Finding Some Sort of New Life:
Can Illness be my Teacher?
By Bruce Epperly and Jay McDaniel
“Energy is moving through my paralyzed body, some sort of awareness, some sort of new life.
-- Matthew Sanford in Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence
In this website we talk a lot about mentors and teachers. We are grateful to other people, to hills and rivers, to music and images, to poems and prayers, for the guidance they offer. We are interested in finding wisdom for daily life from whatever sources are available. This wisdom is more than philosophy and theology; it is life itself as lived from the inside out, with roots and wings. The hills and images and friends are among our sources. All are mentors.
But we also want to recognize along with the Buddha that life includes a great deal of suffering, and that illness and trauma are part of that suffering. Is it possible to be creatively transformed while being ill? Can trauma be a teacher, too? Can we become healthier, not by conquering disease, but by living with it? Can illness be a mentor?
These are dangerous questions, if they lead to a trivialization of the devastation of disease and trauma. A friend was asked what wisdom he was experiencing while he was receiving chemotherapy treatments. His response was honest and realistic: “I’m not getting much wisdom yet. The next glass of water is what I’m living for now.”
While facing serious illness can be life-transforming, we have to begin with the reality that serious illness is painful, disruptive, disorienting, and often isolating. It has the potential of destroying relationships as well as physical well-being. Most of us want to recover at the earliest possible moment. There is no need to romanticize illness.
But, eventually all of us must face our mortality and the diminishment that comes with it. In the midst of life, the onset of disease can leave us both helpless and hopeless, and this reality must be recognized so that any spiritual guidance we give can be helpful rather than abusive to those who suffer chronic pain, debilitation, and threat of death. Still, many persons testify to the experiencing new life amid the challenges of serious illness. Illness is their teacher.
Susan Sontag speaks of each person having two passports: disease takes us from the land of healthy to the land of sick. While sickness, as Simone de Beauvior notes in her chronicle of her mother’s dying process, A Very Easy Death, can shrink our world to the size of our hospital room, it can also be the source of greater personal stature and perspective. Though flashes of insight and mystical experiences often occur unexpectedly, such spiritual growth is usually not accidental, but the result of a lifetime’s commitment to growth and the possibility of a change of heart. Creative responses to illness are a matter of grace and intentionality, that is, our openness to the healing forces moving through our lives – our mind and spirit as well as our body.
The first word of guidance in terms of responding creatively to illness involves spiritual preparation. Just as we speak of healthy lifestyles and disease prevention, there are also practices that we can do while we are healthy that will more readily enable us to respond to events, such as illness, that are often out of our control. In Plato’s dialogue, Phaedo, Socrates asserts that the philosopher is constantly preparing for death through her or his spiritual practices. What supports our well-being when we are healthy, also brings greater peace and well-being when we are facing serious illness. Indeed, spiritual transformation involves finding freedom amid limitation and joy amid challenge. In reflecting on the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps that often reduced life to a matter of animal survival, psychologist Viktor Frankl asserts that “everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
Spiritual practices for wholeness in any season of life are diverse, and highly personal in nature. Accordingly, there is no one pathway to creatively responding to serious illness. However, here are some practices that can enable you to respond creatively to serious illness:
· Cultivate your inner life through prayer and meditation. Stillness expands our vision and perspective. Meditative practices are associated with the “relaxation response,” greater peace of mind, and pain and stress reduction along with a sense of the divine harmony moving through our lives.
· Nurture well-being through healing touch and energy work. Acupuncture, therapeutic touch, and healing touch enhance overall well-being and have been associated with pain reduction and greater physical vitality. They also have been connected with a greater sense of divine harmony and spiritual well-being.
· Reach out to others. We are made for relationships. Healthy relationships in challenging times assure us that are not alone and often are the source of counsel, acceptance, and creative wisdom. When my son was been treated for a rare cancer, he reached out via the internet to persons experiencing the same disease: they shared words of encouragement, images of hope, and medical advice. He learned that other young men – in California, Germany, Canada, and Holland – were living with the same cancer. They shared joys, successes, and challenges, and still are brotherhood of those who have suffered and survived.
· Transform Your Mind through Affirmations. One of the greatest challenges of seriously ill people is to recognize that they are “more” than their disease. In the cancer community, it is common to say “I have cancer, but I am not my cancer.” We are many-faceted, filled with possibilities, and within the limitations of life, new possibilities are constantly being born. As a friend of mine said, “I have breast cancer, but I also am a mother, a wife, a spiritual practitioner, a lover of music, good books, and strong coffee.” When we remember our own unique complexity, serious illness is put in perspective. It is important, but not all consuming.
