Category: Healing From Chronic Pain And Illness

There have been many pain-filled days in the past six months or so where my ego has tried to convince me that relapsing into any one of my former addictions would bring me some much-needed relief. While I’m sure doing so would help me become numb to the pain for a period of time, I know the only thing it’s ever done for me in the long run is make me feel a sense of being uncomfortably comfortable all the time.

Pain sucks, to put it bluntly. I mean who really wants to feel pain anyway? I sure didn’t for all those years I sought one addiction after another and various people, places, and things to help me hide from ever facing it. But doing so eventually just led me to having this constant feeling like I was uncomfortable in my own skin, that something was really off inside me. And the longer I remained uncomfortable in my own skin, continuing to look for things externally to keep numbing any pain I felt inside, the more I grew comfortable living out my life that way. This is precisely the reason why I ended up remaining in a constant state of feeling uncomfortably comfortable for over several decades.

Until I became willing to go through the pain, that feeling never went away. Instead, I’d awake every morning and experience the tip of my pain iceberg and would immediately scramble to find something to start numbing myself from it. I was always restless, irritable and discontent with everyone and everything because of it. In fact, it was quite easy for me to get into a fit about anything. The truth is I was so scared of feeling the pain I kept suppressing inside. But yet I was also just as much scared of staying uncomfortably comfortable for the rest of my life as well.

After my mother passed away about ten years ago though, something inside me began to shift. The amount of pain I was trying to suppress at that point was too great, which is why I went off to a silent retreat to finally begin facing it. Since then, I’ve been on a path that has caused me to go deeper and deeper within to find the ultimate source of that pain. As the years passed, all those layers of it that I pushed down would rear their ugly heads. And each time they did, my ego would attempt to convince me to run back to that state of being numb and uncomfortably comfortable. Sometimes I did, but more often I didn’t, until three years ago, when I stopped giving into them at all.

Now I’m facing the most difficult of pain I’ve ever faced and it’s harder than anything I could have ever imagined. I’m at the true source of my pain now, the one I believe led me down that uncomfortably comfortable path all those years ago. My ego is constantly screaming at me to do anything that will take the edge off of what I’ve been feeling lately. But I haven’t done anything but continue to feel this pain, because I’m convinced the source of it is that I stopped believing in God long ago. And when I did, I started looking outside of myself for one thing after another to bring me comfort, thinking God could never give me that.

So as I sit here and type these words, enduring the greatest pain I think I’ve ever faced in my entire life, I’m not feeling uncomfortably comfortable anymore because I’m not trying to escape from it either. Instead, I’m doing my absolute best to keep my faith in God that in going through this pain, I’ll be led to a much deeper, richer, and fuller life, one where I won’t have the desire to numb myself from living it ever again…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

What is your biggest fear in life? That’s a question I find very easy to answer lately, solely because it’s been the same one I’ve been facing ever since my health began a sharp decline one evening almost five years ago now.

That evening was on April 27^th, 2010, a mere few weeks after I had muttered a prayer to God asking to go through whatever I needed to become free of all my addictions and toxic behaviors in life. At the time I said it, I was deeply engrossed in an extremely toxic intimate relationship and saw no way of ever breaking free from it. What I didn’t know when I said that prayer out of sheer hopelessness though was how it would soon put me on a path where I’d face my deepest fear in life, which was to have severe physical health issues that grossly limited my day-to-day functioning. And since this day five years ago, when the first of many aches, pains, and ailments kicked off within me, I’ve been doing everything I can to not let this fear rule my life, but sometimes it has and still does like today, much to my dismay.

As I sit here and type this, I’m struggling to get comfortable and have honestly spent the entire day in the same way. At various times throughout today, as well as many prior days in recent months, I’ve thought that death or going back to addictions would be a far better path than the one I’m currently on. Frankly, I don’t understand the path I’m on anymore, probably because of how long these health issues have lasted.

The good news though is that all these health issues led me to explore avenues I probably never would have given how preoccupied I was with my addictions. The not so good news though is the price that came along with discovering those avenues, which was to become riddled with myofascial pain. My muscles feel constantly tight and sore these days and I hurt in more places than not. I’ve totally done what I can to treat this condition both medicinally and holistically over the years and am now at a stage where neither brings me any relief. Trust me, I exhausted ridiculous amounts of time, energy, and money exploring every avenue of healing until I realized that the rest of this process was going to be in God’s hands. Now I do my best to remain healthy on every level, mind, body, and soul, but on days like today, when I can’t think straight because of the pain I’m feeling, I question my sanity and occasionally allow my fear of having chronic health issues plague me.

I so long for the days when I could walk for miles, hike up huge mountains, play exceedingly aggressive sports, and was an all around overly active individual. Nowadays, I’m lucky if I even have enough stamina to stand for a few minutes without aching and it often feels like I’m 80 years old. I even use a bench in the shower because it hurts to stand when I take one.

