Symptoms as our Last Call
- Dana B. Fernandes
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
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This one comes from a very deep place within me. If you've ever heard my personal story, that was my door into the body. I want to say this today, because it took me so long — so long trying to fix and figure things out, until I really learned to drop in and listen.
I know the importance of this kind of conversation, because for many people, this is the reality: we only learn to listen — and this is true in so many things, not only the body — when things are not working as they should. Although I don't fully believe that phrase even as I say it. But when we feel things are not working as they should — when symptoms show up, when pain shows up, when discomfort shows up — it's not comfortable at all. It disturbs and moves the whole system when it happens.
But it happens like this for a reason. Today, with the distance I've walked from that place, and everywhere I've moved into since — my education, my many years of hands-on experience with people and their symptoms — I know that it's like this because it's a last call.
You know when we're at the airport, and the attendant is trying to get our attention to come to the gate — this is the last call, please reach the gate. This is our symptom. This is our last call. Please bring your attention to your body. Bring your attention here, to this moment, now. Notice. Feel. Listen.
And so many people, at this moment, are still unable to listen. I don't blame anyone for that. Like I've said in many episodes before, we live in a world that makes it so difficult to listen. So many professionals place themselves outside of us — as the experts, as the ones who know, as the authority on our own selves, our own bodies — pulling our attention out and away again. And I'm not here to dismiss experts — I have my own years of hands-on experience too. But there's a big difference between pulling attention out, and inviting it, with our clients, back in. It's nuanced. It's complex.
Our symptoms are there, the way they are, for a reason — to pull our attention, to make us move. To pull our attention inside. The same way an alarm pulls our attention, activates certain parts of our brain to respond immediately — that's the same function our symptoms serve. We so often just turn the alarm bell off. We still haven't found the fire. We still haven't looked for the smoke. We still haven't looked around at our life, our habits, our patterns, and recognised what needs to shift.
Many years ago, I was targeted by an ad — I don't remember exactly what the device was, but it was selling the idea that it would regulate the nervous system. I made a video about it at the time, because I found it so ridiculous — that I would put on a device to regulate my system without ever looking within myself, within my environment, at what was actually happening. Why is my alarm on? Why is my symptom ringing the bell?
Like I said at the start of this conversation, it's sad for me to share, to acknowledge, how many years it took me. For so many years I tried to fix my symptom. I used to have chronic pain, if you don't know my story — I even used to say I wanted someone to take my body apart, piece by piece, and put it back together. I was searching for a fix for so long, and I took a lot of action from that place.
But then something happened. I found a practitioner who didn't come with the agenda of fixing. Not only did my chronic pain eventually disappear — I was able to reconnect with the trauma, with a wound. And through that, I was able to unwind and reconstruct a pattern I carried around my anger, around my inability to be with my anger. That changed everything. It's still changing everything.
So this symptom, this chronic pain, was a calling — an invitation. We don't know what that invitation is for each one of us. We don't know what the process will look like, what will come up. But the symptom invites us into a better, deeper relationship with our system, with ourselves, with our bodies.
We can't want to be better and think we can leave everything else in our system, in our life, exactly as it was. We have to be brave enough to do what needs to be done.
We have such a short life. We're here for almost a moment — it feels long, but on the larger scale, it's only a moment. Don't waste your life with your head in the sand. Attend to your symptom. Run to the gate when you're called, so you don't miss the flight. Run, so you get the chance to get on the plane.
Because I'll tell you what I've seen. For a long time, actually — I've seen how the alarm keeps going up, keeps getting higher, louder, stronger. And I've also experienced the other side. Our body doesn't only communicate through symptoms, through bells, through alarms. It's communicating constantly, all the time, in signals. But we don't hear it. So it has to raise its voice. And if we don't attend to it, it escalates, in many different ways.
So answer that calling. This calling is for you.
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Offering to continue this work, and bring it into your life and lived experience:
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