May is Inflammatory Bowel Disease Awareness Month, and Tal knows the subject firsthand. She is part of the IBD community, which includes people living with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. But the episode soon opens onto a much larger question: What does it really mean to have a healthy soul in a healthy body?
The phrase takes Tal back to a school election. At 11, determined to join the sports committee, she wrote campaign flyers, sent her father to have them printed and arranged for them to be handed out at school. Their headline was “A healthy soul in a healthy body.” Looking back, she wonders how she found those words at such a young age and what she already sensed in them.
For Gili, the answer begins with the bond between body and soul. She connects it to King Solomon’s image of one power above another, with still higher powers watching over them. To her, the image points back to healing at the root: the soul.
Digestive illness makes that relationship especially vivid, but she believes it is present in every illness, from a stomach virus to cancer and even a broken bone. Even if you know you ate spoiled food, she says, something in your system still responded by becoming ill. Physical care matters. If you break your arm, you go to a doctor for a cast or surgery. You also ask why the injury happened and why it affected that particular arm.
The body’s response to what the soul can’t hold
Gili draws on Rabbi Yuval Asherov’s definition of illness as “the body’s correct response to an incorrect stimulus.” In his view, illness ultimately serves a person’s good. It signals that the physical, emotional and spiritual system is struggling with something that does not belong there. His background in acupuncture, herbal medicine and the study of physical illness led him to ask why even people devoted to natural health can become seriously ill.
Eating well remains an important foundation, and Gili does not dismiss it. Her point is that food alone is not enough; a person’s emotional world also matters. In her description, emotional stability means not getting caught in dramas, taking offense or draining your own strength, while understanding that everything is for the good. She takes the argument to a deliberately extreme place: someone with that stability, she says, could even eat food left on the ground for street cats. She points to physicians including Dr. Nader Butto and Dr. Joe Dispenza, whose work, as she describes it, traces physical conditions back to emotional and mental patterns.
The digestive system offers an immediate example. We digest more than food; we also have to digest reality. That can be especially difficult in a time of murder, rape and the deaths of young people who had simply gone out to dance. Where is the justice? Where is the logic? Where is the equality? Where is the Creator? When reality refuses to fit any understandable order, Gili believes that the strain of trying to contain it may appear in the gut.
The answer is not to stop feeling. Our emotional system is instinctive, and grief needs expression. Jewish mourning practices make room for pain while also setting limits on the period of mourning. Gili points to parents who lose a child and then develop cancer years later. What may look like two separate tragedies is, in her understanding, directly connected. Without comfort or a way to move through loss, she says, grief may continue to wear down the body. In the energetic map discussed in the episode, each organ carries a particular vibration: sexual harm by a partner is associated with the right breast, nonsexual harm by a partner with the left breast, and a mother’s loss of a child with the right ovary. Sadness, anger, tears and anguish can deplete the organ until illness takes physical form.
Looking at the whole person
Modern medicine, Gili and Tal say, often divides a person among specialists, each treating the most visible symptom. A skin problem goes to a dermatologist; a digestive problem goes to a gastroenterologist. The pace is fast, and the expected answer is often a pill or a cream.
That treatment may quiet a symptom without explaining its source. Gili gives the example of skin spots diagnosed as sun damage when, in her understanding, impaired liver function may be involved. She wants a doctor who will connect the dots and see the whole person. Tal agrees. She sees medicine moving gradually toward a more integrative approach, and she values the medical team caring for her because they look beyond a temporary fix.
They also refer to a large recent study of broken heart syndrome. People can arrive at a hospital with the physical signs of a heart attack, not merely a panic attack, including a visibly swollen heart, after a breakup, job loss or bereavement. The crisis is emotional, but its expression is physical. To Gili, this makes a wider truth impossible to ignore: sadness, anger, frustration and loss leave their mark on the body.
A skin condition and a mother’s hidden history
When Gili first opened her practice, she expected to work with emotional and spiritual pain, not physical illness. Yet people with Crohn’s disease, cancer and other health conditions began coming to her. One young woman had been diagnosed with a condition described as “skin asthma.” She suffered attacks of red patches, itching and swelling across her body. Medication and topical steroids had not ended the problem, and the prospect of biologic treatment frightened her.
The woman was an accountant, rational and reserved. Gili began by asking questions to trace the condition back to its first appearance. Sometimes, she says, even she does not yet understand why a particular question comes to her. The symptoms had started three months into the woman’s first pregnancy. When Gili asked whether she had wanted to become a mother, the woman admitted that she had once struggled with the idea. But she had spent a year exploring that reluctance with a psychologist and now loved being the mother of two young children. Gili decided that this was not the root she was looking for.
She turned instead to the woman’s relationship with her mother and asked how her parents had come to marry. The woman pointed to their 30-year marriage and described her mother as composed and capable. At first, she repeated the familiar family story: her parents had met in Russia and moved to Israel together. Gili urged her to ask again.
The fuller story had remained hidden for decades. While studying chemistry and art at an academy in Moscow, her mother had fallen in love with another man. They planned to marry, but he was drafted into the Russian army for a year. While she waited, her father’s shop was burned down amid a pogrom and other violence. Her father decided that the family would move to Israel and arranged a marriage between her and the son of family friends. She left the man she loved and never saw him again.
