Are you living a lack lustre life?
Find richness and meaning…
when you have a chronic illness (or want to prevent one)
(Photo from Unsplash)
Lockdown has eased, the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, the hint of summer plans is in the air. But maybe you’re not blooming, maybe the idea of coming out and interacting feels daunting.
Perhaps your fears and judgments arise:
‘I’m not where I’d like to be!’
‘I can’t do what they do’ ‘what will I tell them?’
‘ What will they think of me?'
While everyone was in the same boat, locked-down, it felt bearable didn’t it? Your life with your symptoms.
But now as the world seems to resume and the activity returns, the weight and limitation of your chronic symptoms feels painfully apparent.
Your mind wants to do things that your body can’t.
You want to enjoy life like others do. You want to accept the invitations to meet up, to picnic, to walk, the only problem is that you know it’ll be too much or you’ll hold others back. So you decline or brave it and silently suffer.
You judge yourself, feel miserable and hopeless, and leave others confused about what’s going on with you or how to help you.
The truth is that chronic illness forces you to ration your energy. You just can’t do everything Sadly, as you prioritise the basics and DO LESS, life gets wittled down to the bare bones. The ‘have to do’s’ of life take all your energy, while the ‘want to-do’s’ or ‘love to-do’s’ seem to fall to the wayside. Before you know it you’re left living a restricted, dull and shrunk down life.
Yet it doesn’t have to be that way.
It’s the things you enjoy that make life rich and meaningful, and in fact help you to cope better with chronic symptoms. It’s these things that make the difference between existing and living.
This 5 minute meditation will help you reconnect with what’s meaningful.
“Find a place inside where there is joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”
— Joseph Campbell