3 Lessons Learned Recovering from Chronic Illness
Some of you have told me you’re having a hard time imagining a better future, with all the challenging things happening in our world.
That’s how I felt when I was recovering from chronic illness several years ago. Here are three lessons I learned from that experience:
Accept what is. One of the turning points in my recovery was when I finally stopped fighting against the reality of being ill, accepted it, and resolved to live my best life regardless. That didn’t mean giving up trying to get better, it just meant that I stopped spending a lot of energy fighting against the reality, thinking thoughts such as, “This shouldn’t be happening.”
Fall in love with life again. Another big turning point in my recovery was realizing I couldn’t get well by hating being sick. I had to fall in love with life again - both my life as it was and the life I wanted to create. Similarly, with our current world situation we can’t solve our problems by focusing all our attention on the things we hate and are afraid of. We have to fall in love with life again – with our individual lives, our loved ones, our communities, our earth. We have to love so deeply and so passionately that we are motivated to do whatever it takes to make the changes we need to make.
Visualize a better future. In the brain retraining program that helped me finally recover from decades of chronic illness, one of the main components was spending time every day visualizing being healthy and doing all the things I wanted to do. I resisted at first because I didn’t believe it was possible for me to ever get well, and it was too painful visualizing the life I wanted that seemed out of my reach. But eventually, visualizing and taking tiny incremental steps in the direction of my dreams helped lead to a full recovery.
One of the things that makes humans unique is our ability to imagine the future.
We can use the great gift of our imaginations to visualize the best case scenario or the worst case scenario - which makes you feel more energized, motivated, and strong?
What is the best future that you can imagine for yourself, your loved ones, your community, and our world?
Spend some time every day visualizing your best case scenarios, either out loud or writing them down, in as much detail as you can.
Then take tiny steps every day in the direction of those dreams.
Please take good care of your precious self. Our world needs your kindness, compassion, and empathy now more than ever.
Hugs,
Liz
