Could chronic illness be a guide to support us on a path to healing and awakening to who we truly are? Could it be that the illness has come to teach a lesson, to guide the sufferer back to wellness and happiness? Could the illness somehow become the healer? The illness calls us into our own ripening into who we are. -Frances Goodall

The challenging experience of chronic illness often leads to an existential crisis, or a dark night of the soul. The struggle to accept something that can't be changed and to identify who you are now that everything has changed is a perfect match for the enlightenment path.

So if you are struggling with a chronic illness, you are uniquely suited for the spiritual awakening process, and in fact, that process has almost surely, already begun.
​

Is the Enlightenment Path Calling Your Name?

​If the spiritual awakening process is calling your name your next step is to find an enlightenment path that works for you and will lead to deeper spiritual connection and spiritual awakening. But if you thought it was out of reach for anyone not living like a monk, you're not alone.

There's a prevailing thought that only monks or similar devotees can become enlightened or experience that kind of spiritual awakening.

But is that really true?

What about the rest of us? Those of us who can't meditate all day long or twist ourselves into pretzel shapes.

Is there a kind of everyday or ordinary enlightenment path available for women like us?

-spoonies who sometimes struggle to get out of bed.
-stay-at-home or work-from-home moms raising a family.
-or any women who can't dedicate all that time & energy to that kind of spiritual practice.

​Absolutely! It’s not necessary to live alone in a cave or become a Buddhist monk to reach a higher level of enlightenment. 

All that’s really required is to pay attention and observe your thoughts.

And, as I have said, as spoonies, we are uniquely positioned for spiritual awakening.

Wondering how to place yourself on the enlightenment path? We will explore that, but first let's answer this question: what does the ordinary, everyday spiritual awakening process look & feel like?
​

The existential crisis created by the illness experience—the “dark night of the soul”—hits us spiritually. Where once we felt connected (to God, to nature, to important others), we now feel utterly alone. Pay attention to your internal terrain and start mapping the rise and fall of your soul, the places where there might be comfort, and the locations that feel particularly treacherous. This is hard but important work, and the answers you find will be yours alone.
​-Katie Willard Virant, Psychology Today

What is the Enlightenment Path?

Enlightenment is accepting life exactly as it is.

Good days and bad days. Flare-ups and worsening symptoms. Those moments when you realize you've overdone it.

The truth is, it’s much more common to view the world through distorted glasses. Our prejudices, biases, hurts from the past, and misconceptions taint our perception. 

We’re driven by habit and polluted by our past experiences. It’s very challenging to strip all of that away and perceive the world accurately. 

It can take a lifetime to reach a high level of enlightenment. And some people never get there.

But there are many advantages to choosing the enlightenment path, and it’s well worth the determined effort. Let’s look at the gifts that the awakening process offers,

(1) You are likely to finally make peace with your chronic illness and accept it completely. And I believe this is the most important benefit because when you are no longer in resistance, no longer in a fight with your body, you'll feel better.

(2) You may find that you are less likely to feel jealous, offended, or have other negative emotions once you experience a spiritual awakening. 

When you’re enlightened, it becomes obvious that what others say and do is not about you at all. So, you’re much more likely to feel compassion when someone acts or speaks against you than to feel hurt. 

(3) You are much less likely to feel compelled to chase after achievements or possessions as a way of proving yourself. You’ll be free to pursue your true passions without regard for the opinions of others. 

(4) You will probably find that a simpler life becomes much more appealing and enjoyable. 

The most successful person isn’t the one that has the most. It’s the person that’s happiest and most satisfied with what they already have.

(5) You'll come to know yourself as you truly are.

The enlightenment path may completely transform the way you see yourself, your life and your illness.

Right now, the filters through which you see yourself and life may keep you from knowing yourself fully and accepting your life as it is. But your spiritual practice & the awakening process will change that.

So, obviously, the enlightenment path has a lot to offer. But how do exhausted spoonies become more enlightened? 

It’s simple, but not always easy. Though it won’t require hours of meditation every day, it does require a willingness to change and a desire to feel much better about yourself, your life and others.

The Enlightened Spoonie Quiz

Let’s identify where you are now on the enlightenment path and have a look at what you’ll be experiencing during the awakening process. This is a quiz you can return to again and again on your spiritual journey.

For each statement, give yourself a score of 1-10 as to how true it is for you...

I have dedicated time for healing and I know I am healing the past. 

I feel freer & more empowered as I let go of and clear limiting beliefs and old feelings from my life. 

I don’t react to things the way I used to, and am more at peace than I have ever been before.

I feel compassion, acceptance and love for myself and others. I know we are all doing the best we can with our current level of consciousness.

I am beginning to feel a sense of oneness with all other sentient beings.

I can easily connect to the love of the divine (or universe) and am experiencing a deeper connection than I have in the past.

I recognize that there may be more trials and tribulations ahead, but I have new-found strength and I am ready to move forward. 

