What my back pain has taught me…

I have had chronic back pain for most of this year. The way I have learned to live life has taught me to look for the lessons in any particular experience, and it seems this experience has come to teach me a lot of things. I will keep adding to this article until the back pain passes. Each of these lessons are blessings.

• Move more.
• I am a community of selves stretched out over time. Serve that community.
• I can be joyful regardless of circumstances. Any circumstances.
• Be grateful for all I have.
• Things can always get worse.
• Any obstacle is an opportunity for creativity.
• I cannot be stopped, even by myself.
• Don’t take things for granted.
• Listen to the body.
• Life is sometimes inhumane and unfair, but there are always choices I can make.
• Check regularly for beliefs that need to be changed and change them to ones that are useful and empowering.
• Choose each action mindfully.
• Watch for where actions are out of alignment with the highest self.
• Nothing in life is constant except for Cosmic Consciousness. Be mindful of all that is evolving, particularly those things that have a strong influence.
• Be endlessly patient.
• Being kind includes being kind to myself.

EDIT: 3 July 2022. I’m looking at this list and laughing at myself.

I’m just going to write here about the clarity I am getting.

When my plant medicine journeys ended in 2019, I think I did not fully take the lessons from them. It seems that a major lesson was to be able to let go and be flakey and not need so much structure and control in my life. It was a lesson I recognised at the time and did try to embrace to an extent, but over time and especially since I have left Bali and returned to the western world, I think the notions of structure and control have returned in full force and in a way that does not serve me.

Like all things, structure and control can be of service in its natural balance with all other things, but until this inherent issue I have, with wanting to have control over life and many things and people in it, is resolved, then I can never be free.

And I think that’s what this pain is trying to teach me. To learn to let go and relinquish control, to trust in God and let life flow. Like I was last year — so much of this life I have now looked the same then, but it came from a completely different place. It was created organically, out of nothing, and it built itself into something beautiful and amazing.

So I guess this pain is here to make me a little or a lot crazy so I can just let go of it all and create something even more amazing in this wondrous city of light that is London! :)