The New Rules of Health

Last fall, my life was uneventful, almost boring. I had made very few commitments, and the few I had made didn’t take up much time. I wasn’t quite ready to have a “serious” job with heavy expectations, so I decided that I would use my talents to tutor a little Mexican boy at the Elementary school. The “Mexican” descriptor is important here for just one reason: he didn’t speak any English, having just moved from Mexico to Minnesota, and since none of the elementary teachers spoke Spanish, he couldn’t communicate with hardly anyone.

I can only guess at how scary it must have been for me in the beginning, showing up in a strange country without either of his parents (one is in jail, the other still in Mexico) and having to start a new life -- all at just 9 years of age!

So I volunteered to come to the school a few days a week to help him with his English and be his Spanish-speaking buddy.

That was several months ago. Today, I’m still going in to work with him a few days a week. Most of the time, we do worksheets, read books, or play games I make up on the spot. His progress has been very slow, but lately he’s started to use more English. He’ll often mix it in with Spanish: “Tomorrow me voy a ir a Sioux Falls (tomorrow I’m going to go to Sioux Falls).”

Today, neither one of us really felt like working on anything, so we found a set of checkers and a board and started to play. (We tried chess, too, after he claimed to know how to play it, but when he tried to move a pawn diagonally on his second turn, I knew we’d better stick to something simpler.)

Here’s the fascinating thing about playing checkers with this little boy. Like many children, he is easily smart enough to learn the rules of the game. Yet, like almost any kid, he likes to make up rules to suit his needs in the moment. An enemy piece behind his checker? The rules say you can’t jump backwards until said piece is kinged. But that’s no problem -- we’ll just change the rules!

I heard myself telling him things like “no, no puedes hacer eso (no, you can’t do that)” and other paradigm-limiting crap. Then I realized, Hell, why shouldn’t the kid make up his own rules? He’s going to have a million people throughout his life telling him he has to do things according to a predetermined rule set. Why? Because they say so. Because that’s how it’s done.

And now here’s the connection to you and your health, if you haven’t guessed it already. When you have a health issue, especially a long-lasting one, it gets firmly defined. You receive a label for your symptom set -- fibromyalgia, cancer, ADD, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, “it’s all in your head” -- and along with that, you get a set of rules. Here’s what can happen within this paradigm, the doctors tell you, and here’s what can’t happen. Usually the focus is more on the can’t than the can.

Some people -- heck, most people -- lay down and take it, unquestioningly applying this arbitrary ruleset -- based entirely on a few dozen peoples’ limited experiences and limited world views -- to their own selves. Why? Because they say so. Because that’s how it works.

Do you see now how stupid that is? A disease or condition comes supplied with its own rule set. But just as with checkers, you don’t have to play by the rules that are written on the accompanying instructions. Why live with a symptom set that doesn’t serve you, just because your doctors don’t believe it can be shifted? Who says a chronic condition has to be chronic? What if we make it a non-chronic one? What if in the next instant it simply didn’t exist?

Here are just a few rules you can take, if you want, or you can reject these and make up your own:

1) Make up your own rule sets and reject rulesets that don’t serve your highest good.

2) Your doctor knows less about your body and your potential for feeling than you think -- often even less than you do!

3) The possibilities for your health (and your life) are limited only by your belief systems.

Use you imagination. Jump five spaces backwards in one turn with that unkinged checker, for God’s sake! Stop living by somebody’s else rules, and you’ll discover the miraculous potential of your body to heal itself.

Oh yes, and one more thing: it’s just a game, all of this, so stop being so damn serious!

[To read a post about TIME and that arbitrary ruleset, click here. While it's coming from a different perspective (and a different author, for the most part), it's a piece worth reading to continue understanding our obsession with false rulesets in our lives.]