let the fever run, the discomfort linger, the old skin fall away.
Because maybe the goal isn’t to get back to “normal.”
Maybe “normal” was the problem.
Maybe the goal is to emerge different. Wiser. A bit more whole.
When something feels off, our first instinct is usually: How do I fix this?
But the better question is: What is this trying to tell me?
Yes, being sick is really uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t volunteer for it.
But it showed me something I didn’t expect: If we stop trying to silence the body—with pills, with productivity, with pretending—it might actually tell us something.
Mine was saying: You’re not broken. You’re transforming.
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Bold