· If possible, try something new, or explore a new facet of yourself. When people are diagnosed with serious illness, it is appropriate to feel depressed and hopeless, to see oneself as a victim; but beyond depression and passivity, there can be adventure. We can initiate new possibilities amid the threats – possibilities for creative transformation and personal growth. We can look at ourselves in new ways. With little to lose, we can take risks as we explore new ways to relate to loved ones and new behaviors.
· Open to realities larger than yourself. Robert Jay Lifton in his book Living and Dying notes the need for images of hope or immortality, especially in times of personal or communal dislocation or disorientation. These images can be biological (through the birth of child), creative (through making a difference in your work, parenting, art, writing, etc.), natural (through an identification with the ongoing processes of nature and the immensity of the universe), personal and subjective (through faith that the self will survive death), or experiential (through mystical experiences). In all of these, the threatened person sees her or his life as part of a larger personal or global story. Peace and equanimity emerge when we recognize that our life matters and is part of an ongoing cosmic, planetary, or personal story. For some persons, this story involves our belief that God everlastingly treasures our lives, including our struggles, and that we will have creative adventures beyond the grave.
Of course, these practices can prepare one for an illness, but still the illness itself comes like a thief in the night, by surprise, whether sudden or gradual. Within the illness itself, including its pain, it can help if you recognize the difference between healing and curing, and then trust that healing is possible even if curing is not. Indeed, in some circumstances, the absence of a “cure” – as traditionally defined – is the very prerequisite for healing.
We think of Matthew Sanford in Waking: a Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. In this book he describes how a devastating car accident, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down, left him completely dependent on a wheelchair, but also opened him to the importance of establishing a healthy relationship with his own body, with the help of yoga. He had to move beyond the idea that he could walk again – that he could be cured in that fashion – before he realized that he could be healed in a deeper way, by entering into a more cooperative relationship with his body, and by realizing, as a Whiteheadian would well understand, that there are ways of being with the body, indeed of feeling its energies. He turned to yoga as a way of dwelling with his body in a healing way, even if not in a cured way; and the healing he discovered is in its own way more “whole” than many people who are, by some measure, perfectly fit.
Matthew Sanford is in his own way an East-West hero, or perhaps better an East-West reverse hero. In East and West we often picture heroes and heroines as people who conquer things: nations, mountains, people, and diseases. They are in complete control…for a while. As Buddha once discovered, eventually no one can escape aging, sickness, and death. As we seek a good life, we need to find beliefs and practices that bring joy in the present and creatively prepare us for what is inevitable and often out of our control. Sometimes…without pretending that this is always the case…it can be recognized that aging, sickness and death are blessings, too, because they help us awaken, like Matthew Sanford, to a grace that includes life and death.
But we also want to recognize along with the Buddha that life includes a great deal of suffering, and that illness and trauma are part of that suffering. Is it possible to be creatively transformed while being ill? Can trauma be a teacher, too? Can we become healthier, not by conquering disease, but by living with it? Can illness be a mentor?
These are dangerous questions, if they lead to a trivialization of the devastation of disease and trauma. A friend was asked what wisdom he was experiencing while he was receiving chemotherapy treatments. His response was honest and realistic: “I’m not getting much wisdom yet. The next glass of water is what I’m living for now.”
While facing serious illness can be life-transforming, we have to begin with the reality that serious illness is painful, disruptive, disorienting, and often isolating. It has the potential of destroying relationships as well as physical well-being. Most of us want to recover at the earliest possible moment. There is no need to romanticize illness.
But, eventually all of us must face our mortality and the diminishment that comes with it. In the midst of life, the onset of disease can leave us both helpless and hopeless, and this reality must be recognized so that any spiritual guidance we give can be helpful rather than abusive to those who suffer chronic pain, debilitation, and threat of death. Still, many persons testify to the experiencing new life amid the challenges of serious illness. Illness is their teacher.
Susan Sontag speaks of each person having two passports: disease takes us from the land of healthy to the land of sick. While sickness, as Simone de Beauvior notes in her chronicle of her mother’s dying process, A Very Easy Death, can shrink our world to the size of our hospital room, it can also be the source of greater personal stature and perspective. Though flashes of insight and mystical experiences often occur unexpectedly, such spiritual growth is usually not accidental, but the result of a lifetime’s commitment to growth and the possibility of a change of heart. Creative responses to illness are a matter of grace and intentionality, that is, our openness to the healing forces moving through our lives – our mind and spirit as well as our body.
