Suffering to Thriving: Your Toolkit for Navigating Your Healing Journey: How to Live a More Healthy, Peaceful, Joyful Life

By Kathy Harmon-Luber

Is it possible to thrive in the midst of suffering?

One moment all is well-then a health crisis changes everything. Your future seems fragile at best. Illness, injury, and loss have become part of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author Academy Elite
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885830171

Kathy Harmon-Luber

Kathy Harmon-Luber is an inspiring, compassionate, and empowering author and wellness guide whose passion is helping others find their compass and chart a course for navigating illness, injury, and loss - learning how to not only cope, but to become more resilient, joyful, and thriving. With insight and enthusiasm, she opens people's eyes to the potential of becoming more physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy by offering practical solutions and inspiring insights. By sharing her journey-from suffering to thriving-she shows us all the way.

Book preview

PART 1

UNDERSTANDING SUFFERING

If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep walking.

—Buddhist proverb

1

EVERYBODY HURTS

Everybody hurts sometimes . . .

If you feel like you’re alone

No, no, no, you are not alone.

—R.E.M., Everybody Hurts

When we’re young, we feel invincible. We peer into our future imagining we’ll always be twenty-four, strong, independent, and active. But as we mature, we come to recognize that everything changes. This was the hard lesson we all had to confront in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic and, in the US, the summer of racially charged events. We’ll be living with the terrible toll of that year for a long time: the prolonged social isolation, loss of loved ones, economic distress, job loss and financial insecurity, racial inequity, wildfires, hurricanes and other climate change events, political polarity, etc. The challenge for us all is to learn that everything changes. We are not invincible. Everybody hurts.

Our vulnerable bodies can be as fragile as glass. Life isn’t always fair. Illness and injury are as much a part of life as birth, death, and taxes. Everybody hurts, yes, but it’s also true that everybody heals. Everybody will take a healing journey in their lives.

Still, when our own health changes, we’re shocked. How could this happen to me?! It feels like the end of the world as we know it. Sometimes it is. Everything feels radically different and completely out of our control.

You are not alone, though it can often feel that way. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, six in ten American adults have a chronic disease.³ How many more experience a medical crisis on any given day? It’s only our culture that makes us feel alone. As prevalent as health crises are, our society tends to ignore the seriously ill, injured, elderly, disabled, and dying. We treat suffering as weakness, and we learn from a young age to fear illness and injury, to hide it, to medicate it.

Society, employers, advertising, and sometimes our own families often wish to airbrush the healing journey—and those of us on it—out of the otherwise perfect picture. Everything is supposed to be fine, right? Meanwhile, we become invisible, exiled by our illness. Left out as the world carries on, suffering alone in silence.

Then there are those who, perhaps unable to deal with their own discomfort and vulnerability, mock and bully, shame or judge. We may feel like misfits who don’t belong, deficient in some way.

Here’s the real human truth: the healing journey is a rite of passage and an initiation. It’s the human condition. Every person alive is on a healing journey of some degree of severity. Illness doesn’t discriminate. Young or old, pretty or plain, rich or poor, athlete or couch potato, soul on fire or bored with life . . . eventually, everybody hurts.

Find comfort in the fact that, no matter how you feel in this moment, you are not alone. Remember this.

On the one hand, we’re lucky to live in this age of modern medicine. On the other hand, the modern world is taking a harsh toll on our planet—our life support system—and our health. Toxins lurk in our water, air, clothes, and cosmetics, and pesticides hide in our food. The Natural Resources Defense Council reports, of the more than 80,000 chemicals currently used in the United States, most haven’t been adequately tested for their effects on human health.⁴ At the same time, toxic stress is everywhere: our jobs, perpetual busyness and overstimulation, the cell phones we cling to, and unending bad news. Combined, these wreak havoc on our health and well-being. No wonder we succumb to disease.

WE TAKE OUR HEALTH FOR GRANTED

I don’t know about you, but I grew up believing I’d always be healthy. I took it all for granted. My grandfather, Pop, used to say, If you have your health, honey, you have everything, but I couldn’t comprehend those words back then. I was young, healthy, and active with dance, aerobics, power walking, the gym, biking, swimming, yoga, and a full social-butterfly calendar. I took for granted the simple ability to walk, to play my flute for hours and perform in public, to stand at my artist’s easel and paint all day, and to travel with camera in hand. I didn’t think about how easily I performed everyday tasks like taking a shower, cooking a meal, putting on a pair of pants, going to lunch with my gal pals, or walking up the stairs to my job.

With my first spinal disc rupture twenty years ago, I learned rather quickly the wisdom of Pop’s adage. Without your health, you cannot work, play, be there for your family—or even make a family. Without health, you cannot grow in the direction of your dreams . . . or can you?

EXERCISE

What part of your health or abilities do you take for granted?

For everything you’re able to do today, there will come a point when you do it for the last time. That’s the reality of life, our fragile bodies, the aging process, and death. Remembering this truth, begin to do things more mindfully. Appreciate what you do have and can do. Start anywhere and build from there. Over time, you’ll begin to feel more alive as a result of savoring every moment—all the way until your last.

An easy way to stop taking things, people, or circumstances for granted is to practice negative visualization.⁵ Choose something important in your life and then imagine—only for a moment—how your life would change if you didn’t have that person or object. Imagine how the loss would impact your health or finances. The point is not to dwell on negative thoughts or to become paranoid but to gain perspective. When you imagine how much worse your life could be, it’s hard to continue taking things for granted.

