top of page

Recovering Body and Spirit



My journey towards Christianity was not a straight, flat, Roman road. It was a long, circuitous, uneven road across bandit-ridden badlands. I went through hell to get to heaven, as many of us must. At a certain point, I got a distant, hazy view of the destination, took the reins and chose a more direct route. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that it was the only way for me. Like the prodigal son, we need to suffer so much that we realize the sheer painful folly of things material and are forced to turn away from the outer world and look within for the Kingdom of God.

 

The turning point in my journey was a moment of intense physical and psychological agony. I was lying in a sun lounger. Not because I wanted a tan. Oh no. It was in my bedroom, at night. I couldn’t sleep in my bed because I had associated the worst pain of my life with lying in that bed. My back and hips hurt so badly, and I feared the dreaded spasm so much, that I struggled to walk and needed a wheelchair to go more than 200 feet. My functional medicine doctor said I was, ‘the worst autoimmune patient I have ever seen.’ Four other doctors and an osteopath thought I had an autoimmune disease – Crohn’s disease, Ankylosing Spondylitis and Celiac disease were mentioned – but I never got an official diagnosis. If their suspicions were correct – and I assumed they were – then according to mainstream medicine, I was incurable and destined to get worse over time. (That is why I turned to the paleo diet, whose adherents have achieved some success in reversing autoimmunity). My brain smog was like downtown Beijing – on a bad day. I was constantly exhausted. I couldn’t eat more than 1100 calories per day without extreme digestive upset and disabling pain. I was intolerant to almost everything, and could only consume almond milk, mushrooms and cucumbers. I was slowly starving to death; after four months of this punishing regimen, I had visible ribs and looked like a prisoner of war.

 

Physical remedies had failed spectacularly. My elimination diet gave me temporary improvements every time I dropped a ‘troublesome’ foodstuff, which suckered me into eliminating almost everything from my diet. I couldn’t take the medications my doctors wanted to give me because I was intolerant to the ingredients. Ironically, even a painkiller gave me pain. The few herbs I could stomach stopped working. My endoscopy – to check for a bleeding ulcer – was cancelled due to the lockdown.

 

At that point, like many young English people, I was not a Christian. In fact, I was an avid reader of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that Christianity was a religion for the weak and sick, whilst himself suffering from debilitating psychosomatic symptoms. But with nowhere else to turn, in a moment of fateful desperation, I appealed to Christ, the ‘rejected’ stone who was to become my ‘cornerstone.’


I had read about Christ’s healing miracles in the Gospel of Matthew and found myself believing in them. Indeed, I believed in the power of belief. ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well’, Christ said to a woman healed of a haemorrhage.[1] A healer God was what I needed. So I prayed: ‘Christ, show me the way to recover and I will spread whatever message you want me to spread.’ Shortly afterwards, amazon recommended a book to me called Healing Back Pain, by Doctor John Sarno. Sarno believed that most pain, especially back pain, is psychosomatic. I saw in the reviews that some people had healed merely by reading the book. Intolerant as I was to most herbs, medications and health foods, this appealed to me, because a reading cure was just about the only way I could heal at that point.

 

I had a dream. I was on Mikhaila Peterson’s podcast. Mikhaila is a well-known advocate of the carnivore diet. I held up Sarno’s book and said to her, ‘diet is okay, but this is better.’ As dreams go, that one was pretty on the nose. I didn’t need to see Doctor Freud to figure out the meaning. Nonetheless, it took me about 2 months to read Sarno’s book, because I thought I had an autoimmune disease and Sarno was talking about pain. Really, I was just resisting the truth. When I finally did read that book, it all made total sense.

