Living with Diabetes is a huge challenge in today’s society. In fact Diabetes Australia reports 280 Australians develop Diabetes every day. That’s one person every five minutes which is about 4% of the population or 1.7 million people.
Diabetes is the fastest growing chronic condition in Australia, increasing at a faster rate than other chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer.
In the USA diagnosed Diabetes is a total 29.1 million people or 9.3% of the population have Diabetes and undiagnosed is 8.1 million people or 27.8% of people with Diabetes are undiagnosed. That’s almost 78,000 people a day!
Worldwide, Diabetes caused 4.9 million deaths in 2014 which means every seven seconds a person dies from Diabetes.
Why? There are quite a few contributors to this number however this article is from a personal perspective and looks at the emotional and energetic components as I later discovered through kinesiology.
Being diagnosed with Diabetes at 12 years old is what introduced me to kinesiology and why I became Australia’s youngest qualified kinesiologist at the age of 18.
Let me start with the background and lead up to how I believe it came about.
Background & Environment
My family emigrated from Czech Republic to Australia under very stressful circumstances illegally fleeing a communist regime in 1983. My parents wanted to create a future with choice for their children that wouldn’t be suppressed by the communist regime.
Both professional musicians, life in Australia started with them distributing newspapers, whilst looking for permanent position music teacher jobs.
Prioritising survival and future ambitions, they wanted my brother and I to have choices they didn’t believe we could have in Czech Republic which meant they were not home much.
Home life was quite stressful and I believe a combination of being looked after by my brother (7 years older) who abused his authority, irregular eating patterns, inconsistent routines, pressure in ballet and lack of family support led to Diabetes.
Along with the adjustment of being a “different” kid in school, I also never quite adjusted well to bullying and the language barriers in the first few years.
It wasn’t until symptoms like excessive urination, thirst and weight-loss became so persistent that I urged my parents to take me to the doctor.
We put it off so long but my mother said she’ll take me as soon as the school holidays hit, until one Saturday night just before my 13th birthday I ended up in emergency intensive care after vomiting from excessive long term ketosis.
Doctors told me that I was just one hour short of being in a major coma that may not have seen me survive it. My situation had gone so far and could have been prevented if detected earlier.
The diagnosis was an opportunity for my whole family to come back into balance as a family unit and to create much healthier lifestyle such as regular eating patterns and a much healthier diet.
We also began to explore TM meditation as a family meditating daily together for years and things started to heal. My parents were so desperate to see my health reverse and so was I.
My mother was so dedicated to my needs and introduced me to a Kinesiologist. The results we got from kinesiology inspired me to learn touch for health at 14 years old. After more courses I started practicing on everyone and anyone I could.
Within the first few months of seeing a kinesiologist I was definitely back on track, reduced my insulin and was obsessed with learning more and more about the body, energy and how I can help others heal.
Emotional & Behavioral Contributors To Diabetes
Outside of the poor choices people make like poor eating habits, no exercise, excess sugar in the diet and alcohol consumption, I believe there is an emotional and energetic cause in every illness and I’ve discovered through my own health and working with clients these factors below:
Anger & Resentment
In about 20 years of clinical practice and self-development I discovered that the energetic nature of Diabetes is all about not being able to process anger and resentment.
Not having a healthy relationship with boundaries for self-care or creating allowable sources of sweetness and nourishment into life.
Hence “loss of sweetness” in life is common. Inability to “stomach” or “digest” these emotions, (from a kinesiology perspective) live in the gall bladder and liver organs and wood element.
The result is unused, unexpressed energy being shunted to other organs and meridians. In my case the earth element which is the stomach and spleen element suffered the blows from the liver and gallbladder suppressed energy.
I was so disconnected with any anger or rage but knew that it was there very deep down yet I had no way of accessing it. I learned how to hide and suppress it so much so that I could not identify with it at all.
Unless anger and resentment is appropriately expressed the body cannot heal. I had no relationship with either. I learned that my mother and her father had major issues with anger and expressing it.
I was so angry that my parents left me with a terrible brother and took us to a country where we had no-one. I was devastated to leave my grandmother behind. I never felt these emotions at the time.
Need For Approval
I became so good at suppressing myself. Why? I was very suppressed by my brother and grew up with an unhealthy need for his approval.
All I cared about was whether he liked me or not and my self-esteem was caught up and scarred with his opinion of who he said I was which at the time was ugly and nothing.
Today he is a very different person, however, that damage was done.
Being bullied at school, I never felt good enough in any situation so my need for approval was also very exposed there.
Take On Too Much Responsibility
I also discovered that juvenile Diabetes can be the pattern of children who take or are given too much responsibility at an early age or “parent” the parents or other siblings.
I wanted so desperately to please and be loved that I only wanted to help my parents and not cause more stress.
They already suffered greatly with my brother who did not handle our emigration well. He turned to drugs, stealing and all sorts of other trouble. I witnessed regular screaming matches and abuse from him toward my parents.
He would then take some of that out on me. I ended up just trying to look after everyone and was always “in the middle”.
I never really learned how to take care of me as I was over empathetic and always concerned with trying to make everything better at home.
It is absolutely essential to learn how to put the self first and dare to nurture and nourish the self, none of which was modelled nor something I knew how to do.
Self Esteem
As mentioned earlier my self-esteem was not healthy. I developed secondary issues and an eating disorder in my 20’s which actually ruined my health even more.
I developed another immune problem, a hypothyroid problem where I was no longer producing T4 cells. I started to gain a lot of weight and was overweight.
That’s when I learned I had to listen to myself. I asked the doctors to give me 6 weeks to turn my health around before putting me on lifelong medication as I was willing to do anything not to have to take more drugs for the rest of my life.
I made some choices about lifestyle and negative emotions and people I was keeping company with. I started to meditate and my thyroid rebalanced. I stopped bending over backwards for everyone else. I recognised that I was over eating because I was looking for energy. I wanted back the energy I was giving others.
Six weeks later my T4 count was back to normal and I have never had a thyroid problem since. It took a few years to lose the weight, however, that happened after I integrated deep belly breathing and breath work into my life.
Coming Back To Balance – Diabetes Management
Diabetes is all about keeping in balance and kinesiology has helped me understand and identify what is going on. The key is to keep very balanced. [Learn more in our Living with Diabetes FREE Holistic Health Magazine and article Good Foods To Eat For Diabetics]
- I believe that self-love, finding sweetness and allowable sources of nourishment are essential in balancing life with Diabetes
- Learn how to take courageous responsibility for the self, regardless of what others need is essential
- Creating a healthy relationship with anger and frustration. Use it as a guide to show you that perhaps your boundaries or values have been compromised
- Practice healthy boundaries and learn how to say no instead of being a people pleaser
- Meet our own needs for nourishment
- Learn how to ask for help, your needs and what you want
- Find a kinesiologist who can help you understand your body
- Learn to breathe
- Meditate or create time for reflection and just listen to the inner voice
- Get as much body work as possible and ground yourself. The trauma is always in the body and needs release.
You can find much more information on living a holistic lifestyle in these free magazines and on our YouTube channel.
Ani Neradilkova – Founder at Sydney Kinesiology
