Click  (moving forward in your life)

In the movie “Click,” Adam Sandler plays a busy advertising executive who is working hard for a promotion to increase his income. One night he goes to the store to buy a remote control for his TV when he can’t get his to work. He meets a strange man in the back room of Bed and Bath who gives him a unique remote that controls his whole life. As he plays with it, he discovers that he can fast forward through a fight with his wife. Then he skips through the foreplay when he makes love with her. Later, he skips forward to his next promotion. It turns out to be a smart remote that remembers his preferences. Pretty soon, every time he has a fight, the remote skips it.

We all want to skip the difficult moments in our lives and move forward faster. We think by skipping those moments our lives will be easier but still productive. The uncomfortable moments are actually the most important. We don’t achieve real change in our lives without them.

Whenever our bodies are uncomfortable, we’d like to click through the discomfort quickly. People come to the doctor wanting to have their bodies fixed. As a long time emergency room physician, I was paid to find a way to give immediate relief of discomfort. Much of what we do in conventional medicine is about getting rid of symptoms.

Our bodies are intimately connected to our spiritual and emotional selves. There is no separation. Many doctors say something is “psycho-somatic” - meaning it is more in the mind. Everything is psycho-somatic. Hormones and neurotransmitters sent out by the nervous system regulate everything in our bodies. When a physical problem is difficult, it is because the body/mind/spirit is in some way talking to us. For many of my patients, the physical is the stopping point. When the body is hurting you can no longer avoid it.

As a healer, it is my job to help you see through all the layers of your physical problems. You may think your problem is just a chronic sinus infection. You cannot understand why it won’t get better with after the third round of antibiotics. Or perhaps you have had three back surgeries but your back continues to hurt.

Maria had the flu and couldn’t get rid of the cough after four weeks. She wanted me to give her codeine cough syrup so she could sleep through the night. Codeine is another way of clicking forward, preventing her from feeling the pain of the cough. If the cough is helping Maria release emotional stress, suppressing it will prolong the symptoms. The body is a vehicle for your emotions to release if you don’t want to feel them some other way.

Adam Sandler ended up clicking all the way through his life. He woke up one day overweight, unhealthy, divorced, with grown children that he never knew. He missed every major growth event in his life. I don’t want to spoil the end of the movie for you, but, in typical Hollywood fashion, Adam Sandler’s character learned that the difficult moments were the most important and got a chance to redeem his life.