Frankly, I’m really not sure what God has in store for me, but I’ve definitely been facing my ultimate fear in life for almost five years now since I prayed for that great change to happen. Well that change definitely happened, just not in the way I thought it would. But I continue to tell myself over and over again that God isn’t going to leave me in this state. And people remind me quite often that God wouldn’t bring me down this path this far only to leave me feeling like this. I’m doing my very best to believe that to be true, but I know that I feel like I’m hanging on for dear life lately and am constantly trying to prevent my brain from convincing me to follow in either of my parents’ tragic footsteps.

So I’m not sure how much longer this is going to last, but I know I’m doing my absolute best to keep the faith, to stay positive, and to not give up. I’m also doing my absolute best to trust in God and remain as healthy as humanly possible. I do hope all of you who end up reading this will pray for me. Pray for me to make it to the other side of this. Because I do believe I’m going to witness the return of my good health soon and when I do, you can be sure I’ll be writing an uplifting post expressing my gratitude to God, to all of you, and to myself, for finally overcoming the biggest fear I’ve ever had in my entire life…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

I feel like God was really trying to get my attention recently when I became unable to access my main email due to a server issue on ICloud. At first, I assumed the issue was coincidental, but as I went through the period of outage, I wondered if there was a spiritual lesson in trust attached to it.

It began early on a Saturday morning when I awoke and rolled over to check my email’s inbox on my Iphone. As soon as I tried to enter the inbox though, a message immediately appeared that indicated there was an error retrieving my mail. After attempting to repeat the same action several times to no avail, I next went to my computer and opened up my mail client to see if I could do it there. That’s when I noticed a similar error message appear telling me what my Iphone already had. My next and final attempt to retrieve my email came when I went directly onto the Internet through ICloud itself. And that’s when I discovered the error was actually with the server where my mail account was on.

For the next two hours, I was on the phone with tech support from Apple, going through one action after another, until they came to the same conclusion I had before I even called, that there was a problem with one of their mail servers. A trouble ticket was then generated and I was told it would take at least two business days for their engineers to even look at the issue. With it being a Saturday, I knew what that meant. It meant it might not be until Wednesday before they even knew what was wrong with my email and this server. I was a little frustrated by this, especially when I was reminded by tech support that I was using one of ICloud’s free email accounts, making it of low priority. I wasn’t very happy to hear this, but thanked them nonetheless for their help and hung up the phone worrying about when or even if it would get fixed.

You see, technology-oriented people like myself usually have at least one email address they rely heavily upon for various operations in their life such as banking, insurance, and various other financial institutions. Add in my personal business, blog, website, and plenty of friends who all have this email address, and you have one contact method I’m overly tied to these days. Which is specifically why all of this led to having an overabundance of worry and trust issues with Apple as to whether they would even make the effort to correct this problem. I even found plenty of user forums online suggesting they might not given it was a free account.

I ended up spending the majority of Saturday obsessing about this. I even re-contacted the person I had spoken with earlier from the ICloud tech support, but they had no new information to tell me, other than the only server being affected in this outage was the one my main email account was on. After hanging up the phone with them for the second time, I pondered what I had just been told. It was then I began to wonder if maybe there was a spiritual lesson in trust with this. After all, the one server I was on was the only one being affected? Most people would probably say that was just coincidence or bad luck. Not me though. I have come to believe these days that God speaks to us in a multitude of ways, even through things that are modernized like email and servers. Unfortunately, I didn’t stick with this thought for very long, and instead went back into panic mode pretty quickly about how many emails I would be losing and whether I needed to start changing over everything to a new email address immediately.

Saturday then turned into Sunday and my thoughts weren’t getting any better, nor did my trust in Apple fixing this issue given my email was still very much down. But as the morning turned into the afternoon, the thought re-emerged of this maybe being a spiritual lesson in trust somehow. Just so you understand what I mean by this, take my health issues I’ve been enduring for a good while now. I’ve been praying to God diligently for guidance, doing everything I can to become healthy on every level and in every way, including getting out of myself and helping many others since it all started. Alas, I’ve had little relief, nor found much of that through any of my medicinal or holistic efforts. All of this has resulted in me having some serious trust issues with God. But recently I began praying to God to help my trust be restored, which made me wonder if this weird email issue was somehow God’s response to that prayer.

Could my trust in Apple not fixing the email problem be no different that my trust in God not fixing my chronic pain issues? Well as soon as I began accepting that idea and decided it wasn’t worth worrying about my email anymore; I started doing my daily affirmations early that Sunday evening. And that’s precisely when I heard a noise on my Iphone laying on the bed next to me, which upon closer inspection saw my mail email was back up and running again.

So it goes to show that maybe there was a spiritual lesson in trust with all this. Maybe God really was trying to get my attention by having something so silly happen as my main email server going down. Well it worked, because I feel that somehow God was able to answer my prayers through this experience. And as long as I continue to maintain my trust in Him, I truly believe I will be fixed just like “The Cloud” eventually did for my email.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson