The body's crisis creating conditions the ordinary mind couldn't maintain
Serious or chronic illness creates conditions that the ordinary self can no longer maintain control over. Several accounts describe awakening arriving at the moment of accepting death, or during the radical surrender that sustained illness demands.
Illness appears to work similarly to other crisis triggers. It breaks the habitual sense of control and continuity, sometimes opening into something that was there all along.
So, at the beginning I just wanted to be able to go back and eat the crappy foods that I was feeding my body, and that to me was what I thought healing was.
And it was shortly thereafter that they changed the diagnosis and it wasn t long after that after I got out of the hospital I did leave everything, I left my fianc , I left my job, I left family, I left everything to go serve.
Got so sick, and nobody knew what was wrong with me.
And they said - I've been having a lot of back pain and we couldn't sort it out, it got worse and worse, and then I went to the hospital - and they said, "You've got stage four lung cancer.