Finding Meaning, Compassion, and Trust Amidst Chronic Illness

This felt therapuetic to write

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I haven’t talked about the specifics of this much, but I’ve struggled immensely with my health for the past 4.5 years.

During this time, I’ve been diagnosed with:

• Chronic fatigue syndrome

• GERD

• Parasites

• Lyme

• Mold

• Long Covid

• Vaccine injury

• Disc herniation / impinged nerves

• Thoracic outlet syndrome

• Dystonia

• Chronic laryngitis

• SIBO

• TMJ

• Systemic inflammation

I’ve also seen many alternative health practitioners, healers, and medical intuitives who have given me other explanations for my challenges:

• Kundalini syndrome

• Ayurvedic imbalances

• Qi blockages / imbalance

• Entity possession

• Psychosomatic / suppressed emotions

This has been exhausting, confusing, and wildly expensive.

Here’s a recent pic of me doing bio-magnetic therapy in Austin. I have about 40 magnets on my body!

Last week I was diagnosed with CIRS (Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome).

CIRS isn’t formally recognized by the CDC or mainstream medicine, but it’s fairly well known in the chronic illness community.

The idea is that, due to genetic predispositions, your body can’t clear certain biotoxins. This causes your immune system to be perpetually activated, resulting in chronic inflammation which wreaks downstream havoc across multiple systems in the body.

This tracks with many of the symptoms I’ve dealt with – extreme fatigue, constant pain, brain fog, memory loss, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, temperature dysregulation, nerve pain, numbness in my arms and legs, stomach pain, insomnia, and incredible anxiety.

The crazy thing is that five years ago I was the healthiest person I knew. And despite eating a spartan diet, exercising 5+ days a week, diligently tracking my biomarkers, and even spending 1000’s of hours doing trauma healing work, my health has gone to shit.

Navigating all this has easily been the most difficult thing of my life.

Many days I haven’t been able to do basic things like work, engage in social activites, or watch my daughter. The physical pain or intensity of my fatigue is just too much.

For the first few years of this, I resisted that this was my reality immensely and was extremely angry about it. It felt like the prime of my life had been taken away from me and I didn’t know why.

Why do things like this happen? Is it just shit luck?

Maybe you’re going through chronic health issues. Or maybe it’s something else that has been extremely debilitating.

I wanted to share a perspective that has increasingly helped me find meaning, acceptance, and compassion through all of this.

Imagine you have a shape that represents the level of well-being of all aspects of your life. For the average person, it might look like this.

Before you’re on a consciousness journey, your life is mostly oriented around trying to grow and improve these external factors through applying yourself.

Most people generally keep doing this as long as it seems to be working for them. There’s not impetus to behave differently.

But at some point, this strategy may stop working.

This happened to me when I turned 30.

No matter how hard I tried and cleverly I maneuvered, things stopped going well – including my physical health. This led me down a path that eventually made me begin to prioritize my inner world.

Even though my inner terrain increasingly became the focus and was viewed as a more primary way to cultivate well-being, I still wanted to thrive externally. It’s why I was so frustrated that things felt very challenging.

A few years into this, my teacher and many of the books I was reading began to point to the same thing…

A higher aspect of myself (my true Self or soul) had a slightly different prerogative than crushing it on all aspects of life. Its priority was the evolution of my consciousness. It acheived this through expanding my awareness and transformation to restore its natural qualities.

Using the shape analogy, its prerogative looks closer to this.

The thing is, the path to restoring and expanding these virtues is typically markedly different from growing your external well-being – at least in the beginning.

How do you, or more accurately, how does life do this?

In my experience, it happens through becoming aware of the obstructions blocking you from embodying these qualities in the totality of your consciousness. Because most of these are subconscious, you need to experience some sort of event or circumstance that brings them into awareness. Otherwise it’d be impossible to become aware of them.

Rob Schwartz, author of Your Soul’s Plan and a recent podcast guest, calls this learning through contrast. To become aware and understand something, we must experience a polarity.

For example, in order to become more loving, you need to be put in a situations that reveals all the ways that you don’t love yourself. Or in order to restore trust, you need to experience something that illuminates the depth at which you don’t trust life. These situations reveal hidden aspects of your consciousness which create the required awareness for healing..

In my metaphor, this means that you often have to experience a contraction in your material reality, in order to experience an internal expansion.

