The Hidden Lessons in Illness

I'm Lisa 👋 Welcome to the latest edition of Stream of Consciousness!

Subscribe to join others who want to live more consciously (read: not on autopilot).

Soundtrack for this edition (you can play this while you read):

Hey 👋

I’m reading a book right now called “The Wild Edge of Sorrow” by Francis Weller and it’s kind of had an unexpectedly profound impact on me so far.

It’s about grief, and how, in Western society, we often get stuck in cycles of not metabolizing it communally. We are left weighed down by the many forms of accumulated grief that we collect and hold on to vs. digest with rituals involving safe support.

There’s a chapter that describes the grief of illness and it really hit home with what I am going through right now. I’m sharing this quote from the book in the hopes that maybe, for some of you, this helps reframe an experience that you are going through right now or that you have gone through.

“When we are in the grips of illness, a major focus in our mind is the hope of getting back to where we were before the sickness began. But we are not meant to go back…we must recognize that we have been uprooted by our cancer, our heart attack, our depression, and we have been set down on some new shore. Like any true ritual process, we are meant to come out of the experience deeply changed.

Illness strips away all excess. Winnowing us down to the bare essentials. When the choice of denial has been stripped away, as it is in illness, we are brought face to face with our own mortal lives, our tender vulnerabilities, the old wounds that linger in our hearts, the fragility of flesh, and the immensity of soul. We are ushered into a darker night that sheds an astonishing light on our deeper and more genuine shape. The old stories, crafted in a mixture of childhood wounds and societal fictions, slowly yield to something more generous, elastic, and responsive to the life of the soul. We begin to experience a more vivid complexity that takes us out of the either/or world of adolescence and into the alchemy of our adult selves. Here, in this more ripened place, we can see how much more we can hold, tasting both the sweet and the bitter, the beautiful and the painful, all in the same moment. Everything we avoided for the sake of living safely yields to a desire to encounter it all. We slowly recognize that no emotion is foreign to the soul, and every one of them can be welcomed as they arrive at the door. We gradually become able to embrace the full terrain of living.”

🤯

(This was my reaction ^ when I read this.)

The way I interpret this is…illness can be a tool that forces us to peel away the onion layers…of ourselves.

There’s a vlogger, Ben Brown, that I have been following for a long time (since he was skateboarding through cities and airports on a Penny board and filming epic Visual Vibes videos like this) and I remember him describing the way his emotional range changed after he “hit rock bottom” or went through a "dark night of the soul” and this whole excerpt in the book made me think of this.

I’m summarizing, but essentially he said, it’s like the old Ben had a very small emotional range - he wouldn’t get too happy or too sad, he’d be hovering around neutral most of the time. After a motorcycle accident, depression, and the collapse of the YouTube empire he had built, and embarking on a profound journey of self-discovery, he describes looking at life through an entirely different lens now, and how going through this changed the scale of his emotions and allowed him to feel a lot more profoundly on both ends of the spectrum.

I would say I have and am in the process of experiencing the same - it’s like my internal radar is in the process of a software upgrade that I didn’t plan for but I am glad is happening.

Everything exists on a spectrum - it’s rarely just “good” or “bad”, “yes” or “no”. I believe everything we experience in life is meant to teach us something about ourselves and get us to tune just a little bit more, including illness.

I hope that this excerpt can help you or someone you might know who is going through something similar right now.

Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and it inspired you to think slightly differently about the presence of illness and grief in your own life.

Thank you for supporting me, for following along, for emailing me, and sharing your thoughts and ideas 🙏

Always open to your feedback on each edition - it helps me feel less like a robot behind a glass wall.

Here’s to navigating life off of autopilot together.

Lisa ✌️