Diabetes and Self-Healing

One of my readers asked about how to heal from diabetes. I love questions. They challenge me to dive in deeply into the spiritual and emotional roots behind illnesses.

When I took the concept of healing diabetes into meditation, I received an interesting perspective about this condition. What I heard is that diabetes is the result of our psychological desire to experience the sweetness of life without expelling any effort. Then when we find that the earthly sweets of food are not satisfying enough, we disrupt our ability to ingest them. We do this so that we will be compelled to discover the greater sweetness in life, which is our true spiritual nature.

Louise Hay in "You Can Heal Your Life," describes the internal motivation behind diabetes in this way: “Longing for what might have been. A great need for control. Deep sorrow. No sweetness left.” The affirmation she recommends is this: “This moment is filled with joy. I now choose to experience the sweetness of today.”

There is a palpable sweetness that is present when we allow ourselves to experience the limitless love of the Divine. The key is to invite an opening to love in each and every moment. If your heart has been closed down for some time as a way to try to protect it, you have probably discovered that stopping the flow of love can be as painful (if not more so) than opening to the risks of love.

At some point, the heart demands to experience love. When that happens, you may find it best to ease your way into sweet love by giving yourself permission to feel gratitude or compassion. It can be quite a challenge to move from protection to experiencing greater love and I have discovered that these two flavors of love seem to make the way a little easier.

Of course, allowing is the opposite of controlling. You can’t control love anyway. It’s not a controllable feeling. It is a vibration that spontaneously wells up within us when we are vulnerable and receptive to life. Being vulnerable is about opening the heart.

We cannot make up for what we did not receive in our past. Love just doesn’t work that way. No person or event can fill the gap. Oh, we try. We fall in love with someone hoping that their love will assuage our aching hearts. We have children with the hope that our love for them will fulfill us in the love we didn’t experience as kids. We build careers with the expectation that money and influence will fill the longing, but they don’t. There is only one thing that fills us and that lies in awakening to the Divine love that we already are.

We just forgot for a while that the sweetest love we will ever experience is not about filling up with food, events, power, things or other people. The sweetest love is right here, right now, in our true nature as expressions of Divine consciousness exploring itself. There is nothing to get or take in. The sweetness is right here and we have the ability to remember it—to awaken to it. The effort required is in surrendering control and allowing ourselves to be present in this moment.

And isn’t that the effort we try to avoid? It takes tremendous diligence and commitment to surrender control. It takes continual focus to remember that all there is and all we long for exists right now. We can’t get it from the past, so regret is futile. Discovering the greatest sweetness we will ever know is in self-awareness and its nature of limitless love, and that is within our ability to experience now.

If you have diabetes, consider everything in your life in this moment that is sweet. Notice the trees and grass as the wind blows across them. Allow your senses to open to the warming of the sunshine and the tickling of the rain. Smile when you see someone smiling in the grocery store and be grateful for a warm cup of tea in your hands. Be delighted by your own silly joke or a mistake you made that led to a funny outcome. Make it a game to be a sweetness catcher, noticing all of the sweet ways in which the Divine exists within and around you. Recognize the sweetness every day until you fully realize that is who you are.