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This seems to be a small group, so I thought I'd add my name to it. The description of the group resonated with something I've always felt. But I wasn't sure whether others with major illness did.
I feel I have grown as a person... have become more compassionate and less materialistic. My self-image has grown because I have survived a challenge that many others would not have. I have also become strong.
If I were healthy I don't think this kind of growth would have occurred. But I have to admit that given the choice I would have picked a healthy body with the prospect of less growth.
Just for background, I worked and dialyzed for many years and managed to hang on precariously to a normal lifestyle. I dated, I married and I bought a house.
At any rate I just wanted to introduce myself.
Bernie Culen
I feel I have grown as a person... have become more compassionate and less materialistic. My self-image has grown because I have survived a challenge that many others would not have. I have also become strong.
If I were healthy I don't think this kind of growth would have occurred. But I have to admit that given the choice I would have picked a healthy body with the prospect of less growth.
Just for background, I worked and dialyzed for many years and managed to hang on precariously to a normal lifestyle. I dated, I married and I bought a house.
At any rate I just wanted to introduce myself.
Bernie Culen
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Re: Hi there
Sun, July 25, 2004 - 6:51 PMHello, Bernie and everyone in the group. I am going through a similar process, which started some four months ago. I certainly feel like I am growing, and at the same time I have landed in a sort of no-man's land between my previous (very physically active) life and this new (very sedentary) one. It seems to me that life turned me inside out and thus transported all this external physical movement to my inner being. Not a day has gone by that I have not questioned and pondered. I only hope that will continue to happen. And if the pain goes away, so much the better.
My sympathy and love to all. -
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Re: Hi there
Mon, July 26, 2004 - 5:54 PMHello Kika, Bernie, and the rest of y'all,
It is beautifully ironic that I fell deeply ill after a year of deep Buddhist meditation in Burma. I was a very healthy 31 year old tring to deeply "let go", but it was actually the path of the illness backed up by a previous year of meditation that created a rocket ship of transformation.
The illness stripped me of everything. It took all my modes of dealing with the world, it destroyed nearly all of my relationships and heavily strained the rest, and it robbed me of any physical, mental or emotional health.
The year of meditation did nothing to influence this rapid decline into tremendous misery, but it did give me a front row seat to witness the process in fine horrible detail. I could describe all the various shifts in physical pain, and even charted the subtle layers of confusion and mental agony.
Finally I lay inert on a couch in my father's house with a dim bulb of meager consciousness in a sea of physical torture, in a place so absolutely vulnerable and lost. Being in this zone for months after two years of steady decline taught me more about "letting go" and "letting be" on such a highly refined level, that now I am truly greatful to have survived such a journey.
It's now three years later and my health has greatly improved. I consider it a blessing to have this illness to keep me honest and wise towards life. I feel honored to be as young as I am and to have a chance to walk on the planet with such a highly developed sensitivity to life.
I still fall for the old ego games that make me disconnect and stop listening to my limits, but not like I used to, and I recover more quickly to being back in line with the cosmos. As I have gotten more healthy I've actually missed the illness as such a clear teacher, but I'm learning to live by the truths it has taught me from a mature wisdom place raher than being forced into this wisdom against my ego will.
I don't think this deep journey could have happened without the illness, and I know a lot of people who wish to be free but don't have a means for transformation. So I'm starting to with something like this illness on others but the real wish is that they have deep and meaningful liberation from their habits of suffering.
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