The first word of guidance in terms of responding creatively to illness involves spiritual preparation. Just as we speak of healthy lifestyles and disease prevention, there are also practices that we can do while we are healthy that will more readily enable us to respond to events, such as illness, that are often out of our control. In Plato’s dialogue, Phaedo, Socrates asserts that the philosopher is constantly preparing for death through her or his spiritual practices. What supports our well-being when we are healthy, also brings greater peace and well-being when we are facing serious illness. Indeed, spiritual transformation involves finding freedom amid limitation and joy amid challenge. In reflecting on the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps that often reduced life to a matter of animal survival, psychologist Viktor Frankl asserts that “everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
Spiritual practices for wholeness in any season of life are diverse, and highly personal in nature. Accordingly, there is no one pathway to creatively responding to serious illness. However, here are some practices that can enable you to respond creatively to serious illness:
· Cultivate your inner life through prayer and meditation. Stillness expands our vision and perspective. Meditative practices are associated with the “relaxation response,” greater peace of mind, and pain and stress reduction along with a sense of the divine harmony moving through our lives.
· Nurture well-being through healing touch and energy work. Acupuncture, therapeutic touch, and healing touch enhance overall well-being and have been associated with pain reduction and greater physical vitality. They also have been connected with a greater sense of divine harmony and spiritual well-being.
· Reach out to others. We are made for relationships. Healthy relationships in challenging times assure us that are not alone and often are the source of counsel, acceptance, and creative wisdom. When my son was been treated for a rare cancer, he reached out via the internet to persons experiencing the same disease: they shared words of encouragement, images of hope, and medical advice. He learned that other young men – in California, Germany, Canada, and Holland – were living with the same cancer. They shared joys, successes, and challenges, and still are brotherhood of those who have suffered and survived.
· Transform Your Mind through Affirmations. One of the greatest challenges of seriously ill people is to recognize that they are “more” than their disease. In the cancer community, it is common to say “I have cancer, but I am not my cancer.” We are many-faceted, filled with possibilities, and within the limitations of life, new possibilities are constantly being born. As a friend of mine said, “I have breast cancer, but I also am a mother, a wife, a spiritual practitioner, a lover of music, good books, and strong coffee.” When we remember our own unique complexity, serious illness is put in perspective. It is important, but not all consuming.
· If possible, try something new, or explore a new facet of yourself. When people are diagnosed with serious illness, it is appropriate to feel depressed and hopeless, to see oneself as a victim; but beyond depression and passivity, there can be adventure. We can initiate new possibilities amid the threats – possibilities for creative transformation and personal growth. We can look at ourselves in new ways. With little to lose, we can take risks as we explore new ways to relate to loved ones and new behaviors.
· Open to realities larger than yourself. Robert Jay Lifton in his book Living and Dying notes the need for images of hope or immortality, especially in times of personal or communal dislocation or disorientation. These images can be biological (through the birth of child), creative (through making a difference in your work, parenting, art, writing, etc.), natural (through an identification with the ongoing processes of nature and the immensity of the universe), personal and subjective (through faith that the self will survive death), or experiential (through mystical experiences). In all of these, the threatened person sees her or his life as part of a larger personal or global story. Peace and equanimity emerge when we recognize that our life matters and is part of an ongoing cosmic, planetary, or personal story. For some persons, this story involves our belief that God everlastingly treasures our lives, including our struggles, and that we will have creative adventures beyond the grave.
Of course, these practices can prepare one for an illness, but still the illness itself comes like a thief in the night, by surprise, whether sudden or gradual. Within the illness itself, including its pain, it can help if you recognize the difference between healing and curing, and then trust that healing is possible even if curing is not. Indeed, in some circumstances, the absence of a “cure” – as traditionally defined – is the very prerequisite for healing.
We think of Matthew Sanford in Waking: a Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. In this book he describes how a devastating car accident, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down, left him completely dependent on a wheelchair, but also opened him to the importance of establishing a healthy relationship with his own body, with the help of yoga. He had to move beyond the idea that he could walk again – that he could be cured in that fashion – before he realized that he could be healed in a deeper way, by entering into a more cooperative relationship with his body, and by realizing, as a Whiteheadian would well understand, that there are ways of being with the body, indeed of feeling its energies. He turned to yoga as a way of dwelling with his body in a healing way, even if not in a cured way; and the healing he discovered is in its own way more “whole” than many people who are, by some measure, perfectly fit.
Matthew Sanford is in his own way an East-West hero, or perhaps better an East-West reverse hero. In East and West we often picture heroes and heroines as people who conquer things: nations, mountains, people, and diseases. They are in complete control…for a while. As Buddha once discovered, eventually no one can escape aging, sickness, and death. As we seek a good life, we need to find beliefs and practices that bring joy in the present and creatively prepare us for what is inevitable and often out of our control. Sometimes…without pretending that this is always the case…it can be recognized that aging, sickness and death are blessings, too, because they help us awaken, like Matthew Sanford, to a grace that includes life and death.