Expression is everything: Thyroid disease & the Ageless Wisdom
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Expression is everything: Thyroid disease & the Ageless Wisdom
Every part of our bodies is designed to teach us something about the wholeness we are to live here on earth.
One of the most beautiful and delicate teachers in our body is the thyroid gland. This small organ, shaped like a butterfly, sits just below our voice box (vocal cords) and is a vital player in our body’s endocrine system. The thyroid is essential to maintaining our body’s balanced hormonal function and to restoring balance when imbalance has been created.
What is so inspiring about the thyroid is that, like so many symbols of the natural world, its quality and form reflect not only its purpose, but our purpose.
Just like the butterfly, the thyroid is a delicate, living symbol of transformation, literally transmuting the nutrients of the food we eat into cellular energy and hormones that then harmoniously regulate almost every metabolic process in our body.
Our heart and digestive functions, our growth and maturation, our mood and brain function, our immune function; even our sensitivity to temperature and stress are influenced by this remarkable gland.
When a key player like the thyroid does not function as it is truly designed to, it carries a message for the whole body – one that requires our attentive consideration. And as the Ageless Wisdom teachings offer, it is not only its loss of function that matters, but the energetic message it relays about the way we have been living up to that point.
Many who have experienced thyroid disease would agree that even failure of such an apparently small body part can have devastating and widespread effects on the whole body and its sense of lived vitality. Chances are, you already know someone who is or has been affected by thyroid disease – perhaps by way of an under- or over-active thyroid, autoimmune disease, or even thyroid cancer. Or maybe you are one of the silent majority, with ‘subclinical’ thyroid dysfunction that goes undetected for years before symptoms are felt.
Depression, fatigue, diarrhoea, constipation, irregular heart rhythms, early heart disease, voice changes, irregular periods, infertility, intolerance to heat or cold and drastic weight fluctuations are just a few of the ‘red flag’ symptoms that those with thyroid disease experience.
The truth is that, even in our so-called modern era, we find ourselves in an unprecedented global epidemic of thyroid disease. Epidemiological reviews document that between 1.5 to 2 billion people have some form of thyroid disease, with true (undiagnosed) rates likely much higher, including those in children[1]. This translates to about one to two people in every eight developing a thyroid disease in their lifetime, with women over twice as likely to be diagnosed as men[1]. Thyroid disease has now escalated to such levels that we have instigated an International Thyroid Day (May 25th each year) to raise awareness of this essential organ[2]. And whilst thyroid treatments become ever more refined, they are not halting the tide of new cases.
So given this global state of play, the moment is here to ask:
- What messages are being sent to us from our body, and to the wider body of humanity?
- Is there something about the way we live and express that is stopping our thyroid from re-balancing and re-tuning the interconnected energy systems of our bodies?
Conventional medicine has many complex nutritional, genetic, hormonal and environmental theories to explain the spiralling incidence of thyroid disease – many of which are linked to chronic physiological or mental stressors. These explanations make fascinating reading, and many have proven treatment benefit. For example, many people find that taking more iodine, prioritising sleep rhythms and switching to a gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar- and toxin-free diet helps speed recovery – when conventional treatments do not deliver former states of health. And these adjustments certainly helped in my case.
"The part cannot be well unless the whole is well."
Plato (Charmides)
True medical enquiry accepts there is always more to discover about our bodies – and as the Ageless Wisdom offers – that ‘more’ always leads back to the energetic Truth, the root causes of how we are living our lives in honour of the body’s natural intelligence, or not. Those background ‘epigenetic’ or lifestyle choices are under-explored yet underpin all our genetic expressions and hence our total package of self-expression in the world.
So, what if the thyroid gland was not just a physical transmuter of chemical energy, as modern medicine has thus far investigated, but also an energetic transmuter of our chosen energy, expressed in our whole body via word, thought and movement?
AND …
What if our thyroid’s true purpose was also to transmit our true and whole self-expression (the energy of our Soul) harmoniously into our body and its many systems?
If so, is it possible that the energy we choose to give voice and expression to might be affecting our thyroid’s natural function?
Given the deteriorating state of the world’s thyroid health, these questions are worth considering. The Ageless Wisdom asks us to consider that not only is everything energy but that because of that fact, so are ALL of our expressions in life. This includes every casual thought, every word, every written or voiced intent and every true or untrue moment of silence or sound.
When we as a one humanity collectively indulge in extremes of restricted expression – as in the current personal and online censorship, the epidemic of cyber-bullying and the chronic social division and disharmony that come with turning a blind eye to this – the accumulated effects of all this corrupted expression are felt by each of us well before they play out in our bodies.
When I fell ill with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (an autoimmune thyroid disease) I was immersed in stressful medical exams, where what I thought I was allowed to say and what I was aware of were in constant conflict with one another. It also came after two decades of shutting down my true expression, my heart’s ‘voice’ and my ability to self-love. For example:
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Stifling my voice in conflict situations with my parents or friends.
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Not voicing my true feelings around men because ‘their views mattered more’.
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Suppressing acts of natural self-care expression – like going to the bathroom before I’m bursting or having a natural break – out of ‘duty’ to work.
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Not speaking up during ward rounds or clinics, for fear of outshining bosses or losing that job reference.
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Remaining silent out of misplaced deference to ‘authority’ e.g., university department leads, the local work ‘bully’ or even my partner.
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Not voicing hurt at my own or others casual daily mistreatments, just to ‘keep the peace’ or ‘get through’ at work or at home.
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Not expressing to my children when they’d overstepped the mark because of losing my ‘best mum’ status or their validation.
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Not singing freely (as I’d done during childhood) due to fear of critique and ‘imperfectness’.
Perhaps this resonates with you also …
The point is, all the suppressing and stifling of our true and Soulful expression takes place at the expense of our body. And this is bought to our attention by the multitasking thyroid which must then compensate and ‘retune’ the body via its hormones and chemicals, in order for that choice of expression to continue – and always at the expense of OUR own energy.
Yet, like any hormonal system, it has a tipping point, where it will express to the whole being (us) that ‘enough is enough’. For me knowing that my thyroid cells were attacking themselves (autoimmune thyroiditis) was enough to realise instantly how much I had been attacking my true expression since childhood.
"Expression is everything."
Esoteric Teachings & Revelations Volume I, ed1, p 280
When we do not speak or express our sensed truth, free of the world’s many imposed beliefs and ideals, we negate our innate worth as multi-dimensional, Soulful beings. This leads to feelings of unworthiness, disempowerment, shame or guilt. Our body feels it all but is forced to constantly adjust, simply to cope with corrupted expressions coming through its parts – including the delicate thyroid – and the dis-ease that is felt there may sooner or later lead to disease.
It is our collective choice, in whatever body we are born into, to either magnify or deny our natural and Soul-felt expression.
That choice may be the key that unlocks the truth of our thyroid’s purpose in harmonising whole-body health. If the quality of our every expression, our innermost voice, became our emphasis, we may sense an inner metamorphosis from human caterpillar to ‘more than human’ divine butterfly – just as the thyroid’s symbolic form suggests.
NB: Conventional medicine has and continues to have a vital role to play in treating the vast spectrum of thyroid disease; and this article does not advocate stopping thyroid medication treatments or otherwise changing what is recommended by our doctors. Rather it asks us to be open to the unexplored and largely unknown epigenetic aspects of thyroid dis-ease, by asking what quality and ‘ease’ we express with and whether addressing this may truly aid in halting our personal and global epidemic of thyroid disease.
References
Filed under
Ageless Wisdom, Disease, Energy, Expression, Health conditions, Human body
