There is a young man who loves to play soccer and has played from his youth. I actually was his coach. In high school, he had knee surgery, resulting in his having to exercise care whenever he plays this sport he loves so much. He calls and tells me his knee is bothering him, and it has been getting progressively worse each time he plays. He says the pain is right under his patella.

The young man had spent some time on the Internet, investigating the symptoms and seeking information regarding the likely places in his knee and likely conditions that have led to this pain. When he calls me, he wants my advice about whether he should/should not consult an orthopedic surgeon. He also is concerned that the pain starts within minutes of his starting in a game.

So we began to have a conversation about the connectivity of everything, which includes the role consciousness plays in our overall experience. We talk about how this connectivity can be used to extract information about the knee problem by tapping into consciousness. We discuss the possibility that symptoms can sometimes be a metaphor for other problems. (This approach has merit mainly in Psychology, but it also can be extended to other areas as well.)

We decide on an exercise the next time he has an episode of pain. The exercise involves placing his awareness or consciousness on the exact place in the knee where the pain arises when he plays. I also ask him to perform a meditation of emptying his thoughts and becoming aware of whatever presents itself into his awareness, without judgment.

After a couple of weeks, the young man calls back. He says that whenever he does the awareness exercise, he gets the feeling of self-sabotage. So, I asked if there is anything going on now in his life   that could be construed as self-sabotage. He tells me “yes,” and I advised that he needs to address those issues.

To his surprise, the young man finds that when he deals with the “self-sabotage,” he has little to no knee pain; when he doesn’t, the pain is increased and actually returns. The young man eventually found that when he fully addressed all of these issues, he was able to return to playing soccer, without any recurrence of pain that had plagued him for so long. Once again, he is enjoying the sport that he so loves and can play as long as he wants without pain.

The insight here is that not every physical complaint has its origination in a physical event. Sometimes, there is an analogy within the metaphor that awaits discovery. Sometimes that is all that it takes to make the symptoms go away: becoming aware of the source or origin!