This week, I’m going to do something a little different. I’m going to use myself as a case study, because my body has handed me such good material that it would be a shame to waste it.

Here’s the situation. Last week, I told you about the trigger finger in both hands. Since then, the right hand has settled down. But the left is still stubbornly locked.

And then, because the universe apparently felt I needed a matched set, Jack — our cat — scratched my right hand while we were playing. Same as he always does. Except this time, it got infected. I woke up with my hand swollen to twice its size, cancelled my client day, and ended up in emergency. Now I’m on antibiotics.

So here I am with both hands compromised. Neither one is able to fully close. Neither one able to fully open.

And I thought, if a client brought me this, what would I do with it?

What I would NOT do

I would not reach for the formula.

You may know the kind I mean. The “left hand means this, right hand means that, inflammation means suppressed anger, the body keeps the score and here’s the exact tally” approach.

Louise Hay made that approach famous, and I want to be fair to it. It did something important. It cracked open a cultural conversation about the body holding emotional truth. It gave people permission to wonder whether their physical symptoms might be saying something that mattered.

But here’s where I part ways with it. The body speaks in metaphor, not definitions. Like I said in the title, it’s not a dictionary.

You can’t look up “trigger finger” and find the definition. You can’t decode an infected cat scratch like it’s a secret message with one correct translation. The body works in metaphor, pattern, and association, and those are deeply personal.

So I don’t decode. I listen.

How I’d actually approach it

If you were my client, and you told me you had two hands that couldn’t open or close, I wouldn’t tell you what it means. I’d get curious with you.

I’d say, isn’t that interesting? Both hands? The grip and the release, both compromised at once. What’s it like to not be able to hold on and not be able to let go at the same time?

I wouldn’t be hunting for the answer. I’d be opening up the questions.

The moment you hand someone a fixed interpretation, you close the door on their own knowing and replace their wisdom with your formula. And the formula is almost always too small for the actual human in front of you.

The real work isn’t “what does this mean?”It’s “what does this open up?”

The pattern I notice (without deciding what it means)

I notice both hands. The clenching and the scratching. The bracing and the wound.

Last week, my hands were preparing to fight. This week, one of them got hurt in play, connection, affection, in the ordinary roughhousing with a creature I love. And now both hands are asking me to slow down, stop gripping and stop doing, briefly.

Do I know what it means? No. I genuinely don’t. Yet.

But I’m staying with it. I’m letting it raise questions instead of demanding answers. And already, the questions are more interesting than any tidy interpretation would have been.

What am I bracing for? What got wounded in connection? Why now, both hands, both at once? The timing is fascinating.

I don’t need to solve it. I just need to stay curious long enough for the real thing to surface.

The energy this week

This is exactly the week for this kind of work.

The mental, quick-fire energy of recent weeks is softening into something more intuitive. We’re moving from the head to the gut. From logic to feeling. From “figure it out” to “sense your way through.”

It’s a beautiful time to pay attention to the thing beneath the thing. It’s the emotional truth humming under the surface of your everyday life. Conversations get more personal this week. Intuition sharpens. And the answers that come won’t come from analysis, but from listening.

So if something in your body, your life, or your relationships is asking for your attention right now, don’t rush to decode it or reach for the formula. Stay curious and ask better questions. Let it be a conversation, not a crossword.

The belief that won’t survive this week

“There’s one right answer, and I just need to find it.”

There isn’t. Not for the body or the soul or for most of the things that actually matter.

The body doesn’t speak in answers. It speaks in metaphor, and pattern, and felt sense. And the meaning isn’t fixed. It’s yours to discover, slowly, in relationship with your own life.

Anyone who hands you a tidy formula is selling you something too small.

Stay curious instead. Curiosity is where the real insight lives.

Why this matters

I could have Googled “trigger finger spiritual meaning” and “cat scratch metaphysical significance” and stitched together a neat little story about what my hands are trying to tell me.

It might even have been satisfying. But it would have been wrong, or at least, far too small.

Instead, I’m sitting with two sore hands and a handful of good questions. And I trust that if I stay curious, it’ll come together. It always does.

That’s the invitation this week. For me, for you, for anyone whose body or life is sending signals that don’t come with subtitles.

Don’t decode. Listen.

Don’t solve. Stay.

The answer will find you, but only if you stop demanding it long enough to hear it.

Jonni

P.S. This is exactly the kind of work we do inside UNLIMITED. It’s not me handing you interpretations, but the two of us getting curious together about what your life is actually saying. 7, 30, or 90 days of real-time support if you could use someone to help you see what’s working and what isn’t. Not just strategically, but soulfully.

P.P.S. Jack is not sorry. I’ve checked. He has no regrets whatsoever.