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The following may not apply in every situation, but please give them consideration.
Here is the most useful reason to be ill:
Illness is the most accepted legitimate reason for not doing something!
Here are a few of the most popular causes of illness:
Personal stress
Contact with contagious carriers
Physical injury
Here are a few of the less obvious causes of illness:
Verbal self-deprecation
Use as strategy to gain attention from family and friends
Refusal to ‘take time out’ or change behaviour
Belief in illness
Here is how we expect to recover:
Give ourselves over to someone else to effect a cure
Take medication
Undergo surgery
Here is what we don’t expect to do:
Take responsibility for our own recovery
Accept that we had anything to do with creating our situation
Decide to be well
Let’s have a look at these in more detail.
Personal stress can take many forms and is one of the most common triggers for illness in our contemporary society. Our sense of stress often manifests mentally first and physically second. There are more things that can cause stress than I have room to write about here, but unless we acknowledge what causes us stress as individuals, we will not be able to recognise the signs that develop into physical symptoms of that stress.
Once you recognise that something is causing you stress, try to find ways to address things to restore balance. Because illness gives us the excuse we need to opt out of a situation, it is tempting to become ill. Try to avoid this way of thinking because you may create an illness that is hard for you to reverse.
Contact with contagious carriers. Although you may not believe it, there is no reason to necessarily assume that you will ‘go down’ with something that someone else appears to have! When you are in harmony with your life, your health often reflects this and there is no need for you to change state. Belief in your positive state of health can also maintain good health.
Physical injury can come about for many reasons and sometimes leads to complications not directly apparent to the original injury. Physical injury can be healed to varying degrees and an improvement or complete recovery is not unusual. Using even the basic sunlight technique (given on this site) you can speed up recovery. A change in your thinking and belief can also improve, or even return you to, good health.
Verbal self-deprecation is something we don’t always realise we are doing. It basically comes down to the things we think and say about ourselves – our self-talk. Putting ourselves down and using expressions like, ‘this’ll be the death of me’, are not helpful! Try to use more positive language such as, ‘I can feel my health improving’.
It is perhaps relevant here to mention a universal truth about anything in our experience of life:
You always get more of whatever you focus your attention on.
Sometimes, illness can bring us attention. As children, we were possibly comforted by a parent or relative when we hurt ourselves or became ill. As adults, we may subconsciously remember this attention and at some level connect illness with love and attention.
Sometimes we become so absorbed or stressed about our working lives, that we feel unable to take time out for ourselves in case things go wrong in our absence. An illness or injury may force us to stop working and spend more time relaxing – albeit laid up with something! But at least when we are ill, we have a good excuse not to be stressed at work!
Read what Seth (via Jane Roberts) has to say about illness:
“The naming and labeling of ‘diseases’ is a harmful practice that to a large extent denies the innate mobility and ever-changing quality of the psyche as expressed in flesh. You are told that you have ‘something.’ Out of the blue ‘it’ has attacked you, and your most intimate organs, perhaps. You are USUALLY told that your emotions or beliefs or system of values HAVE NOTHING TO DO with the unfortunate circumstances that beset you.
“The patient, therefore, often feels relatively powerless and at the mercy of any stray virus that might come along. The facts are that you choose even the KIND of illness that you have according to the nature of your beliefs. You are immune from ill health as long as you believe that you are.
“These are quite practical statements. Your body has an overall body consciousness filled with energy and vitality. It automatically rights any imbalances, but your conscious beliefs also affect this body consciousness. Your muscles believe WHAT YOU TELL THEM about themselves. So does every other portion of your physical body.
“While you believe that only doctors can cure you, you had better go to them, because in the framework of your beliefs they ARE the only people who can help you. But the framework itself is limiting; and again, while you may be cured of one difficulty, you will only replace it with another as long as your beliefs cause you to have physical problems.”
The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 624
(originally underlined words in caps)