I

spent most of last weekend in hospital and will spend the remainder of the week battling flu symptoms.  Definitely doesn’t fall high on the list on my favourite experiences and definitely doesn’t score high on the happiness scale.

Usually what we do is – and particularly if we are really experiencing unusual and frightening symptoms, aside from feeling terrible, is have a little anxiety come and join our party.  And that makes things so much better- NOT!

OK so now we are not going to die and we are accepting our process to recovery.  If you are by this stage still stuck in a head space or reverted to a head space you will start to stress about the impact of this sickness.

How much the damn thing has interrupted your life.  All the appointments you have to cancel-AND RESCHEDULE!  All the things on your ‘List of Things to Do’ you now need to schedule time to achieve.  All the jobs you did not get done.  All the new jobs this “interruption” has created.  And finally the “fun” things you missed out on as you recovered.

Besides the fact that I don’t get sick often, this sickness took me totally by surprise for two reasons.  Firstly, because it struck me down within a minute and secondly, because it so vastly altered my perception.

I began to review how and why I got so sick and what I could learn from this entire experience.

Definitely there was a clear sign to SLOW DOWN.  Review my patterns.  Focus on my priorities.  Establish better patterns reflecting the priorities of the moment and shed the patterns that were no longer serving me.  I spoke about this in an earlier post    [HERE]

“So what a fantastic time, now that I am house and bed bound to make a new plan”, I thought.

The other thing that was so salient was that: not until your health becomes compromised in any way, do we really value the importance of good health.

You suddenly realise that “health is not everything, but without it everything is NOTHING!”

Another thing that struck me was (with a severe case of vertigo that completely changed my perception), the notion of how the universe really looks.

You see we often hear these philosophical questions like “what colour is the sky?”  It refers to the idea that it is perceived as “blue” because of the function of the cones and rods in our eyes, and based on humans’ tri-chromatic vision.  A dragonfly might perceive the sky differently as it is processed via different visual instrumentation.  Dragon flies see the world in ultra-multicolour due to their souped-up colour vision.  So the real colour of the sky or how the Universe really looks depends on who’s asking the question and what instrumentation for interpretation they have.  Implicit in this is that with more evolved senses or sophisticated instrumentation – the world as we know it could look completely different.

This understanding really brings to life the notion of our body being the vehicle for our soul to experience the physical world.  And that we are spiritual beings currently having a temporary human experience.  Yet it is seems to always be viewed the other way around: that we are human beings having a temporary spiritual experience.

Of course the greatest thing any sickness will do is to bring your focus to the present moment.

The key is to remember this so you don’t need another, and another, and yet another dose to remind you.

 

So next time you get sick re-evaluate your life, and look at what you have gained.

Photography by Fagun Mishra