You would think that looking back, a year of disabling illness would appear completely flat and bare: wasted space. The dry desert of months of doing nothing but survive from day to day. But you would be wrong.
Looking back, you’d stand amazed at just how rich a year it was. Because the physical challenges drove you deep into your spirit, into finding truth.
And you learn:
- Reality is not what we can observe here in the physical world. Reality goes deeper, reigns in the spiritual world. Don’t believe everything you see, hear, touch, feel, or experience. Even the most appalling suffering carries a deeper reality of light hidden within. We are not beings who can see deeply within, except for occasional glimpses. But we can trust in the truth of reality being far more right than it appears.
- Don’t simply believe your thoughts. Just because they are in your head doesn’t make them true. It doesn’t even always make them yours. Always examine what you think before accepting a thought as truth, before taking ownership of it.
- The smaller the container of your spirit, the easier it is for things to upset you, to slosh like a storm in a teacup right over the rim. Stress contracts and shrinks us. Enlarge your container! If one person upsets you, place yourself among more people to gain balance. If an experience makes you contract within, tightening your container, then breathe into you heart, opening it up, softening it.
- Meditate, meditate, meditate. Be mindful. We lead such fractured lives of distraction, we forget how to simply BE. Mindfulness helps to remind us how, it draws us back into the moment. This moment is all there really is. Not the past that haunts you, not the future that baffles you. This moment.
- Acceptance goes a long way towards alleviating suffering. When we enter the place of wanting-it-different, whether it is pain we’re not accepting, or someone’s influence in our life, or some other circumstance, we suffer. When instead we simply sit with the pain or the anger or fear, no longer trying to change it or get away from it, then we discover how fluid and alive it is, and what gift it brings. We discover that it holds no power over us when we simply accept it as It is, because it allows our I am to stand pure and strong.
- You are stronger than you think. Believe me. Whatever the pain, whatever the trauma in your life, you can handle it. Perhaps not on the first try, and that is perfectly okay, but you can and will handle it. You are stronger than you think!
- Nothing is senseless or futile or random … if you learn from it. It is your choice whether you seek the purpose in it or resist it. If you approach all experiences as containing something to teach you, you will find that treasure. It might take a week, a month, a year, but you will not be disappointed.
- You need balance. Always. You can’t afford to go all or nothing in one aspect of your life only. You can’t strive to be all yang without harming your yin. You can’t protect your yin at the expense of your yang. Thinking has to be in balance with doing. Exertion has to be in balance with rest. Meals have to be balanced. Like all heavenly bodies, we were designed to be basically spherical, all forces pulling in equal directions within us.
Finding abundance in a year of challenge – and this is just the tip of the iceberg – it is all grace! And best of all? You realize that if God can shower you with such treasures that turn the desert into an oasis, just imagine what will happen in the oasis itself!
Pippa's Porch 