In honor of Inflammatory Bowel Disease Awareness Month, this episode is about the important connection between a healthy soul and a healthy body,
based on the understanding that the root of all illness lies in the soul.
Rabbi Yuval Asherov defines illness as the body’s correct response to an incorrect stimulus.
Illness actually comes for the person’s good.
It calls us back to the foundation, to the soul.
It’s an opportunity to take charge of our emotional system and use it the right way.
In this episode, Gili and Tal talk about the emotional challenges that come with physical and mental illness, and about ways of coping with them.
They talk about the importance of understanding and of knowing how to comfort ourselves, and about how emotional stimuli can affect the physical body: how every organ has its own energetic vibration, and how dealing with our emotions the right way can help keep our organs healthy, which means keeping body and soul healthy.
Join us for a deep conversation about a healthy soul in a healthy body.
Episode summary
The episode takes up the question “How do you keep a healthy soul in a healthy body?” and offers several key points:
- The connection between soul and body: Every illness, including inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s disease and colitis, is connected to the soul. Soul and body work together, and sometimes illnesses are caused by emotional states.
- Awareness of illness: May is Inflammatory Bowel Disease Awareness Month, for conditions such as Crohn’s disease and colitis. These illnesses are examples of the connection between soul and body.
- Why healing in the soul matters: Healing always begins in the soul. Even when there’s a physical injury, like a broken bone, it matters to understand the injury on the emotional level.
- Coping with emotional and physical illness: People suffer from many health conditions, and proper healing needs to consider the whole person, including both emotional and psychological dimensions.
- How emotions affect the body: Emotions such as sadness, anger, frustration and loss affect the body and can cause physical illness.
- Examples of illness and healing: Personal stories and real cases show how physical illness is linked to our emotional and mental state, and how healing can come through understanding the emotional root of the problem.
- Whole-person care: It’s important to choose doctors and medical staff who look at the whole person and not only at the symptoms. Whole-person care addresses every part of the patient’s life.
- Faith and hope: Hold on to faith and hope that everything is for the good and that every illness can be healed. It’s important to understand that every illness is a signal about something that calls for a change in how we see reality.
The episode ends with the advice to look for the emotional root of every physical problem, and to keep the soul healthy through positive thoughts and emotions.
Episode transcript
Episode 58. Good morning, Gili, how are things?
Good morning, Tal, Tal, how are you?
Great, great.
It’s Inflammatory Bowel Disease Awareness Month. As you know, I’m part of the IBD community. Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are the two best-known conditions in that world.
So now, the month of May is Inflammatory Bowel Disease Awareness Month.
And really, I thought we’d talk about that.
This episode is about the connection between the soul and inflammatory bowel diseases.
Now, not only inflammatory bowel diseases, because in the end every illness, whatever it is, every sickness is connected to the soul.
So if we need to give this episode a title, I’d like us to call it “A Healthy Soul in a Healthy Body.”
Yes, you know, that line, “a healthy soul in a healthy body,” back in school…
I ran for the student council, and I really, really wanted to be on the sports committee.
Cute, the sports committee.
Yes, I really wanted to be on the sports committee, and I printed flyers.
I sent my dad to the print shop. I wrote the flyers and told him to hand them out at school, and the headline was “A healthy soul in a healthy body.”
What a champ!
I mean, I’m saying to myself: an 11-year-old girl, where did you come up with that?
And what were you aiming at?
But it’s true.
Look, let’s give our listeners a headline too, for those who don’t know what this is.
We’re talking about an awareness month, just like there’s an awareness month for breast cancer or for any other illness.
This is about inflammatory diseases in the whole area of the digestive system, and there are quite a few: Crohn’s, colitis, there’s a wide range, and people suffer a lot.
Right. And by the way, it goes way beyond that, because you don’t have to be in the IBD club. Tell me:
Who doesn’t suffer from stomachaches?
Right?
The belly is a tender spot; it doesn’t react for no reason.
Right. The digestive system has lots of problems, but in general people suffer from all kinds of health conditions.
In the end the connection has to be made. I mean, it always ties back to the verse of King Solomon, who said, “For one higher than the high watches over them, and there are higher ones above them.” What he’s saying is that healing will always be in the soul.
Always go to the root.
Someone breaks an arm?
Fine, you need to go to the doctor now, because there’s a cast or surgery or whatever it is, but the meaning of why my arm broke is very important.
And by the way, which arm it is matters too.
I mean, today there are quite a few people, even doctors, like Dr. Nader Butto, and there’s Dr. Joe Dispenza, who are doctors in every sense.
