More Than Your Body
More Than Your Body
I believe in striving for physical health, but also for emotional and spiritual health. I recently read a book called “Still Here” by Ram Dass, who gives an interesting perspective on life after a stroke. If you have lived most of your life in a western spiritual mindset (traditional christianity) or without much spiritual influence, this book might step outside your comfort zone a bit. But I encourage you to give it a chance, and look for the similarities between your worldview and the author’s, rather than focusing on the possible differences. The last chapter of this book, in particular, is about his life after having a stroke.
Ram Dass experienced first hand the reality of suffering after a stroke…..the loss of physical and mental capabilities, the loss of independence, etc. But he was able to allow this suffering to teach him lessons about life that he would not otherwise have learned. This isn’t simply a “try to find the silver-lining in every cloud” book. Ram Dass, like many of us, feel that the journey of life has purpose. We can choose to believe one of two possibilities about life: Either our existence continues after this life in some form (heaven, reincarnation, etc) and therefore this life has purpose, and every joyful or sorrowful experience is shaping us and teaching us for our continued existence beyond this life. OR that our existence ends at death, and life is nothing but a series of random events, some happy and some miserable. Perhaps your stroke has forced you to take a hard look at these two options like never before. If so, you might benefit from reading this book. Ram Dass speaks about how his stroke led him much deeper along a path that he had been on for most of his life…..the path to understanding that “I am more than my body.” It led him to a more spiritual understanding of life, but also a greater understanding of what it means to be human….to be truly human, in all of the vulnerability that entails. He tells of how important his independence was to him, prior to his stroke. After his stroke, he began to realize that independence was a way of denying our vulnerability (or masking it), and he saw the way his stroke had “opened him to the vulnerability of being human.” He also began to appreciate “in a much deeper way the preciousness of the love that surrounds” him. If you have loved ones caring for you, perhaps this has been an opportunity for you to realize the preciousness of their love.
Please don’t think that I am trying to trivialize the drastic life change that a stroke can bring. But I think that we all sometimes struggle with opening up to the reality of life beyond ourselves, and transcending the physical circumstances that hold us back.
“Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying” 2000. Ram Dass. Riverhead Books.