“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you turned from the habit, and would have turned to food for comfort, you denied yourself this out of fear of gaining weight. Subconsciously you felt cheated. Now the comfort was needed to begin with so that you could make up for other things that you felt you did not have, and to help you cope with problems, as you are aware.

This was reflected in other portions of the body as well. As you noted, you felt off balance subjectively, and unsure. Now. You had grown used to smoking as a way of comforting yourself. You removed the comfort. You refused to add another, and at the same time you did not face the inner problem that was bothering you, that made the comfort so necessary to begin with. We will go into this more deeply, for you can indeed rid yourself of the symptoms, but I would like to make one point here first. When you bought the dog, subconsciously you felt that the dog was almost a symbol of your failure.

The body is trying to tell you that you have a problem, and because you did not cope with it, and denied it mentally, it is physically materialized in symbolic body language. Now give us a moment. (Pause.)

To protect yourself from her disease you had to move quickly physically. You also had to move quickly in the area of work. You were sensitized because of your mother’s problem to fear inactivity. Any threat to your motion or advance, even in the business area, becomes highly charged for this reason. Earlier you felt that you could strike out. There was plenty of time. Then you became frightened after the age of 35, and you began to soften up your blows. (Jane gestured widely, with a fist.) You began to hold back, become more cautious, and then slowly began to entertain thoughts of the possibility of failure.

Now. The problem is not in the exterior circumstances but in your own mental attitude toward them, and in the habitual patterns of thought that you have subjectively accepted.

You do not want to accept the basic fear of immobility and lack of motion. You are too afraid of the fear itself. You recognize it but you do not know what to do about it, and this frightens you further. You act this out subconsciously then, hampering the free motion of the joints, which then become stiffened through the inactivity. The stiffness then convinces you that the joints are indeed at fault; this adds to the problem, which then gives more fuel to the basic fear.

If you allowed this to continue and did not check it, then gradually the inactive joints would be accepted as a basic problem. You would think: “If I could move freely, then I could solve all problems,” when the true point is: when you feel free to solve the problems, there will be no physical symptoms to worry about.

Tell yourself that you are free to move ahead. Do not tell yourself you are feeling fine when you hurt; I do not mean this. You must however realize fully that your ideas are responsible. Give us a moment here. (Long pause.) You must face the fact fully that you are and have been frightened, and that fear is a natural reaction, and that there are ways of responding to it that are healthy and constructive. You can face your problems and deal with them. You are free to do so, and you should remind yourself of this fequently, for you doubted your ability to handle the problems. (Long pause.)

Tell yourself several times a day that you can deal with whatever problems you have. Do not keep thinking of the job situation so that you are hammering yourself over the head with it constantly. Whenever you find yourself projecting failure in any sense into the future, even into tomorrow, stop yourself, remind yourself that your thoughts form reality.

Now. There will be an effect—not one I believe that you have foreseen, and not immediate. You worried them. You are a problem to them, as they are to you, even while you both receive services from the other, and your report may help take all of you off the hook. It may take all of you off the hook—they do not know what to do with you either.