Notes from the recovery room
Finding the teaching in illness; just listen.
One of the best parts of being on a "growth journey" is that you can turn almost anything into a teaching. Challenges become stepping stones on the path to insight and evolution. If you've got the right mindset.
The journey
That is how I recently saw my two-week bout of stomach flu.
Nothing reminds you of your body quite like a heaving esophagus. For three days, my life consisted of sleep, stomach cramps and rushes to the bathroom. When the crisis subsided, I was weak and dizzy, making the physical world a dangerous place to be in. All focus was getting through the day, and hoping rest would bring wellness a little closer.
So it is to be sick. The ambitious, visionary self is reduced to the animal body, needing and abhorring comfort at the same time.
🫀 It is in this fully bodily state that we become most aware of the consciousness waiting beneath the surface. In the opening lines of her essay, "On Being Ill", Virginia Woolf muses, "how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light..." Once the robust defenses are down, the fragile consciousness is revealed. How we journey into those lands, and what we bring back, will set the course of our healthy days.
The mindset
What will we discover in those strange lands of the generally suppressed soul?
Well, that is for every person to discover for themselves. The next time you are bedridden, with a flu, for example, that foreshadows a greater darkness, ask the illness:
what would you like to tell me?
Consider yourself a novice at the feet of a master and humbly ask:
what do you want me to learn?
If you are ready to listen, it will speak its secret language.
It is a sensitive endeavour, not for the faint of heart. So – be kind to yourself if you embark on it. Practice non-judgment: illness reveals to all of us information we did not see or want to know. That’s part of the human experience. Be curious: what need or realisation is illness pushing through the “smudged or rosy [window pane]” of our everyday thoughts? These two qualities will give you the compassion that makes the insights easier to bear.
With every realisation comes the possibility of action. As you recover from the embodied and transcendent experience, what action do you want to take to respond to what you have learned? It can vary. Maybe you want more softness; or more grit. More connection; or more independence. Whatever it is, the weakened state will illuminate the meaning and purpose of your health.
These are my imperfect (and hopefully productive) takeaways from the sickroom.