What they do is go into fine detail to understand the emotional and mental makeup that actually affected the person’s body.
In other words, we understand that in the end it all comes back to the soul. A person doesn’t get cancer for no reason. A person doesn’t get it for no reason, even if you catch some stomach virus.
And even if you know you ate something spoiled, you need to understand that there’s something in your system that turned it into an illness in the end.
I actually want to start from the end.
Rabbi Yuval Asherov has a really beautiful definition of illness. He says that illness is actually the body’s correct response to an incorrect stimulus.
Explain.
Basically, he says that illness comes for the person’s good, and that it’s actually telling him that his system, physical, emotional and mental, is dealing with a stimulus that isn’t right.
By the way, he’s talking more about the emotional and mental aspects.
Okay. So when a person suffers from something, he needs to understand that there’s an emotional root there. Now, the path he took was really interesting, because he’s an acupuncturist and an herbalist, and he also researches physical illness, not on the spiritual level. And he found people devoted to natural health who eat only greens and consume only healthy food and drink.
How did you get liver cancer?
How can it be that you got liver cancer? And then they understood that a person, even if he eats healthy…
That remains a very, very important starting point, and we shouldn’t discount it.
It depends on the person’s emotional makeup, because if the emotional makeup is stable…
I don’t spiral into frightening stories about reality.
I understand why all of this is for the good. I don’t get hurt, I don’t get offended, I don’t waste my strength. I could even eat the food people leave out for the street cats on the ground.
So you’re actually digesting reality.
Yes. Digesting reality is important, especially now.
With what we’re living through, so many people are suffering digestive problems because reality is hard.
Is it hard for you to contain this reality?
Where’s the justice?
Where’s the logic, where’s the equality, where’s the Creator?
How can it be that they murdered us, raped us, that they’re still coming at us? A reality that’s hard for you to understand.
How can it be that a girl, a flower, a flower, a flower, beautiful people who just went to dance and have fun, sweet people…
How can it be that they died?
Something here doesn’t add up for you. You try to put together some kind of logic, but you can’t.
And then it goes deeper. Because it’s not that we’re told not to use our emotional system. That’s fine, we can’t not use it anyway; it’s instinctive. You need to know how to master it, but you do need to use it.
I mean, there are so many stories of women who, heaven forbid, lost their children, and a few years later you hear that she also got cancer, and you say, what a life story, poor thing, she lost her child and got cancer too. But it’s a direct result of the first event.
Why?
Because a person who doesn’t know how to find comfort… It’s not for nothing, for example, that there are laws of mourning. There are laws of mourning because they limit it in time, so that you give expression to your pain but limit it in time. But a woman, for example, or a man, who doesn’t get over this…
They can even identify the specific organ involved.
Sexual harm from a partner shows up in the right breast; nonsexual harm from a partner shows up in the left breast.
A mother who lost a child is the right ovary. In other words, every organ has its own energetic vibration, and if sadness, tears and anguish wear down its energy, that organ becomes ill.
I did that for many years.
Yes, people do it, because you don’t really understand it. That’s how we’re conditioned:
an ENT specialist, a dermatologist, a gastroenterologist, whatever the problem calls for.
Something hurts?
Go to the doctor.
How does our medicine work? Exactly like our whole world.
Very fast, not deep, “give me a solution here and now.” So a person who has something hurting goes to the doctor, and the doctor gives him a pill.
Now, it may be that the pill blocks the symptoms. Because if I go to the doctor, he sees the spots I have on my skin and tells me, “Listen, these are sun spots,” and he gives me a cream to put on.
When really, the spots on my skin are a result of my liver’s activity, which is impaired. So where’s the doctor who treats the whole person, the one we need?
A doctor who treats the whole person. I need a doctor who will look at the whole system.
I don’t want someone who specializes only in my skin; I need someone who will connect all the dots.
Absolutely. I think medicine today is also going through some kind of…
They’re going through some kind of transformation toward integrative medicine.
Slowly, because there’s no choice.
Right. By the way, that’s also why I think it’s important to choose the right doctor for you.
The team that takes care of me personally is exactly like that.
They’re the kind who see the whole picture. They don’t just put a Band-Aid on the problem.
Wonderful.
Yes, because it’s important to have a good doctor, and it’s true, because there’s something here that goes even much deeper than that.
Not long ago a very large study was published.
They found that there’s a thing called heartbreak. I mean, they found people arriving at hospitals with symptoms of a heart attack, and not of an anxiety attack.