I am exploring and discovering my own essential truths. I know that my truths may not be for everyone, and that is okay. I also know what works for me. 

I am ready to own my truths and share them with the world. I am confident in my wisdom and ability to contribute back to the world. 

I am grateful for all the challenges I have endured along the way. And I am grateful for the wisdom and inspiration I have been given.

NOTE - if you are at the very beginning of the spiritual awakening process, your score will be lower. 

​TO SCORE - add your rating for each one and evaluate the sum as if you were receiving a grade in school. So a total score of 90 or above, would be an A, and so on.

Once you know your score, consider reading the statements again and make a commitment to each one, thinking about what you need in order to experience them. Having done that, you will know you are solidly on the path and now, you have a checklist to guide you. For more guidance, read the section below.

Best & Easiest Spiritual Practice to Use
on Your Enlightenment Path 

So now that we know what everyday enlightenment will look and feel like, how do we get there? What is the easiest way for a spoonie, coping with chronic fatigue syndrome, or another chronic illness to get from here, to enlightenment?

I recommend meditation. 

At its most basic, you close your eyes and breathe in and out. Hopefully, focusing on your breathing will slow it down (try it now, for a moment), and you're good to go.

Meditation will change your life, in all the best ways!

​But here's the best part - you are likely to feel better physically, too. And that's huge for anyone struggling with a chronic illness.

(this infographic is from LiveandDare.com)

Meditation Benefits for Spoonies

Another resource cited studies that observed the changes in the brains of monks who had been meditating for years. Typically, it is said that in order to master something, you need to spend 10,000 hours doing it.

But they found life-changing benefits of meditation with only 5000 hours. Or even 1000 hours.

After 1000 hours of meditation, you can expect to experience a lot of mental, emotional and physical benefits...

You'll have much better concentration, have an almost superhuman ability to focus, become more intuitive and aware, need less sleep for optimal functioning, have a higher tolerance for pain, and have an ability to experience more love. Neat, right?

​But it gets even better after 5000 hours. Studies found the following results...

• Won’t obsess over emotions, if something comes up you’ll be able to drop it pretty much instantly. Deep feelings of peace will pop up unexpectedly and stay for unpredictable amounts of time. Much more control over automatic reactions, so things like worries, fears, anger, hatred will not stay around long enough to impact you.
• -go to ProjectMonkeyMind.com for even more

After I learned about what can happen after 1000 hours, or better yet, 5000 hours of meditation, I immediately began to calculate how many hours a day I would have to meditate to reach those nirvana-like benefits in one year. In order to get to 5000 hours, I’d basically have to become a monk, dedicating my entire day to meditation.

​Sure I could cut that in half or into a quarter of the time and still get amazing benefits. But after my own struggles with depression and anxiety, with winter blues which changes my life for almost half a year in ways I don’t want, and with chronic illness that I know is exacerbated by stress, I felt greedy. I WANT IT NOW!

Well, the good news is that studies suggest that you can experience powerful benefits with even 20 minutes a day, in just a few weeks. Whew!

My challenge to myself, though, is to double that time, or even go for an hour, and see what happens. Hopefully, one or more of the following benefits.

FOR EXAMPLE…

A study done by the University of California found that mindfulness meditation decreases ruminative thinking and dysfunctional beliefs. 
So let’s unpack that. 

Most of us are likely to be worrying about something when we ruminate. We might even tell ourselves to stop thinking about it, but we find that we can’t.

And let’s say we know we have some limiting beliefs - things we have learned to believe that unfortunately for us, aren’t true at all. The question then becomes what to do about it. I’ve tried renouncing them, myself, but I didn’t have much luck.

If you haven’t either, it’s because limiting beliefs live in a nice, comfy home in our brains that is built on a solid foundation. Lies, I tell you! But grafted in there, nonetheless!

Well, research tells us that meditation changes your brain. And this study I have just referenced indicates that one way it does that is by prying loose those destructive limiting beliefs. Isn’t that amazing?

But another study suggests that meditation may have as powerful an impact on depression as antidepressant medication. Go here to read more about that stunning assertion. Here’s a quote from that link…

Describing their results in January in JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers found moderate evidence that mindfulness meditation alleviates pain, anxiety and depression—the latter two to a similar degree as antidepressant drug therapy. - LiveandDare.com

​Here’s another astonishing result, and if you have fibromyalgia, or chronic fatigue syndrome, lean in for this one. A research study found that meditation was better at reducing pain than morphine. 

This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation. (…) We found a big effect – about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. - Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D, one of that study’s lead authors

One of the reasons I am motivated to spend even more time meditating each day than I do currently is my realization that one of the reasons I have difficulty falling asleep is pain and discomfort. Based on that study, I am thinking I will save one of my meditation times for right before I go to bed.

I want to mention that these are just some of the many benefits that research experiments have found for meditation. And I focused on the ones I thought spoonies might be most interested in.

Go to LiveandDare.com for links to even more studies and their results.