Live Beyond Stress and Illness

A large part of learning to play a bigger role in your health and well-being is about finding the gifts in what we might usually perceive as God-awful life circumstances. To be diagnosed with a chronic or life threatening illness—God awful! To be let go from a high power + high paid career, also God-awful! To have a long term marriage you committed your heart, soul, and everything to just to have it end with an adulteress act—again, God-awful!

Part of the work I do with my coaching clients at Live Beyond Stress and Illness involves supporting people in learning to befriend their illness—not an easy task, I agree. I’m not talking about encouraging others to bow down to their illness or give up on their health and desire to create a sense of well-being. I’m talking about learning to shift the negative, health-stealing, and resistant relationship we tend to have with an illness into one that invites a greater opportunity for peace and healing. Befriending an illness releases one from falling prey to stressful thoughts and emotions that can keep illness in place.

I’ve spoken before about the stress and illness cycle. When stress remains in place for extended periods of time it can manifest in the physical body as illness. And when illness enters one’s life—more stress tends to be mounted upon us. The new stress that comes with an illness can hold illness in place and even perpetuate more and more physical symptoms, which of course will typically perpetuate more stress. Once the stress and illness cycle is in place it becomes increasingly difficult to manage either the stress or the illness.

Finding peace with your illness requires a commitment to shift your focus towards one that empowers you. It is important for anyone challenged by illness to remember that any thought we generate that isn’t a match for inner peace is most probably a stress-producing thought; one that creates a stressful emotion which in return has the potential to create disharmony is the physical body. We cannot afford to entertain stress-producing thoughts for too long if we want to break the stress and illness cycle.

Generating a peaceful relationship with your illness will surely feel like an impossible quest in the beginning. But don’t let that deter you from reaping the benefits that can come by setting course on this journey. I have witnessed again and again the serenity- and in many cases, the so called miraculous mental, emotional and physical healings that have come from mastering the art of befriending an illness.

I’ve included a video clip link here of one of my greatest hero’s Byron Katie in hopes of better bringing to light the power of shifting our relationship to illness. Byron Katie is truly one of the leading champions in supporting others in living beyond stress and illness, and you can trust I will speak of her work from time to time as it is so pertinent to my own message. Follow this link and I trust you will be inspired to tears as you witness one man’s journey towards befriending his own illness.