Fibromyalgia Spiritual Root Cause: What Your Body’s Trying to Tell You
Living with fibromyalgia can feel like being trapped in a body that’s constantly sounding the alarm. Pain, exhaustion, frustration — it all adds up to a cycle that feels…endless.
In my experience, symptoms are getting misinterpreted all the time to no one’s fault. It’s what we’ve been told again and again: the body should be quiet and run in the background. If it’s doing something it “shouldn’t”…there must be something wrong.
But that leaves us feeling helpless and deeply disempowered.
So what if there’s a new understanding of the body that’s possible…inherently spiritual…and empowering?
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👋 I'm Steve — helping your body, mind, and inner world get on the same team, where thriving naturally follows. Learn more about my work ›
Hi, I'm Steve. If I were sitting across from you right now, I would say this:
That inner nudge that something deeper is going on with your body? It’s real.
Most people ignore it, but you’re actually noticing it. That already tells me something about you.
Welcome, you’re not alone in this.
The Spiritual Meaning of Fibromyalgia
If you landed here by searching for the ‘fibromyalgia spiritual meaning’ or ‘chronic pain with no clear cause,’ you’re in good company.
Here’s what I’ve discovered:
When we say spirit here, we are talking about the psyche. Essentially... your inner world — the invisible space where your mind, emotions, and consciousness meet.
Think about phrases we use all the time:
“Her spirit is broken.”
“My job is soul-crushing.”
“He’s in low spirits.”
The psyche is an expressive, intelligent part of you...and it impacts the physical body!
Symptoms are part of its language.
We instinctively know the psyche and body are connected. Yet most approaches only focus on the surface—medications, massages, food. While they might support temporarily, they don’t touch the deeper source.
You may have already tried many of these — maybe with some relief — and still felt like something essential was being missed.
Here’s how fibromyalgia ties in:
Fibromyalgia-like symptoms are rooted in an inner safety issue.
Quite literally, some part (or parts) of you are not feeling safe on a deep level… and your body is letting you know.
In Heal Your Body, Louise Hay mentions that, “fibromyalgia is fear showing up as extreme tension due to stress.”
That can feel frustrating to hear, especially when it’s so painfully obvious.
My take: Fear and stress showing up as tension…feels unsafe. Your body is communicating that it needs safety. But we can’t convince the mind to feel safe; it needs to be felt and embodied first.
My work implements German New Medicine philosophy, and in GNM, fibromyalgia is connected to a self-devaluation conflict of the skeletal muscles, affecting the whole person.
While that may feel like a slap to the face, it’s intention is to help us understand what the body has been carrying.
My interpretation: Feeling devalued is an inner safety issue where one doesn’t feel “of worth” for specific reasons. If a person truly felt safe within themselves, a sense of value, capability, and worth would naturally follow.
When we can start to see through this lens, the body stops feeling broken, and starts making sense.
In reality, the body is responding to something within that’s saying, “We aren’t safe or understood.”
When your muscles, fascia, and nervous system have been in this state for years, they eventually speak. Yours is speaking right now through the pain.
But lifting the pain is possible.
Chronic Pain, Safety, and The Mind-Body Connections
While fibromyalgia and chronic pain challenges are rooted in an inner safety issue… safety doesn’t look like just one thing.
Most of us were never taught how many layers of “safety” the body is actually tracking. Here are the different kinds:
Physical (safe in my environment, my body)
Emotional (safe in my feelings and expression of those feelings)
Mental (safe in my thoughts and ideas)
Spiritual (safe in who I am and in my beliefs)
Relational (safe in my relationships)
With those I work with, I’ve seen that chronic pain is most frequency stemming from feeling unsafe emotionally and spiritually.
This doesn’t mean anything is “wrong” with you — it means something important hasn’t felt nurtured or supported yet.
Feelings of unsafety trigger the fight-or-flight response when the brain perceives a threat.
This doesn’t even have to be a conscious threat. In fact, most often, they are the invisible threats operating within our subconscious mind and bodily memory. Uncomfortable emotions, suppression, stories, projections, and attachments fall in here as well, which make us uncomfortable and anxious.
The body doesn’t argue with these signals. It responds. And, guess what? All of these triggers cause the body to prepare us to fight, flee… or freeze.
This response can literally trigger you to brace for impact, run, or shut down. It’s a biological defensive response to keep you safe.
Protective — yes. Sustainable — not always.
And yet, it’s also creating a certain kind of agony for you. I’ve been there as well.
The question I get asked so often is, “Steve, why is my body doing this to me?!”
My answer: It’s communicating, and it is on your team even if it doesn’t feel that way yet.
It wants you to feel safe within yourself rather than coping or “just getting by” in survival mode. IIt wants a better way forward for you...one that allows you to actually to thrive.
The Way Forward With Fibromyalgia and Chronic Pain
So how do we move forward from this frustrating place?
We nurture inner safety.
I help people create this within the body, mind, and emotions.
The thing is, we can’t convince our mind into truly feeling safe in our body and spirit.
Safety needs to be embodied, meaning, felt and experienced within the body, emotions, and nervous system. This is where somatic embodiment becomes essential. Through somatic work, I help people create and experience real feelings of safety — the kind the nervous system can relax into, and the mind can get behind, instead of resisting.
When we take care of this foundational need within ourselves, we feel lighter, less braced, and more present. And from there… conditions for thriving are nurtured.
The Pain Body And Our Basic Needs
If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we’re talking about the very bottom of the pyramid: Physiological needs and Safety.
This is the foundation everything else is built on.
At the base live things like illness, pain, and exhaustion…and just above that sits safety.
When your body is hurting or chronically inflamed, it becomes very hard to feel safe. And when you don’t feel safe, your system stays tense, alert, and on guard.
You can probably feel how those two loop endlessly… consuming your energy in survival mode.
This is why it can feel like you can’t move forward or shift into something better because, quite literally, your foundational needs are asking to be met.
That’s why this work matters so much to me: because it makes all the difference to start with a solid foundation.
Understanding your symptoms in a way you can truly feel creates real shifts in your body and mind. See what working together could open up, here ›
When we start at the foundation — helping the body and inner world feel safe again — a state of thriving is created as well.
Symptom resolution, connection, creativity, inspiration, and greater capacity arise out of this spacious, thriving state.
Many people arrive here having tried everything to fix their pain that getting back to basics can feel almost too simple, and yet… it’s often the missing piece.
Working at this level aids the body to resolve chronic symptoms, naturally.
I help people create inner safety through self-connection. When safety becomes felt — not imagined or convinced — you can literally notice the difference in your body and mind. And it really does create a new lease on life.
Take a moment and consider this gently:
If you truly felt safe and connected within... would the pain need to stay?
I’d love to help you settle into that place of embodied safety, where your energy is finally free to move toward thriving and living fully again.
If that feels right, we can begin with a Welcome Call below. ↓
Rooting for you,
~Steve
P.S. If you’ve happened to revisit this article, maybe even multiple times…it’s safe to say that it’s touching a truth for you. What if it’s time to go from bookmarking this article to putting the truths in action? I’d love to help with that.
