Did I Create My Illness?

Q. I generally believe that everything happens for a reason, and that we create our reality. But sometimes, when it comes to serious illness or disease, or perhaps a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, say a mass shooting or building collapse, I can’t help but wonder, why would someone create that? What went wrong?

I am so glad to be able to weigh in on this question! I know that sometimes there’s a perception in spiritual communities that disease, illness, freak accidents are somehow chosen by ‘spiritual beings having a human experience’.

At the macro level of awareness, it’s entirely true that every experience occurring in our lifetime is part of our overall incarnational journey from Source back to Source.

Yet in the moment, when difficulty strikes, it’s inappropriate and lacks compassion to classify someone’s illness, disease or loss as ‘chosen’. In the micro level of awareness, it’s inaccurate to do so, and can feel insensitive and shaming to someone in extremis.

Spiritual teachings on this subject are frequently misunderstood. As a long-time student of the Jane Roberts teachings from Seth, one of the often-quoted statements is: ‘you create your reality according to your beliefs’. Our beliefs do inform our reality and frame the meaning of our experience. Our beliefs are generated from our thoughts, previous experience, familial, societal, and cultural programming/conditioning, karmic load, lineage and ancestral patterns and so much more. And of course, in the case of disease, there are environmental and nutritional factors to consider as well.

In other words, to answer the question, ‘what’s really going on when someone receives a difficult diagnosis or is perhaps a victim of random violence?’, we need to look to overarching themes rather than simply concrete experience.

Every one of us is here exploring and evolving our conscious and unconscious awareness. We do so through our experiences, day in and day out. We’re exploring and evolving based on a variety of themes or patterns that we’ve chosen as our palette for this turn on the incarnation wheel.

We don’t come here to explore being hit by a car and paralyzed, becoming gravely ill with a specific diagnosis or the victim of a mass shooting.

We do come here to explore themes like acceptance (paralysis, grave illness) or victimization (mass shooting).

Over the course of our journey back to Source across our many incarnations, we’ll explore every possible theme. We may have explored being a victimizer in a previous lifetime, or perhaps that’s still on our incarnational to-do list! We may have already explored resistance repeatedly, and we’re now focusing our incarnational efforts on acceptance.

Each of us is creating from a wide variety of factors, some of which are conscious and most of which are unconscious. We are creating within a framework and context of overarching themes, and through those themes we’ll vibrate our way into all kinds of experiences — some joyous, some neutral, some devastating.

When it comes to disease and illness, our bodies are not isolated in a vacuum without external input. Someone who lives in Flint, Michigan is likely to have a greater toxic load in the body than someone who lives in Tahiti. Did the individual choose to live in Flint instead of Tahiti? Perhaps, though it’s more likely that life circumstances dictated a life in Flint. Is it guaranteed that the person living in Flint will become ill and the one in Tahiti will not? Of course not!

A person living in Flint who is exploring resilience and overcoming obstacles may become ill and against all odds, survive and thrive. A person living in Tahiti who is exploring acceptance and surrender may become seriously ill and die.

When someone enters my practice wanting to understand why they created their illness, disease or difficult experience, the first thing I do is let them off the hook of guilt, shame, self-blame and recrimination.

And then we go to work on understanding the energetic root cause behind whatever they’re experiencing. In reality, the source of the situation can have its basis in other times and places, karmic load, belief systems, ancestry and lineage, as well as the Astral/Emotional, Etheric/Physical and Mental/Causal bodies.

Remember to offer compassion when confronted with a difficult experience in your own life, or as a witness to someone else’s experience. Your understanding that the experience underlies a theme, rather than something you or the other person has ‘done wrong’, allows evolution, grace and healing.