 

Effectively, Sarno was saying that fear of symptoms and the associated physical restrictions – the diet, the ice pack, the sun lounger, the bending embargo – were distracting me from the repressed emotions that were the true source of the disorder. It was a condition he called TMS: Tension Myositis Syndrome (later updated to The Mindbody Syndrome). Most of those who accepted the diagnosis and its implications went on to heal. The solution was to understand that there was nothing structurally wrong with me (or if there was, it probably wasn’t the cause of the symptoms), stop worrying about the pain, express my emotions via journaling and resume normal activities. So I did. And it worked. I gradually reintroduced all of the ‘problem foods’ with no problem, honestly explored the grief surrounding my dad’s death and slowly increased my range of motion. I overcame my fears by facing them. After about 15 months, I could eat anything I wanted, drink a glass of milk without any symptoms, run a 10k in 40 minutes and do 60 consecutive push-ups. I wasn’t nearly as anxious or depressed, either. My recovery was total.

 

Having discovered the disastrous consequences of ignorance, and how phenomenally useful the right information can be, I set out on a spiritual journey to discover everything I needed to know. After the torment of my illness, when my time on earth was up, I didn’t want to come back for another incarnation (my beliefs at this time were vaguely New Age). I wanted to get off the wheel of suffering for good. So I went in search of enlightenment, Nirvana, the philosopher’s stone, the Holy Grail – whatever you want to call it – even though I had no clear idea what that was.

 

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was my next guru or ‘wise old man’ after Doctor Sarno. My TMS knowledge of unconscious emotions dovetailed nicely with his idea of archetypes – unconscious inner images and personalities that everyone is born with. The shadow is the darkness within everyone that is rejected from the ego and seen outside of us. Jung defined the anima as the woman within man and the animus as the man within woman. The wise old man was a kind of higher self or guardian angel, a font of paranormal wisdom that could make sense of the world, symbols and the unconscious. The Self was Jung’s idea of God, the neutral ground between conscious and unconscious, male and female, good and evil – a bit of everything.

 

Jung gave me a framework to interpret the vivid symbolic dreams I kept having. In one of them, a large scarab beetle with a giant golden carapace landed on the shelf above my bed. Apparently, scarabs were an ancient Egyptian symbol for rebirth – whatever that meant. I also read a biography of Edgar Cayce, the Christian mystic who prophesied and diagnosed under hypnosis with shocking accuracy. I read about the alchemists, whom Jung believed were seeking – or projecting – a psychological philosopher’s stone and an inner gold. The alchemical sacred marriage of the red king and the white queen was echoed by the Gnostic bridegroom meeting the bride in the bridal chamber. I read Homer’s Odyssey and saw a similar symbolism at work in the tale of King Odysseus’ storm-tossed journey back from the Trojan War, to clear the suitors out of his house and be reunited with his wife, Queen Penelope. Clearly, esotericism was about a ‘conjunction of opposites’, a reunion of disconnected parts to form a cohesive whole. I experimented with active imagination, a Jungian technique in which the imagination is used to engage with the archetypes of the unconscious, typically through dialogues. These exercises inspired a couple of novels and yielded the realization that I owed my recovery to Christ. The divine bargain, which I had half forgotten about, had worked. It had led me to Sarno’s book and set me on the road to recovery. This discovery nudged me back toward the gospels. I came to suspect that the truth had been staring me in the face every time I walked past my local church. That Christianity had become the world’s most popular religion for a reason. That what I sought in esotericism, was the soter, Christ. After all, the cross represents the conjunction of opposites. Vertical and horizontal. Spirit and matter.

 

I found the meaning of life in the parable of the prodigal son from the Gospel of Luke. A son is given his inheritance by his father. He goes off to town, where he squanders his inheritance. This wasteful son winds up starving and feeding pigs. He comes crawling back to his father and offers to serve him. Perhaps surprisingly, the father welcomes his wayward son with open arms. On first reading, I understood that the father was God. That was obvious enough. It was only later that I realised the prodigal son was the individual mind or soul, who was lured into the material world (the town) by ignorance and desire and was forced to return to the spirit (father) because of the immense suffering he encountered there.

