The Gift
I recently read a phrase that has stuck with me in a book called ‘The Mindful Christian’. It talked about “accepting the gift wrapped within the suffering”.
So often we focus on the suffering. When it’s overwhelming, it’s overwhelming. It’s hard. Not knowing if recovery will ever come, not knowing how long I’ll feel so awful. The loss of everything I’d filled my time with. The loss of my vitality. All of that. I’ve been there.
And yet even in those early weeks I had the faintest glimmer of the gift. As I learned to properly slow down, to use meditation and breathing, I found a peace of mind that I’d not had in years. I learned how to listen to the birds. How to clean my teeth slowly. How to get off the merry-go-round of the thoughts in my head.
As time went by I learned to listen to my body. To move and stretch gently to ease 20 years of sitting at a desk, to relieve my neck pain and ease the headaches. To stop when I needed to stop. To raise my heart rate to a level that gets the blood pumping to my brain but that doesn’t push me back into the concussion symptoms. To faithfully do the many physio exercises every day to give my brain what it needed to rebuild and recover. To respect my body in its entirety, rather than as something that just carries my head around.
As obvious as it sounds, I no longer believe in the theoretical split between mind and body. It’s total nonsense. My brain suffered a concussion and it’s impacted my whole body, down to the speed of my heart beating. So my whole body is part of the recovery. I have learned so much about nutrition and how food impacts the ability to heal, recover, maintain and restore both the body and the mind. Dr William Li’s book ‘Eat to Beat Disease’ was a real eye opener, along with the growing area of nutritional psychiatry by people like Dr Uma Naidoo. Literally mind blowing. What I’ve learned has changed my whole perspective on food and health for good.
The gift has been time to stop and reflect about what I do and don’t want from the next part of my life. How I want to spend my time. What my priorities actually are, when starting from a near blank piece of paper. I realised that I can count on two hands what is truly important. As a follower of Jesus, I’ve learned to find my strength and joy and peace in him, not in my own finite resources. The song ‘Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me’ has sustained me through some long days. The lyrics are far better than I could put into words.
I’ve recently been learning about the concept of a growth mindset. I’ve realised that this whole experience, whilst profoundly difficult, has given me the opportunity to learn and grow and re-frame the negatives into positives. I have had a lot of help and support along the way. As full recovery now seems within sight, albeit still distant, I am profoundly grateful for the gift within the suffering. Perhaps it’ll prove the greatest gift of my life.