I don’t think this means your soul wants you to suffer. In fact it wants the opposite. But in order to expand to a higher level of understanding and fundamental well-being, it has to create the opportunity for learning through contrast.

In the example with my health, pretty much all external vectors of my life have suffered – it’s been hard on my partner, my social life has diminished greatly, I can’t work out really, and my raw capacity for output is much less than what it used to be.

However, these conditions have forced me to become aware and grow in so many ways. Without being pushed to my absolute limits, there’s absolutely no way I would have developed the same levels of self-love, compassion, acceptance, awareness, and trust. Moving through, and honestly surviving these conditions, required it.

This doesn’t mean all this hasn’t been hard as hell. It has. And I wish I felt healthy and vibrant the past 4 years. I know I will at some point. This is just where I’m at right now.

After Perspective Then What

Having this perspective has been a great foundation. It creates a sense of meaning and even ownership for what might otherwise seem like bad luck or misfortune which can keep you stuck in victimhood.

I came to it through my teacher, reading, and eventually direct experience through dialoging with both my true Self and guides. If you want a starting place, I’d recommend reading Your Soul’s Plan.

In addition to grokking this idea, here’s what I’d recommend on a daily basis to navigate any period of prolonged suffering.

Notice and accept whatever you’re feeling each day. Each time you notice that you’re feeling upset or helpless, take some time out of your day to be with these feelings. I tend to do this in the morning and as I’m doing things if time allows.

In Conscious Accomplishment, I called this process “identify, face, accept, and replace.” The replace component is where you bring in love and compassion for yourself. It may feel like you’re doing this a zillion times, but just keep going. It really does help.

Do things that help remember the game you’re actually playing – the evolution of your being.

One question I once heard was “if [insert challenge] was your pathway to God, would you take it?” For me with my health challenges the answer is yes. And it has brought me unequivocally closer to realizing my own divinity. I try to remember this question when I am feeling frustrated or down.

Don’t wait to start living until you’re better. I’ve fallen into this trap many times. After a certain level of suffering, it’s easy to just punt on everything until “when I get better.” The thing is you don’t know when this is, and tbh it may never happen. So you might as well try your best to enjoy your current conditions, while gently honoring the constraints of it.

Drop all comparison. As soon as you start comparing your path to everyone else, it’s easy to drop back into victimhood. How come other people don’t have to go through the same hardship that you do? It feels unfair, especially when you feel like you made all the good choices leading up to this.

Your soul has its unique plan. It’s nonsensical to compare yours to others when you have no idea what theirs are. When you notice this tendency, let it go and replace it with trust that your higher self knows what’s best for you and is giving you exactly that. Again, you might need to do this many times before the tendency softens.

Don’t throw the medical baby out with the bathwater. After 2 years of western medicine sending me in all sorts of directions that resulted in no improvement, I went almost exclusively into spiritual healing mode. The lack of progress I experienced convinced me that I was mainly dealing with a psychosomatic healing crisis, and all the spiritual healers I was seeing loved to reaffirm as much.

In hindsight, this was not a great idea. It’s not that this psycho-spiritual aspect isn’t important to tend to, it’s just that there’s no reason to abandon all the tools that you have at your disposal. I’ve had the best results running both in parallel.

I’ve also noticed that a perfect confluence of western medical diagnosis and support tends to arise in close concert with some inner awareness and healing.

Find peers and community who are going through the same thing. The loneliness of chronic illness cannot be understated. If the only people you can talk to it about are people who don’t have a direct experience, it’ll be hard for you to truly feel seen and understood.

Fortunately, I’ve connected with a handful of people who are in a similar crucible that I am in. Our conversations and mutual support are deeply nourishing and helpful. I didn’t really seek this out, but wish I had earlier and there are sites like The Mighty and Healing Well where you can meet other people.

I genuinely hope that no one ever has to go through something like this. However, I trust if you are, it isn’t a mistake. As far as I can tell, the universe doesn’t seem to make them.

So the name of the game is learning how to traverse these experiences with greater ease and grace. These have been the most helpful things for me. I hope that it meets all those who need it right now!

-Scott

P.S. as for my own healing, the main things I’m doing right now are bio-magnetic therapy, the shoemaker protocol, peptides, herbal detox for Lyme, and some supplements. Thankfully I feel very supported.