 

Throughout this period, I struggled to connect with the wider world. Attempts at dating fizzled out. My efforts to find a literary agent for my thriller novels failed completely. These rejections were built on the solid foundations of having been widely disliked and mocked at school. So I gave up on dating and committed to self-publishing (you can find all of my books at robertensor.com). I don’t regret either decision. Desire for worldly approval, like fear, was just another distraction from the spirit. I see now that God was keeping me hermetically sealed from the world so that I would have the quiet, reflective time necessary to discover the truth. As Jesus said, ‘if you were of the world, then the world would love its own. But because you are not of the world, since I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.’[2]

 

The Gospel of John was the key text for me. Jesus’ reference to ‘living water’ that will become ‘a well of water springing up to eternal life’ got me thinking.[3] What kind of water would lead ‘up’ to eternal life? I sensed I was on the cusp of a breakthrough, that whatever the answer was, Jesus had it. I believed in him, this outsider God with a fantastic turn of phrase and a poet’s talent for metaphor, this self-taught teacher who strolled in from the wilderness to drop truth bombs on the masses and perform wonder after jaw-dropping wonder. He was castigated and rejected so much he had to be right.

 

I believed in Jesus’ Resurrection. Regular people have had out of body (or near-death) experiences in the emergency room and returned to tell the tale. It wasn’t much of a stretch to believe that Christ could come back from the dead. If I could only decode his parables and sayings… ‘Unless one is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter into God’s kingdom.’[4] What does that mean?

 

The penny finally dropped when I read the bread of life speech. Jesus is the bread of life. But he is not ordinary physical bread. What is he? ‘The words that I speak to you are spirit, and are life.’[5] When Jesus equated life with the spirit, and death with matter, he gave us the master key to eternal life. The spirit is a particularisation of God, the divine spark within all of us that gives us life. The soul – the mind in the widest sense – is positioned between the ‘dead’ body and the living spirit and must choose between the two. The Logos leads up to life via wisdom and meaning; the devil lures the soul down toward death through fear and desire. Spirit and soul share the body, but they are not permanently joined together at birth. For that, Holy Communion is needed. What we eat is taken inside of us, after all. It becomes part of us. Because Christ and the Father are one, and the Father is the source of all life, Christians eat the Body of Christ to receive eternal life of the soul. To put it in the Jungian parlance I used at the time, the Christian mind must integrate the Christ archetype. We must let Christ into our innermost being, to share in his immortality.

 

Logically, God had to put on the flesh so that humanity could cast it off. God and humanity had to meet in the middle somehow, if the two were ever to be reconciled. And it was pretty obvious that humanity, trapped in pitiful cycles of sin and suffering, could not save itself. We needed outside help. Christ, by incarnating and ascending to heaven, assumed that crucial role as intermediary between mortals and immortal, and thereby formed a bridge between the rescue vessel of spirit and that old sinking ship, matter – a bridge that is still available to all of those seeking to escape.


Following Christ’s injunction, I forgave everyone for everything. I realized that because others are in a sense inseparable from ourselves, especially our unconscious aspects, we cannot be forgiven until we forgive others. The soul must be purified to be a fit receptacle for the blood of Christ.

 

Then I took active steps to keep my end of the divine bargain by sharing my recovery story online. For me, faith and works were necessary. Or rather, knowledge, faith and works, for we cannot have faith in Jesus without first knowing something about him. The more we know, the easier it is to believe. Faith, in turn, produces tangible effects that result in certain knowledge that Christ is the Lord. I am extremely introverted and was quite nervous about the first podcast interview I had arranged. I needed help from Christ and was willing to receive it. I ate the bread of life. When we eat this bread, we feel full; we are not hungry. This esoteric eucharist, this Holy Spirit (for the persons of the trinity are inseparable), was the ‘living water’ that Christ contrasted with the physical water of the well.

