Category: Healing From Chronic Pain And Illness

Learning patience has got to be the hardest lesson I’ve ever had to face in this lifetime. I’m speaking specifically to the healing process I continue to go through and how long it seems to be taking to physically recover from the unhealthy life I once lived. Upon deeper introspection, I have started to believe that my level of impatience is tied to more of a cultural shift happening in society now.

In the past three decades, there has been great leaps in science and technology including the development of cellular communications, quick acting medicines, faster diagnostic equipment for doctors to use, more powerful cars, the Internet, and so much more. Everything seems to be gearing all of us for ‘faster, faster, and faster’ and our lives seem to be rapidly following suit. This wasn’t always the case though.

I grew up in a time where I couldn’t text someone to get a quick answer and instead had to take the time to use a home phone. That was when cell phones didn’t exist and people weren’t living, eating, breathing, working, and sleeping with their phone on them. It was when messages had to be left on a house’s answering machine with the hopes that it would be retrieved at the end of a day when the person came home from work. It was also a time where there was no Internet to quickly look up the answer to everything and instead I had to travel to a local library to find those answers. If I wanted to see a movie, buy some music, or get some clothes, I had to leave my home and travel to various places to do any of them. Back then there also wasn’t high doses of caffeine in everything nor were there energy drinks. Television had only four major networks to choose from and I was usually forced to sit through an entire program and its commercials as there weren’t DVRs or hundred of other channels to surf to. And if I got sick during those years, there weren’t medicines to instantly make me feel better to mask what was going on inside and usually the only help was prolonged bed rest with chicken soup until it passed.

With all these advances that are speeding up society, it really does seem like everyone is becoming extremely impatient these days. What’s ironic though is that there are many locations in the world that I’ve travelled to, and many that I haven’t, where these advances still don’t exist. There, mainstream society takes things at a much slower pace. In rural China for example, healing is done through a very slow course that involves herbs and life changes. And there are still too those places out there which don’t rely upon cars and computers and mobile phones and minute clinics and prescriptions to get by. There people get along and live healthy just fine. Sometimes I wish I lived in a place like that. Many of the people I have met in those places seem so much more at peace then what it’s like to live in a major metropolitan area such as the one I do in the Boston, Massachusetts vicinity. One of my first experiences here with this city’s impatience level was a few years ago when there was a freak ice and snow storm that came on suddenly in the afternoon during the winter. Most everyone had headed home from their respective jobs at the same time as a result and the roads were almost at a standstill. As I was creeping along the road at 2mph, I had to stop dead in my tracks because the windshield wipers had completely frozen and I couldn’t see a single thing. When I got out of my car to get the ice off of them, another driver had opened his window nearby and shouted some terrible obscenities at me because I had made him slow down from his 2mph to 0mph.

I could go on and on with other examples of how life has grown more impatient with these advances in science and technology both in my city and many other cities as well, but what I feel is more important is to say that I’m doing what I can now to slow down and develop more patience in everything. On the roads, I am over on the far right lane driving the exact speed limit most often. At home I meditate and pray for a good hour each morning. During the day, I often sit outside in my backyard or at different places like a forest or the beach to silently observe life. Even with my writing I do in here each day, I am trying to slow down for several hours at a time as I chronicle my day to day experiences.

Unfortunately, even with my attempts to slow down, I’m still dealing with a level of impatience in regards to my physical healing. Having grown up with all this science and technological progress has left me wanting quick results with a lot of things in life, especially my healing. But today I’m doing what I can to be more patient with my body’s natural healing process. I admit it’s frustrating that I can’t fast forward it somehow with all these advances that exist. But maybe that’s a good thing, because as I try to have more patience with what I’m going through, I am also gaining a much greater appreciation for things in life again. Many of which I lost sight of so long ago, when I was that patient and much more technology-free, young boy.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

My spiritual teacher repeatedly tells me to not compare myself to others. Frankly, it’s hard not to when I see so many people living life similar to the way I once lived but with no consequences. In a conversation I had with her the other day, she reminded me that what I see on the outside with any of these people is not necessarily what is truly going on inside. After much thought to my old life, I had to agree with her statement.

For years, I lived as if I didn’t care about anything or anyone. I overindulged with cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, sex, caffeine, and money more times than I could count. I gossiped and was judgmental, negative, and greedy all too often. I usually looked at others with only one intention on what I could get out of them. And during all of those times, the worst that happened to me was having to experience anxiety and depression, which only halted my sick behaviors temporarily. What I didn’t know was just how toxic my insides had become from all of my sick actions in life. But, a day did come several years ago when I finally had grown weary enough of experiencing those mental and emotional symptoms, that I reached out to God for help.

I believe that when anyone asks God for help, that it’s like opening up a contract and accepting its terms and conditions when signed. Except in the case of God, those terms and conditions aren’t usually disclosed when we reach out for help. This has been my biggest challenge since I prayed to God with an open heart back in the Spring of 2010. I had grown so sick and tired of that mental and emotional roller coaster that I was living in then, that I humbly offered myself up to God in prayer. I asked to have me go through whatever I needed to, so as to heal from all of the toxins within me and to free me as well from all the things that drove me to those toxins in the first place.

