What helped me understand my own suffering, are different cultural perspectives towards illness, neatly described by Ken Wilber in his book: Grace and Grit.

Each of the next five posts will be dedicated to 1 of 5 cultural perspectives. Here is the first perspective that I find relevant and short descriptions of what it means to me:

1. “New Age Perspective – illness is a lesson. Disease happens as there is something important you have to learn from it to further your spiritual growth and evolution.”

My dear late friend, Lee Jones used to say: “Everything happens for a reason”. My accident, loosing my boyfriend and huge trauma is an extreme form of suffering. Is there something in it for me to learn from? I believe so. I believe that there is something more behind suffering than just suffering. My situation presented me with a lot of challenges. Patience is one of them. Acceptance is another. I choose these two to become my spiritual teacher.

As I am stack in hospital bed and can’t ‘control’ my life as I used to, patience is the most challenging.

What is patience? I actually need a dictionary to define it as it is too alien trait for me. I must admit, it was never my virtue. Not sure how I managed 4 years as a teacher or last few years with my boss. Dictionary describes patience as “the ability to endure difficult circumstances such as perseverance in the face of delay; tolerance of provocation without responding in annoyance/anger; or self-control when under strain, especially when faced with longer-term difficulties. Patience is the level of endurance one can have before negativity.”

For most of my life I was like a bullet, acting quickly, expecting short-term rewards and running rampant to achieve my goals. Before I would have called it an ambition…. but no, now I see it was just BEING AFRAID OF UNKNOWN. I tried to ‘control’ my life and the outcomes by putting enormous pressure on myself and others instead of trusting and allowing life to unfold with minimum interference.

Now my situation pushed me to be present without certainty what’s going to happen. Will I ever walk? When will I walk my dog if I walk? Will my knee ever bend? Will I ever dance, travel, drive?

Patience forces me to be present without certainty. It also creates an unsettling feeling around my loss of control. Yes, I worry and I am anxious because of that. But at the same time, I feel patience, even though it is so hard to practice, helps me endure my difficult situation. In the moments when I am patient, I feel true peace and soothing surrender.

The spiritual teacher Meher Baba stated that “One of the first requirements of the spiritual aspirant is that he should combine unfailing enthusiasm with unyielding patience…spiritual effort demands not only physical endurance and courage, but also unshrinking patience and irrefutable moral courage.”

Famous novelist Leo Tolstoy summarized the importance of patience with the following: “The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience.”

Fu*k the speed and control. I lost both anyway. Or maybe they were just a delusion from the very beginning?

Let me try to win the battle with my two new and very quiet friends – time and patience; ok, ok, to be realistic, I am allowing myself for delusional sense of control from time to time. Born control freak died control freak. Except that now I will be more patient.

Much love,

Kasia