Real heart attack symptoms. They even imaged the heart and saw that it was swollen. Then they discovered…
That doesn’t sound crazy to me at all. And then, in conversation, they found out that the person had been through some crisis: a breakup, being fired, a loss, whatever it was, and it showed up on the physical level.
A heart attack, but it isn’t a heart attack.
And then you understand: it’s literally broken heart syndrome. What, you think sadness doesn’t have an effect?
What, you think your anger doesn’t have an effect?
Of course, everything has an effect.
It gets a physical expression too.
Of course, everything reaches the physical level. Because look, when I opened my practice, for example…
I didn’t intend to deal with physical illness.
I intended to work only with conditions connected to the soul, offering guidance and soul healing.
That was my intention.
The Crohn’s patients?
Of course, not only the Crohn’s patients. I work with people with Crohn’s, and with people with cancer too. I can tell you a story: a young woman called me.
She suffered from what they called “skin asthma,” or at least that was the diagnosis.
And it wasn’t exactly skin asthma.
It was attacks of all kinds of red patches.
Itching all over her body, she’d swell up. They gave her pills, it got to the point where she was putting steroids on her face and her body, and in the end they told her, “Look, we need to move to biologic treatment,” and that prospect really frightened her.
And one way or another, she came to me, the most rational woman in the country. She’s an accountant, actually.
Very buttoned-up. She came, and look, the way I work is to find the connection and get to the root. To find the root,
you have to ask the right questions.
A lot of the time, even the questions I ask…
I don’t even understand what the question is, but I ask it. And already in the first conversation I asked her when it first started, and she said it broke out during her pregnancy with her eldest daughter, when she was about three months pregnant. And then I asked her, “Did you want to be a mother?”
She stopped for a second, took a breath, and said, “Good question. Honestly, it was hard for me to connect to it.
Back then I was seeing a psychologist.
I went to therapy and spent a year working through it until I reached a place of wholeheartedly wanting children.
And I really do have two small children now, and I’m very connected and I love them.”
I said, okay, stop, that’s not it.
And then I asked her, what actually happens with this thing?
When does it…
When does it flare up?
I’ll keep the story very short.
I asked her about her mother, from the connection: if it began during pregnancy, then the pregnancy itself matters here.
There is a connection to her mother or to motherhood.
So we turned our attention to her mother.
What about your mother? How did your mother get married?
She tells me, “No, but my mom and my parents have been married 30 years.
My parents are from Russia. My mom’s the type who’s very together.”
No, okay, fine, go ask your mom how she got married.
The story is unreal, because people don’t even know their own family history. When she went and asked her mother,
at first her mother gave her the usual answer: “What do you mean?
Your father and I met in Russia, and we moved to Israel together.” And then she got really frustrated.
The young woman basically yelled at her mother, “But tell me the truth.
I have to know the truth.
I’m suffering here, and there’s something here that’s affecting me.” She told me, “You won’t believe it.”
Her mother started to cry and said to her, “Look, I’ll tell you the truth. When we were in Moscow, I had a different partner and I was in love with him.
I studied at the academy of chemistry and art.
We wanted to get married, and then he was drafted into the Russian army. The Russian army drafts you for a year, and I told him I’d wait for him. And during that year they burned down my father’s shop.”
There was a pogrom there, along with other violent incidents, and her father told her, “Now we’re moving to the Land of Israel.
This young man is the son of good friends of mine. Marry him and move to Israel.” They arranged a match between her and the girl’s father.
So she actually never saw the love of her life again.
Yes. She moves to Israel, and I get the whole picture right away, and I ask her, I say, “You’re the eldest daughter, right?”
She says yes, and I ask her, “Tell me, after how many months did your mom get pregnant?” She says, “3 months.” I already understand the cycle, that everything here works in threes, and then I understand this too.
Look, the logic is very simple: a fetus in its mother’s womb absorbs all her conflicts, and it understands a lot about the world.
What did she understand while she was still in the womb?
Her mother had love, she had passion, she had desire, she had a life, and in the name of family honor, in the name of security, in the name of her Judaism, facing “come move to Israel, you’re marrying that one and we need to present you,” she gave herself up.
She gave up her dreams, she gave up her fantasies.
And I think that as long as she hadn’t gotten pregnant, she still had some hope that he’d come back, that maybe he’d come.
But he didn’t.
And the moment she got pregnant, she understood that that was it, the story was over.
Now,
what was this young woman like from birth?
She was born with a lot of very masculine traits.
Why?
Because when I asked her, “What’s your illness?
This skin problem, how does it affect your home?”
she said to me, “Listen, I can’t do anything.”
I said to her, “What do you mean?” “I can’t cook or clean, it irritates my skin.”