Since then, my reality has become a full day to day onslaught of mental, emotional, and most disturbingly physical ailments. There are quite a number of days where I question my sanity and wonder like Job did in the Bible about God’s salvation. This in turn has led me to looking at those in this world who are still doing much of the same behaviors I once did and wondering why they’re not in pain. It’s then that my spiritual teacher reminds me that most of them aren’t trying to stop their toxic behaviors or heal from anything. She also helps me to remember that there was a day when I lived my life with hardly any cares in the world other than to please myself. And how in each of those days, I was becoming more and more toxic without even knowing it.

If you’ve read any of my other writings about healing in my blog, what keeps me going is hope and faith in believing that all of my pain is coming from residual toxins being cleared out of me by God. And essentially, that this is the answer to those prayers to God all those years ago when I had been so mentally and emotionally broken.

The bottom line is that it really doesn’t help me in any way to compare myself to anyone else. My teacher is totally right in that I don’t know what’s going on inside any of those people I see doing my old behaviors. What I do know though is that I asked God for help several years ago and because of that I created a contract with God. And like all contracts, I need to trust that God will honor God’s side of it. I may not like God’s terms and conditions, but in the long run, I really believe that only good will come out of it all.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

People love to give their opinions on just about everything. I think we’re all guilty of it at some point in our lives. Normally, I don’t really like hearing them from other people these days, especially when it comes to the subject of the physical pain I endure. But in rare cases, such as with what happened last week when a woman in a new age store gave me hers about it, I actually saw it as a good thing and grew from it.

I frequent new age stores quite a bit simply because I like crystals, incense, and the like. When I was away last week in the Nashville, Tennessee area visiting my sister, I was searching for a crystal named aquamarine which I learned was hard to come by. Thankfully, I was in luck when I found a store named Cosmic Connections that had some in supply. Rarely do I engage in conversation with any of the employees at new age stores now when I visit them. That’s only because I have at times been provided at many of them, misleading advice and poor direction, which only have complicated my healing path. For whatever reason though, I did the exact opposite of this when I visited this one in Nashville that day. While I did end up in a long conversation with a woman who talked about quite a number of things, there was one thing she said about my pain and the healing I’m going through, that proved to be a blessing in disguise.

“Have you ever considered the idea that the reason you are still in pain is due to some belief system you still hold onto which wants you to remain in pain?”

Whoa! At first I wanted to be angry upon hearing this because I have done so much to change myself and try to heal. It was especially hard to believe that there might actually be some part of me that wanted to remain in pain. But like there are many bad opinions, there really are those too that sometimes end up being quite good, such as this one, because the truth is, a part of me subconsciously did want to stay in pain.

After much meditation and prayer, and then a long discussion with my spiritual teacher about what that woman at the store said to me, I understood my truth behind that statement and it stemmed back to my childhood. There, I had a dysfunctional family where verbal shouting matches, anger, punishments, and control dominated most days and nights. As a child though, I learned early on that when I was sick, all of those undesirable family traits were tossed aside for love and affection to help me heal. In other words, there was great reward for me in being sick as when I was, there was no fighting, no arguing, and no being told to go to my room. My meals were chosen by what I wanted to consume and not what my parents forced in me. There were also loving hugs and tender words when they listened to what was going on within me. As life went on, I got sick more than not. And it wasn’t that I was faking being sick, as I really was sick. It was that my mind and body was on a programmed response forcing me to be that way. It’s really is true that the mind and body are powerful tools. Somewhere along the line, mine learned that when I was sick, I’d get the love I so needed, wanted, and deserved and because of that, it created this negative belief system and programmed it into me.

Throughout most of my life that followed since then, during much of the tumultuous connections I maintained, I got sick and had many physical ailments. In each of those times, those around me offered compassion and had less unreasonable expectations on me which was opposite of how they normally treated me. On top of that, doctors and practitioners would console me like a loving mother would. So throughout most of it, I was doing nothing more than solidifying that negative programming.

All of us, even animals, have different types of programs constantly running within us that begin somewhere. Some are healthy for us, and some aren’t like the one that have kept me being sick. An example of some other type of programming can be shown quite simply with my roommate’s dog who upon hearing the word “Treat?” will begin to salivate and drool, jump up and down, and start doing tricks without even being asked, all for the sake of the reward that her brain knows is about to come. In my case, as I allowed people to treat me terribly and remained in unhealthy relationships, my programming would bring about sickness and ailments just for the reward of getting more love and affection from them. Through my closer connection to God today though, I am loving myself so much more and having a much better relationship with myself. I don’t have any toxic or negative people close to me that do nothing but bring me down. Because of that, this negative rewards based belief system isn’t going to work because I don’t need to be sick to have love come into my life, it’s already there. I generate it now with God’s guidance from within and from surrounding myself with healthy people.

The bottom line is that I don’t want or need to be sick or ailing anymore. And I most definitely don’t have the desire to find love in my life by becoming sick or ailing. That woman really did hit the nail on its head with what she told me. What she didn’t say though, but what I know is also true, is that this old belief system is already dying through all the work I’ve been doing on myself. I just have to be patient. After all, it took years to create this programming, hopefully it won’t take the same to delete it.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson