Hi, friends. This is against everyone with Connor Abbeveh. The body and mind are, of course,

connected, and their connection becomes undeniable in periods of stress, world turmoil, and anxiety.

Whether anxiety reveals itself as sore teeth and gums from grinding in TMJ or you're getting headaches from not sleeping

or your stress eating and your choices or compulsions as to what you're eating are affecting

your overall health. We can see the connections between our world, our lives, our minds,

and our health in times like this. Beyond that, when we begin to understand why an illness is there, what it is revealing to us,

we start to touch on how healing and illness is related to the self, who we are, as individuals,

and as people generally.

The investigation into how healing, illness, and the self are connected can require the often difficult decision to stop trying to get rid of pain, suffering, and symptoms, and work to understand, and beyond that, to love what's happening. Love thy enemy, as we are told. Before you get

upset about any of this, like I'm telling you to just love being in pain, I want to say this is

not a call in any way to tell people to not seek help from others when they need it, nor a

prescription against any sort of medicine. Instead,

it's an attentiveness to the hidden dimensions of illness, the meaning we can find living alongside

of it and the healing that comes in the form of meaningfulness. I've had experiences with all this

myself, from long-term depression to a

cancer diagnosis to chronic pain, enduring illness, and asking ourselves questions about it,

and sitting with its presence has been, for me, part of the treatment that I offered myself. It's part of the treatment we all

offer ourselves, whether we want to do this investigation or not. Again, none of this is to say

we should judge others who don't want to do that as a primary or foundational form of treatment

or who want to find their way through with

whatever help they feel is their best option. I'm making a point on this a couple times right

at the top here because too often when people address the spiritual causes of healing, they end up

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