The young woman was the eldest daughter, conceived three months after the marriage. Her own symptoms had also begun three months into pregnancy, and Gili saw a pattern in the repeated number three. Gili imagines that until the pregnancy, the mother may still have hoped that the man she loved would return; becoming pregnant meant that possibility was over. She believes that a fetus absorbs its mother’s unresolved conflicts in the womb. In Gili’s reading, the daughter absorbed the lesson that her mother had surrendered love, desire and personal dreams for family honor, security and Jewish belonging. The daughter was born with what Gili describes as strongly masculine traits, and her system developed a way to keep her from repeating that sacrifice: her skin made cooking and cleaning unbearable, while she became highly capable with money.
For Gili, healing begins at the moment such a pattern becomes visible. Her studies with Rabbi Yuval Asherov helped her make sense of the connection between body and soul. The woman’s story is an example of the deeper inquiry she believes ordinary healthcare rarely has the time to undertake.
What unresolved pain leaves behind
Time can dull pain, but Gili does not believe that time alone can heal it. In her view, every experience is imprinted somewhere in the body. If it has never been faced or understood as serving a person’s good, it may be swept under the rug, remain in the body and return.
She describes Dr. Nader Butto examining a woman, seeing a blockage and asking what happened in 1982. At first, the woman says only that she and her husband had a problem that year, but that they resolved it and are still together. The problem was his infidelity. She had carried on for the sake of the family without fully expressing or examining her pain. In Gili’s account, the wound had not disappeared simply because life continued.
Youth and a high level of vitality may allow such wounds to remain dormant. Healthy habits help: do not smoke, get exercise and avoid living in constant anger. As vitality declines with age, Gili says, illness may emerge from old events that were never understood, sometimes when a person is in their 70s, 80s or 90s. The hardest part may be finding any good in experiences such as betrayal, humiliation or collapse, or accepting Gili’s contention that a person may have brought an illness upon themselves.
Milk from the supermarket has an expiration date, and so do our troubles, she tells her beautiful souls. Nothing painful is meant to last forever. A warning usually begins small. First we hear it in general terms; then we see it at a distance. If we do not recognize and clear what it reflects in us, it moves closer. She then alludes to COVID-19 and other vaccines, saying that “they played with our bodies,” and adds that fear in recent years increased illness.
The old program and the possibility of change
Gili places healthy thoughts and emotions at the center of a healthy soul. Good food nourishes the body, but she considers care of the soul even more important. The body is always renewing itself and, she says, replaces itself completely within a year. Why, then, does illness continue? Her answer is identification: when people identify completely with a diagnosis, that identity reaches the cellular level, and the body reproduces itself according to the same old program.
She tells the story of a woman named Einat who was told that her medical condition was serious. In Gili’s retelling, Einat said she did not go to doctors or undergo tests. Instead, she spoke directly to the Creator and demanded that He repair what was wrong. In her imagination, she returned to a time when she was healthy and began speaking and behaving as she had at that time. She stopped giving the illness her attention until, as Gili tells it, her body accepted the new state and recovered.
Gili connects this story with The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. As she summarizes its message, the stranger and more extreme a healing seems, the more likely the person is to recover. Her conclusion is uncompromising: stop accepting the idea that chronic illness must last a lifetime. There is no illness that cannot be healed. Illness carries a lesson, and the work is to understand what it means.
A father, an unborn son and a family pattern
Another case began when a man came to Gili because a scan showed that his unborn son’s kidney was not developing. His wife was in an advanced stage of pregnancy, and they already had two daughters.
Gili uses intuition as well as reference books in her work. She mentions material from Theta Healing, Recall Healing and Louise Hay that links particular organs and illnesses with emotional patterns. At times, she also opens the Zohar or the Tanya in search of understanding. With this man, who was not religious, she opened a particular book and immediately asked about his father and the paternal line.
The question stunned him. His father had died by suicide 20 years earlier. Gili saw the male fetus as the next link in a line of men who had not withstood pressure. The father-to-be had also repeated his own father’s pattern after assuming his place in the family. In her interpretation, the unborn child did not want to continue that inheritance and was signaling this through his kidney. She says the pattern was repaired and the baby was born healthy.
Gili came to this work from a highly rational field. The idea that pain in the left shoulder might point to pain in the heart was not obvious to her at first. She believes these connections can be studied and learned. When an outward symptom appears, she sees it as an emotional or spiritual state that has taken physical form. What moved forward into the body, she says, can also move backward.
That possibility challenges a linear view of life. As an image from nature, she offers the “immortal jellyfish,” which she describes as reaching the equivalent of age 50 and then returning to an earlier stage, over and over. If reversal exists in nature, she asks, why reject the possibility that something similar could happen in us?
Illness as a signal
Gili’s final message is that illness does not come to harm us. It signals that something in us is struggling to digest reality and that we need to change the way we see it. Taking medication alone, in her view, is not the solution. Treating a symptom may offer temporary relief and may also drive the underlying problem deeper, but healing requires removing the cause. She applies that conviction to physical and mental illness alike.
Tal wishes she had understood this when she first began living with Crohn’s disease. She always believed that the illness had come for her good, but she did not yet know how deeply it was rooted in the soul or what she could do with that knowledge. Learning this has given her a richer, more vivid way of seeing life.
Even when illness is painful and discouraging, the episode ends with an insistence on hope: ask what the interruption means, why it has stopped you and how it might serve your good. Hold on to the conviction that every problem has a solution and that the solution was created before the illness itself.
Be healthy. Amen, amen.