Illness......

is always, always a teacher.

I don't hold with those who say we create our own reality. By that same token, I don't hold with the idea that we call the illnesses to us that we need to teach us whatever spiritual lesson we need to learn. Let's not blame the victim, shall we?

However, I know that in my own life, when I'm sick, there's something for me to learn in the illness. Even with the serious illnesses that I've had, there's a lesson or two or twelve embedded within the illness, whether it's the illness itself, or how I'm dealing with it, or what lead up to it, or how I'm treating it.

Currently, I have a bronchial infection. (No, you won't be reading yucky details!) Now, I smoked in my partially-misspent youth. For ten years. A serious habit, a pack to a pack-and-a-half a day. Next year, it'll be 30 years since I had my last cigarette. I'm clear that one of the reasons that my colds, if not caught early, go to my chest is residual damage to my lungs. Is the damage dreadful? Nah. But I do have to be more vigilant than those who never smoked, or who smoked less, or for less time, about colds, so that they don't go to my lungs.

From another angle, the lungs start at the top of the third chakra, and come up into the right and left sides of the heart. So a bronchial infection is partially about personal power and all the issues related to the heart. For me, the infection always ends up embedded in the deeper parts of the lung. So it's more about how I'm managing my personal power.

See how rich this stuff is?