Healing any one aspect of ourselves will invariably and consistently involve every other part of our being. Our beings consist of a team of aspects that live, love, and work together to co-create and sustain the life force of our existence.
When I wrote this, I was undergoing the last leg of my healing journey with ulcerative colitis. A particularly severe and painful health crisis, which interrupted the harmony and flow of my body’s ordinary course, sent me reeling inward to brace myself as I endured waves of gut-wrenching pain, rapid weight loss, and a cessation of any activity save for breathing. This chronic condition had gotten better over time and occurred with less and less frequency. But when it came, it took no prisoners. It consumed everything in its wake, every inch of me, all of who I am.
Since I was its reluctant host who, after all, still had some need of it (and it was my need of it that kept it coming), I had to surrender all that I am to its demands. Only then would it offer, in exchange for all that it had wrought, the truth, the vision, the understanding, and the transformation that I could not reach without its assistance.
Thus, my feelings, mind, body, and spirit were all cleansed, revitalized, and encoded with the purest truth of their highest capability and functionality. In other words, this harsh intruder was akin to ‘the cleaner’ who in movies removes incriminating evidence from a crime scene. It came in and unceremoniously cleaned up the mess of my repressed actions, my unspoken truths, my doubts and fears, my blocked and unrealized dreams, and all the damaged areas where my love for myself needed to deepen and grow.
As I continue to excavate and uncover more of who I am, the light of Love bathes and seeps through my being, seeking to heal any new places of Fear exposed. If I am unaware, resistant, or behave incapable of offering Love my assistance in this process, a ‘body-mind-spirit team’ produced illness will step in as a catalyst to move things along. Loving the self is an evolutionary process whose perfection is revealed in the ongoing discovery of who we are and our conscious intention to heal ourselves and all aspects of our being.
When I began, again, to eat and sleep, to work and play, I steeped myself in peaceful gratitude for having endured the challenges of my healing and for blossoming into a newer, more true, and real me. The need to suffer to arrive there will never be my conscious method of choice––as I abhor suffering of any kind for myself and all my
fellow human beings. With Love’s assistance, I have worked to develop better tools, utilizing Love and The Path’s teachings, so that we can evolve beyond this need to suffer and embrace an unfettered willingness to heal, grow and change with ease.