 

Later, I was reborn. To understand what is meant by rebirth, you need to understand what exactly occurred at birth. We were all born into the flesh, but being born in the spirit is something altogether different. To be born again is to be born into a different body, to rise beyond yourself. This experience shed new light on the resurrection. It could not have happened without the grace of Christ and His Father.

 

I then encountered the work of spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and spent a lot of time trying to be present, to be in the moment. Like many people, I couldn’t keep it up. Soon some worry or annoyance crept in and I was left feeling like a failure for not being present. At the time, I didn’t understand the full significance of my earlier experiences. I was still seeking for what I had already found in Christ. I had already learned to tune out excess fear during my TMS recovery; little did I know, that was all the presence I needed.

 

But there was at least one part of Eckhart’s book, The Power of Now, that was very helpful. Eckhart recommended a meditation that involved lying down or sitting in a comfortable chair, closing your eyes, and focusing your thoughtless attention on the inner body, the feeling of warmth, vitality and aliveness inside of the physical body. That inner body is the spirit. I did the exercise for long enough to feel my individual spirit dissolve into the universal spirit. There was no boundary between me and everything. That, I thought, was the kingdom of God, Christ said is, ‘within you’.[6] That was the Father.

 

There is, of course, a different aspect to the eternal kingdom that is closer to a conventional Christian image of heaven. The Father can be ‘seen’,[7] though He is also without form. Within that formlessness is all form, including a creative personality, just as the formlessness of spirit is within every created form. ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me,’ as Christ put it.[8] At any rate, the meditation certainly helped me to understand the sheer breath-taking vastness and universality of the spirit that underlies the world of apparently separate material forms.

 

I sought and I found. I recovered my body, then my spirit. I had gone from being unable to eat bread, to eating all kinds of bread. I owe it all to the Triune God. Like the prodigal son, and Odysseus, my journey ended where it began. As Christ said in The Book of Revelation, ‘I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.’[9] But I am not the same as I was when I set out. Now, by writing this piece and my book, The Spirit Solution: Lessons Learned From My Spiritual Journey (available here), I am sharing the message Christ wanted me to spread. For some of you, too, the master is coming to your house. Be ready to greet him when he arrives.

 


[1] Mark 5:34. World English Bible.

[2] John 15:19. World English Bible.

[3] John 4. World English Bible.

[4] John 3:5. World English Bible.

[5] John 6:63. World English Bible.

[6] Luke 17:21. World English Bible.

[7] John 6. World English Bible.

[8] John 14:11. World English Bible.

[9] Revelation 22:13. World English Bible.

Recent Posts

See All

TMS

It's the psychosomatic syndrome everyone's talking about.

2 Comments


bluedesertlotus
Jan 13

I am deeply appreciative of your literary contributions. Your books have inspired me to question the status quo and seek truth, rather than blindly accepting the narratives of mainstream society and conventional medicine. This pursuit of truth has been liberating, and I find resonance with this concept throughout your writings. A few years ago, Dr. Sarno's books played a pivotal role in my recovery from carpel tunnel and back pain. Although my peers were doubtful, I chose to keep my healing journey private. Since then, my spiritual growth and faith in God have guided me toward a path of wellness and self-discovery. Your books have been instrumental in my ongoing health journey, and I continue to find solace in Kriya…


Like

Lauren Hinsman
Lauren Hinsman
Jan 12

Hello Brother! What a beautiful post. Those of us who have suffered in this way have such similar arcs. We kick and scream and thrash, then relent. There is power and peace in that.


I have taken up mountain biking. What a gift! I remember thinking I'd never sit again, much less on hard bike saddle - speeding over rocks and roots. Thank GOD.


Talk soon...

Like

Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. Nothing you receive from me is intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis, and/or medical treatment of a qualified doctor. If serious symptoms arise, seek immediate medical attention. This website is intended for informational purposes only; reading the website does not make you my client. Serious or structural issues should be ruled out by your physician before embarking on mindbody work.

Website copyright © 2023 Robert Ensor.

bottom of page