It is hard to imagine illness being a gift, and yet we hear over and over of those who benefit or who benefit others because of an illness. We may have even experienced an illness ourselves and grown from it to where we end up saying that we’d rather not repeat the experience, but we would if it meant we would learned what we have learned and gained what we have gained.
The gift of an illness may be as grand as the alternating of our DNA that we may evolve to greater dimensions or to give us greater insight into our true nature and mine greater depths within ourselves. The gift may be needed rest to learn to receive graciously or to learn to live with grace and dignity in adverse conditions.
Illness can take us beyond the normal thinking process into deeper realms of consciousness and allow us to experience a new way of being in the world, as well as opening up dimensions of the spirit not available to us under normal circumstances. The unpleasantness of chronic or acute pain can force us to learn of the body’s miraculous mechanisms for healing and the spirit’s ability to heal the body. Suffering can bring us to our knees of surrender where we let go of all our human beliefs and conditioning and allow our God-self to shine through.
Even knowing there might be great gifts that come from an illness, still none of us would consciously choose to be ill. Too often though I have heard people say that we chose the illness. There is truth to that, but it is much more complex than the statement allows, and on the surface those words – “we chose the illness” – is a blaming statement, which does not help a person who is sick.
Disease is a complicated and complex experience that is part of the human experience. It is born of a soul’s path, human conditioning, cellular memory, social influences, beliefs, and a host of other influences including taking on an illness to help find a cure for others. Or, what parents wouldn’t take the place of their sick child, taking the illness into their own bodies if it would rid their child’s body of any sickness?
It is not from the human mind that we choose illness. Whether from conditioning or from the soul’s path, the choice of illness comes from a deeper place than our conscious waking mind. But when we do experience disease in the body – whether that illness requires a day or a lifetime of rest – we have a choice to either ignore or to receive its gifts. In receiving the gifts of the illness, we raise our consciousness, which in turn raises the energy for ourselves and all those around us, as well as changing the energy in the world, thus creating a pattern of healing for others to follow, which just might heal us of that which ails us.