Love, Health and Happiness

About Love, Health and Happiness. And many other things that make your life complete.

I’ve always been interested in health. When you start having painful symptoms you normally get interested in health and that’s what happened to me. I had rheumatic fever when I was around 10 years old (yes, can you believe that?) and I had to get painful injections of cortisone every week. I had to take numerous blood tests and to cope with it I started to train myself into believing I actually liked it.

When I was a teenager I suffered from eating disorders. I often had stomach ache, it was actually the normal condition for me, a permanent stomach ache. On top of that, I was incredibly sad, all the time.

I’ve always been introspective. I started to have a journal as soon as I could write decently. I’ve always observed myself and the way I was experiencing my life very sharply. Nothing was “just fun” or “just a mood change”. No no no, everything had a deep meaning, had to be analysed, dissected, categorised. My feelings, my experiences, my relationships, my choices. I was living every day of my young life very intensely, the good and the bad ones. I couldn’t filter, I was just absorbing every experience (with the emotions they caused) as a sponge.

Many people might disqualify the picture saying that it’s normal, that everyone during teenage feel depressed. But it’s not normal when it endangers your life balance. Sometimes I was so depressed that I would just go to sleep in the middle of the day because it was the only thing I could do to alleviate that pain I felt inside. It was both an emotional and physical pain, and the two sides were so interconnected that I couldn’t tell which one caused the other.

I didn’t know what I had, but by the age of 17 I felt that my life was very, very wrong.

I started to look for answers. My dad is passionate about TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and holistic medicine. So I was lucky enough to have the house full of books about Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, Bach Flowers and so on.

I started to study Bach Flowers, and I liked the idea of using a flower instead of a drug to solve problems. But I was expecting a miracle from these disciplines and the miracle never happened. They didn’t solve my whole situation as I was expecting. I still wasn’t happy, I still wasn’t balanced.

In the meanwhile I was constantly arguing with my parents, to a point where I wasn’t feeling comfortable in my own house anymore.

It was around the age of 19, when I left my parents’ house to move into a “commune” (we were 7 people in a house, some studying some working, some both) that I started my real spiritual journey, a self-discovery path that brought me to understand the deep interconnection between the relationships you have, your mind and your body. I discovered the connection between physical, relational and emotional health. Mainly, I discovered that one is not possible without the others.

As soon as I moved out of my family’s house I realised that I had to take care of myself by myself. And not because my parents stopped loving me, on the contrary. But I simply couldn’t blame them anymore, or the school or the teenage or anything else, for my problems. If you think that the problem is the environment where you live, but you find yourself with the same problem after you move to another environment then you realise that the real issue is not outside, it’s inside you.

But so it the solution.

In that moment I made the conscious decision to start taking care of myself with love, thing that I had never done before. It was thanks to that decision that I started to heal.

I started reading about meditation, and I started practicing meditation 10 minutes every morning. It was the first step in the right direction. I also started to look for healers of every sort. Not doctors, but healers.

A wonderful friend of mine was studying massage, and I she did some shiatzu and craniosacral treatments on me. I also found that another friend of mine was studying kinesiology and neuro-training, and I did some sessions with her as well.

In the meanwhile I received a book from my lovely cousin: “The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self“. In the book the author describe an exercise to get in touch with your inner self: when you wake up in the morning write 3 pages of stuff. Just write down whatever is in your mind as soon as you wake up. 3 pages, every morning, before you do anything else. It connects you with your inner self, but more importantly it works as a trash folder. You empty your mind of all the “trash”  of the negative talks that we sometimes start our day with. 

I realised that the way I talked to myself was really, really bad. If I had to say those things to a friend of mine they would have never called me back. But I was saying it to myself. And I was wondering why I wasn’t feeling healthy and happy..

I also started to build connections with the people who were living with me, and the deeper the friendships the more rooted and healthy I felt. We humans are healthy when we live in communities. With no real friends, with no real love, there’s no health.

I started singing in a choir. Singing is for me a form of meditation, a spiritual experience that makes me feel connected with my soul. But singing in a choir is even a stronger experience. Hearing my voice crossing other people’s voice and making a harmonious melody made me feel part of something bigger than myself.

So really health didn’t come from one way. It came firstly from the decision to take care of myself with love, and that decision made me take actions in the right direction. It came from balancing my life on all levels. It came from having good friends. It came from expressing myself creatively. It came from nurturing my soul.

As the video above describes, health is not related to the body. At least, not only. Your body is really just the expression of your life. And life health is measured by how good your relationships are, how stable you feel, how well can you adapt to change, whether you express yourself creatively or not, whether you got in touch with your inner voice, whether you take action to modify what’s not working, and whether or not you talk to yourself with love.

So really health, love and happiness are so intimately interconnected that the more you start having of one of them, the more you start getting of all of them. For a strange magic it’s enough to start from one little step, and the other will follow. Start by deciding to take care of yourself with love. Start by taking that decision. And then take it again, and again and again. If you forget for a day, a month, a year or even several years, as soon as you realised you didn’t take care of yourself with love take that decision one more time. And with love for yourself, the health and all the things you need to get your life balanced and healthy will follow.