Okay. Look what her system did so that, heaven forbid, she wouldn’t be like her mother, who gave up her wishes, her needs, her dreams.
Her system created this mechanism in her: I can’t clean.
I can’t cook, and I’m also very, very good with money.
Okay, wow.
Now understand: the healing comes the moment you understand this.
The moment you understand it, there’s healing there.
Now, when a person suffers from something physical, the easiest thing is to go to the doctor and say, “Give me something,” but you have to understand:
The healthcare system treats the symptoms. It almost never addresses the root cause.
There’s no doctor who even has the time to go into fine detail and understand what’s going on in your emotional system.
You feel, you went through some event. I mean, it took me a long time to understand why people with physical illnesses really come to me.
Because they’d sit across from me,
and I’d say, okay, what?
Master of the Universe?
What am I supposed to do with this?
The fact that I made the connection between body and soul…
It was clear to you from the start.
Yes, it really was clear to me from the start, but also my studies with Rabbi Yuval Asherov gave me a tremendous amount of clarity. And I understood for certain, and you should understand too, that the root is always in the soul.
The healthcare system treats the symptoms; there’s no connection to the person’s emotional and mental state.
No one looks at the person as a whole. Giving someone medication for life…
That’s not healing. That’s not healing; I find that appalling. And that’s true of physical and mental illness alike. So there’s no healing without removing the cause of the illness. Treating the symptom might make it easier for you.
It may bring temporary relief, but it can drive the underlying problem deeper.
Okay. And what we need to understand is that every event that happened to you in life, every event, is burned into your body in some particular place. If you haven’t understood why the event was for your good, it will come back. Okay? I mean, this idea that time heals, that enough time passes…
and then I feel better.
Look, that’s not nonsense, because yes, with time and perspective, it does hurt less.
But it can
come back, and it can grow. It’s like sweeping it under the rug.
Sort of. You have to understand.
Take Dr. Nader Butto, for example.
He scans a woman, he sees a blockage, and he says to her:
“What happened in 1982?”
Okay, and then she tells him, “Listen, there was this thing with my husband, we had a bit of an issue, but no, it worked out, we’re still together to this day.” No: in 1982 he cheated on her, and she got over it, as if she got over it, for the sake of the family.
You didn’t give expression to your pain, you didn’t confront it, you didn’t examine it?
Why did it happen?
You didn’t look?
Okay, you left the wound. What happens is that as long as a person has a high level of vitality… The younger you are, the higher your vitality.
But here’s the thing: the healthier a life you lead,
you don’t smoke, you exercise,
you don’t stay angry, okay, the healthier you’ll be.
But here’s the thing: there’s a process of aging, and a person’s level of vitality goes down.
It’s not for nothing that in people aged 70, 80, 90, illnesses suddenly break out. These illnesses can lie dormant for years. They remain wherever you never understood how an event served your good and merely told yourself, “It passed, and now it hurts less.” And these are places that are hard for us to accept.
Why would I want to accept that I was cheated on?
That I was knocked down?
That I was insulted?
Why would I want to…
Accept that I brought an illness on myself, exactly.
But no, I’m going with you even deeper to the root. Like everyone says, “Come on, come on, let’s rush through it, let’s not deal with it.”
In the end, your emotional system leaves its mark on your body; it can inscribe illness there. In the end, that’s what illnesses are.
Look, like anything you buy at the supermarket, milk.
What you buy at the supermarket has an expiration date. Okay, your troubles have an expiration date too, dear souls.
Okay. Nothing here is supposed to stay forever. Every bad thing that happens to you is actually a warning before something worse happens, because it always starts small.
At first they tell you in general terms.
Then they show it to you from far away, if you didn’t have the sense to understand, when you see it from far away,
that it probably exists within you and needs to be cleared out. If you don’t clear it out, it comes closer, and then it comes closer.
And then it’s close.
Now look, I won’t say a word here about COVID vaccines or any other vaccines, but they played with our bodies, too.
In recent years they also frightened people.
That increased illness even more. And that’s why the whole concept of a healthy soul in a healthy body needs to rest on the understanding that it’s fine for me to take care of…
You know what I’ll do with my body?
I’ll nourish myself with good food. But you have to understand that the thing that’s much, much, much, much more important is keeping your soul healthy.
A healthy soul comes from healthy thoughts and healthy emotions,
and the combination of the two leads to a healthy body.
Because you remember we talked about the body renewing itself all the time.
And then we said, wait, so how can that be, if the whole body renews itself…
Within a year, the whole body renews itself.
