Helping Others Equals Healing You!

Living with chronic pain, disease, or illness is a difficult battle to win, but it is important to take the focus off oneself and benefit in ways that are immeasurable as you help others.

When you live with chronic pain, it is very easy to fall into a “why me” state of mind.  Of course, it is natural to be filled with negative emotions like anger, sadness, hopelessness, and despair.  As we live our lives, we learn that life sometimes is unfair to us and sadly, it may be more unfair to you.  It is at this moment where our battle to get better begins!  Yes, life is unfair and it’s unfair in various ways to everyone on the planet at different points in our lives.  For some people, however, this “unfairness” may touch them their entire lives.  And yet, even these people – the most desperate of all can still find a positive purpose in their life no matter the everyday obstacles they face.

Although feeling negative feelings may seem a natural way to think, I can assure you that a negative mental and emotional state is extremely detrimental to your health and healing.  I can also assure you that there are many people who are living just like you and who are worse off than you.

Of course, every individual case of chronic pain and illness is different just as everyone’s journey into healing will be different.  There may be times during our healing crisis where it is absolutely mandatory that our focus must be entirely on ourselves because of the severity of our situation.  But in other instances, there are just as many people who live with chronic pain that are able to give to others.  This act of charity—of thinking and giving to others actually helps us to heal.  I think of the elderly who volunteer at hospitals with proud smiles on their faces and a twinkle in their eyes, who assist others with a real sense of purpose.  While I am sure they have ailments of their own, they keep giving because the reward they receive from acts of charity brings on healing that we can’t even begin to measure.

Our health and our life should be in a constant state of balance.   There should be an equal exchange of giving and receiving.   Sometimes, even small gestures that may seem insignificant in the moment may have far reaching beneficial consequences.  Whether you are able to perform small acts or large, helping others can help you heal too.

One of the most rewarding times in my own healing journey was during the years I spent in Europe volunteering at a physiotherapy rehabilitation center while I was receiving my own treatment.    The center was remotely located with a backdrop of olive trees, donkey’s and chickens.   With sanitation conditions poor and barely working plumbing,  I would soon understand that the physical rehabilitation methods were advanced and far different from the  American medical system that failed me catastrophically.   I began to volunteer at the center when I still had my own mobility challenges and chronic pain, but I was further along in my own healing (from a fall that had injured my spine), that I was lucky enough to also be able to help others during off times when I wasn’t receiving my own treatment.  This was a crucial and beneficial part of my own healing—giving to others in whatever capacity I could.  I especially loved interacting with the patients and helping during their treatments.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the intense years I spent immersing myself in the rehabilitative care of other sick people was also when my own aptitude for healing took root.  I was humbled in many ways, once thinking myself so unlucky to have struggled to walk when my pain seemed insurmountable and my life in tatters.  But in this experience of helping others, I saw other patients who had much more severe spinal cord injuries and unable to even get out of their wheelchairs.  I saw paralysis, over and over again–from the neck down and from the waist down.  From swimming accidents to car crashes, from stroke to surgeries gone very, very wrong.  I saw patients with paralysis having severe spasticity in their legs that couldn’t be controlled easily.  Even patients with their bladder function destroyed and patients whose ability to sit upright was a greater rehabilitation challenge than my tackling walking.   I saw children with severe cerebral palsy, women with multiple sclerosis struggling to walk or people with muscular dystrophy.  And most were poor, not able to afford care, even their foreign governments failing to help them to even survive, let alone pay for continuous rehabilitation treatment.

My experiences as a volunteer helping persons’ with disabilities was one of the greatest blessings in my life – a chance to redirect focus off my own circumstances and think of others.  I will remember this time in my life as extraordinary.  I learned much about myself through helping others and the rewards to my soul have helped me in my own journey into healing.   I learned to embrace my pain in a new way and be thankful that my body was “shouting out” at me to care for it properly and give healing a chance to happen.  I chronicle my dramatic healing journey in my spiritual memoir that I am currently writing and will hopefully be published in 2010.