Ironically, negative visualization is an easy way to maintain a positive outlook no matter what happens. (Just don’t live in that negative place too long!)

You’re completely entitled if you feel that things suck plenty just as they are. But instead of dwelling in those feelings, this exercise allows you to find peace in your situation.

Change is inevitable, growth is optional.

—John Maxwell

2

THIS THING CALLED SUFFERING

We can make ourselves miserable, or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same.

—Pema Chödrön

A health crisis or catastrophic injury usually strikes out of left field. Unanticipated. Unwelcome. You’re fine one day, and the next, you’re thrown off course. Depending on how disastrous it is, it can totally derail your life and leave chaos—or abrupt endings—in its wake.

Most of us feel sorely unprepared for the profound mental and physical suffering and the pain, disappointment, discouragement, and despair that come from health crises. Change is hard. Loss and grief harder still. We likely don’t tell ourselves these struggles hold meaning—but they do. Even the downward spiral, rock bottom, or dark night of the soul happens for a reason. Often it’s a wake-up call, an initiation.

It’s all too easy to get stuck in the mental suffering that overshadows illness and injury. We are snared by what I call suffering traps. Here are a few of them:

Expectation of specific outcomes—When we expect to be healed in a certain number of days or months, to be able to return to normal life, or to make a complete recovery, we’re setting ourselves up to suffer. All that matters is what you can achieve right now—in this moment. Once you accept this, suffering lifts like a weight off your shoulders and soul. And with this inner peace, healing happens.

Comparison—Comparing your Bad Day (of pain, loss, illness, etc.) to someone else’s Best Day (similarly, comparing your current inability to your former ability) can cause great suffering. You are not and may never be who you were. And that’s okay. You’ll find peace when you embrace this.

Struggling—If we don’t accept the reality of our situation but instead struggle against it, we’ll suffer. You’ll endure less pain by living your life with an acceptance of what is.

Fears and worries—We suffer less when we face what frightens us. Fears and worries are not truths.

Unattainable desire—On the healing journey, we often desire that our life could be different, and this is often unrealistic. It’s certainly not your current reality. When we let go of unattainable desires, suffering evaporates.

Allowing shoulds to rule—Illness/injury is your permission slip to walk away from everything you should do that no longer serves you (in a responsible way, of course). Make want-tosyour priority.

Perfection—Holding on to the illusion that your body and health must be perfect creates suffering. As Leonard Cohen sang, There is a crack, a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.⁶ That crack is imperfection—where light comes into darkness and transforms you. On the darkest moonless night, the stars shine their brightest.

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

MOST SUFFERING IS A CHOICE

The statement that suffering is a choice may sound insensitive or delusional. We didn’t ask for our health crisis; we certainly didn’t choose it. But we’re talking here about how we respond to things we cannot control. When we let our suffering dominate us, we’re putting on what William Blake called mind-forged manacles.⁷

Suffering can become a prison of our own making wherein we insidiously trap ourselves. We don’t need to dwell in that place. Suffering is a choice. The door of the prison of self-imposed suffering is locked from the inside—and you have the key. In other words, it’s totally within your power to diminish unnecessary suffering by changing how you perceive and react to it.

Where we place our awareness shapes our reality. If we focus on suffering, our lives become a daily slog through a wasteland of suffering.

In his book The Stoic Challenge, William Irvine tells us the goal is not to remain calm while suffering a setback but rather to experience a setback without thereby suffering.⁸ Notice that subtle distinction: suffering and setbacks are not the same thing. We cannot control our health setbacks, but we can control our reactions to them. The body may be in pain, but the mind doesn’t need to be. We can be suffering physically yet still be happy to be alive and celebrate beauty, love, friendship, and freedom.

In other words, we live in two worlds—an inner and an outer world, which have significant independence from one another. In the outer world, our bodies may be disabled, diseased, or dying while at the same time our inner world can be lush, vibrant, imaginative, and thriving. Too often people allow terrible challenges in their outer world to overrule their inner world. This is the prison of suffering. We must choose to free ourselves from it. The healing journey can be the catalyst to shift from outer work to inner work.

Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.

—Ram Dass

BENEFITS TO SUFFERING?

Don’t turn away. Keep looking at the bandaged place.

That’s where the light enters you.

—Rumi

It’s important that we not turn our eyes from suffering. It may sound strange, I know. But suffering can be a catalyst for change and portal to find:

greater self-love

compassion for others who are suffering

personal growth and development

spiritual renewal

resilience

As we’ll see in the next chapter, the benefits we gain from the catalyst of suffering can alter the trajectory of our healing.

There’s a popular bit of wisdom that says, Grow through what you go through. On the healing journey, when times are difficult and challenges seem insurmountable, there’s always an opportunity to grow. These tests of strength and resilience can be catalysts for finding meaning and purpose in the suffering we go through. Otherwise, what we don’t grow through, we learn the hard way through emotional suffering and pain.

There is something sleeping inside you that your health crisis and suffering will awaken—if you let it. You see, your inner world can lie dormant for years—for some people, most of their lives. Sadly, some folks never awaken to their inner world. It usually remains asleep until an event—illness, injury, loss, trauma, or tragedy—awakens