So how can it be that there are sick people?
And then we talked about how people identify so strongly with what they have that the identification goes all the way down to the level of the cell.
They become identified with the illness,
and the body keeps replicating itself
according to the old program.
There’s a beautiful story about a woman named Einat who became ill, and she says, “I didn’t go to doctors or for tests.” They told her the situation was bad. She went and sat down, because she talks directly with the Creator.
She said to Him,
“You got that? Fix this now.” How did she switch it off?
In her mind, she went back to a period of time when she wasn’t sick.
Okay, and she imagined
that she was in that period of time now, and she behaved like that woman, and she talked like that woman.
She completely ignored the thing, until her body, in her consciousness,
understood that she was actually in that other period, and she isn’t sick, and it fixed it.
We hear unreal stories. Take the book
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. It actually tells you the opposite: the stranger and more extreme and more bizarre the healing, the more the person will recover.
There’s no illness that can’t be… There’s no such thing.
Stop buying into the idea that chronic illness has to last a lifetime. There are lessons here.
There are lessons here. Understand what things mean.
I can tell you about an extraordinary case from my practice.
A young man sat down. I asked him why he’d come.
He told me, “Listen, my wife is pregnant. I have two daughters at home, may they be healthy. My wife is far along in her pregnancy.
We did tests: the child’s kidney, the fetus’s kidney, isn’t developing.”
Now you know, I use books; it’s not that I have everything in my head, but I also work with a kind of intuition.
I mean, I have in my practice
books about illness from Theta Healing and Recall Healing, which link each organ and illness to a particular emotion.
There’s Louise Hay, who has the whole…
Tell me what illness you have,
and I’ll tell you what thoughts you have.
Right. So there are quite a few, and I use them too.
A lot of the time I even open the Zohar, the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, or the Tanya, a classic Hasidic text, to help me understand. But I think the young man was sitting across from me,
He wasn’t religious, but intuitively I reached for a particular book, opened it, and the first question I asked him was, “Tell me, what’s the story with your father?
What’s the deal with your father?
There’s something there. The fetus is showing us something connected to your father.
To the paternal line in your family?”
The man’s jaw dropped.
He tells me, “Listen, my father committed suicide 20 years ago.” Oh my.
Now we understand: he has two daughters at home, and a male fetus in the womb.
This fetus is supposed to carry on his line, his father’s line and the lineage that came before them.
The men in this family couldn’t hold up under the pressure.
They couldn’t hold up under the pressure, and he repeated his father’s pattern because he had taken his father’s place.
Now this fetus comes along and doesn’t want to continue that pattern. Already in the womb, he signals it to his father.
It was fixed, and a healthy baby was born. How wonderful!
Great, right?
So you have to understand, and you should all understand:
I come from the most rational field there is.
It’s not that from the start it seemed obvious to me that if someone’s left shoulder hurts, you immediately understand he has some pain in his heart and so on. But you can know this and learn it.
Look into it. If you have some outward symptom, you have to understand that your emotional and mental state has become so serious that it has become matter.
It is taking material form in your body.
But every movement that goes forward can also go backward.
Now, that doesn’t fit our linear view of the world.
We know that kind of movement. So let me expand your consciousness and tell you that in nature there’s an organism called the immortal jellyfish.
This jellyfish doesn’t die.
It gets to age 50, say, and goes back, and gets to age 50 and goes back.
If it exists, it exists.
What’s there to argue with?
Stay connected to yourselves, and understand:
In the end, the illness doesn’t come to harm you.
It comes to signal to you, dear souls.
Something in you isn’t digesting reality well, and you need to change the way you look at reality.
No, taking medication isn’t the solution.
I wish I’d known this.
At the start of my journey with Crohn’s, I always knew it was for my good, but I didn’t know how much the foundation really is in the soul.
And what do you do with that?
I didn’t know.
That’s something I came to understand along the way, including through this journey with you, and it’s one hell of an insight for life, right?
It’s one hell of an insight for life, and it also makes life feel much richer and more vivid.
And out of the understanding that whatever comes, comes for my good. Even if I become ill, it may get me down at first, but come on, come on, understand, understand what it means, understand why you were stopped.
Understand why it’s for the good, and above all hold on to the hope and the vision and the understanding and the knowing, knowing, knowing that it’s
for our good, and also that it’s
for our good, of course. And also that there’s no problem that can’t be solved and no illness that can’t be healed, and even before the problem
and the illness were created, the solution had already been created. Focus on that. Excellent.
Really the best tip I could have chosen. Come on.
Wishing you good health. Amen and amen.