When I was probably 19 years old, I would go to a man’s house every week and meditate with him as he quickly died of pancreatic cancer.
This man was the father of a family friend. He had been diagnosed with a cancer that was particularly aggressive, deadly. He was a triathlete. He was young.
I hardly knew him. But, he had become interested in meditation, both for the physical pain and for the pain of facing one’s own mortality. He had heard I was a yoga teacher. And so, I went.
He would lay on the couch in his living room, so frail, each week a little bit thinner beneath his clothes, a little grayer in the skin, and I would sit next to him, cross-legged, and close my eyes, and I would just start talking.
This was my first experience with channeling, and it was when I learned that healing is a co-creative process. He was receiving the messages coming through me. He was transcending his physical body, with their help. But I too was receiving. Soon, I was not even consciously aware of what was coming out of my mouth, but I could feel myself floating three feet above my actual body that was sitting there. I was completely on another plane. There was no physical sensation at all; there was only peace.
He felt it too. I remember once that his wife hugged me and cried in the kitchen after one of our sessions, telling me how much meditating was helping him. I felt embarrassed to take any credit for it. I had no idea what I was doing. But I too felt the power of it.
Week after week we did this, and I played with the energy. And still, after just a few months, he died.
So is illness fate? Yes, and no. Disease is not “fate” in that it shows up randomly in our lives and dooms us to a certain death. Disease is always, always, a slow progression of a whisper into a roar, from our bodies that we did not listen to. It is always a path our body has been on for a long time before symptoms appear.
Dis-ease is fate in that its role in our lives is karmic. That it shows up in perfect timing, with perfect challenge, to teach us all of the lessons that our soul contracted to come here and learn. No matter how many supplements we take or yoga classes we do, we cannot avoid the role that dis-ease plays in our soul’s evolution.
We can choose to use its presence as the catalyst for growth and healing that it is, or not. We have both fate, and free will. The fate asks us, “Will you?” The free will, answers.
And sometimes, even when we answer “we will”, the karmic path is more complex than our human desire to stay alive. The lessons are greater than we can see from our limited view behind these terrestrial eyes.
And so how do we believe in fate, in miraculous and spontaneous healing, in God, in free will, and in the biological facts of the human body? This is how. We keep one eye on our diet, one eye on death, and our hand in God’s and Goddess’s.
Photo by Jessica LaFleur
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