Wishing you all the best in your healing journey.

The only thing is, I don’t think you can ‘manufacture’ this situation, like ‘I will surrender in order to get better’ – that’s just more resistance. But you may already be in the situation without realising; you might already be deeply desperate to give up, in fact it sounds like it, and the thought ‘…but then I’ll be ill forever’ is stopping you doing that. What you actually need is inner rest, and that thought is blocking it. Just as an experiment, put that thought to one side and let yourself try giving up for a little while. You may find that the resulting rest actually makes you feel better. And remember, you can rest while part of you is still tense – there is a level of habit to this so don’t expect to be totally relaxed immediately; you may or may not be. You can rest with the tension, if you like.

Our culture is very big on ‘fighting’ illness and ‘staying strong’ – but I think a lot of this is just our hyper-masculine way of thinking; that we need to overcome things and ‘beat’ them. This can probably work in some cases but overall it is probably counterproductive – the illness is not something external to us, but an inner process which is deeply part of us, telling us that adjustments need to be made. To fight it is like not listening to your friend when they are telling you the very truth you really need to hear. Also I think there is a kind of embarrassment in our culture about illness, a desire to sweep it under the carpet quickly: ‘ah so you’re ill eh, well stay strong and keep fighting and you’ll beat it!’ So then we can stop thinking about it and turn away from the uncomfortable facts as quickly as possible. Obviously it’s not good to be morbidly fascinated by illness but I think our industrialised culture has gone to the other extreme. That was a longer answer than I expected but I hope it was useful. 🙂

I haven’t read those books, will check them out, thanks.

I think one of the things I found really important (which I touched on in part 1) is not to allow ‘being ill’ to become part of one’s identity, which can be very tempting at times. In some way, everyone has already lost everything, because this moment is new and the past is over – it’s just that most people don’t realise it, whereas someone who has been through this sort of thing maybe does realise it.

In the same way it might be good, once we are restored to health, to not create the identity of ‘the one who is cured’, because we never know what might happen tomorrow. The same thing with awakening, if we think it’s a finality we may be deluding ourselves because tomorrow something might happen which throws all that into question. It’s all ultimately empty and transient and that is the only way it can be filled with joy, because we get to treasure this moment as it is. 🙂