Disability, Illness, and Spirituality
I am an artist, I am an intuitive, I am a psychic medium, and I am a channel for Spirit. And I am disabled. I am a healer, and I am chronically ill. These things coexist.
At age 28, I experienced sudden onset disability. Before my illness, I was active, busy, healthy, able bodied, and didn’t really ever think about what I could or couldn’t do. I didn’t have any physical or cognitive limitations. Then I got COVID. I had a mild case, and I remember feeling so grateful to have been spared. What happened next was something I was completely unprepared for.
Like millions of others worldwide, I developed long COVID. My experience was quite severe, and I was suddenly unable to do things I had previously taken for granted - like shower when I wanted, cook meals, talk on the phone, do my job…the list of losses went on and on. I experienced severe pain, extreme fatigue, and my brain no longer worked properly.
Suddenly, my life got a lot smaller and a hell of a lot slower. I spent a year of my illness largely in bed. Laying down in the quiet and the dark, doing nothing was the only way I could get some reprieve from the pain and sickness. I was forced to turn within, because the outside world was no longer accessible to me.
It is from this pain and loss, that I began to turn towards my spiritual practices and sought to understand what I was experiencing from a wider perspective. Two books, both written by authors living with ME/CFS, really helped me early in my journey – “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chodron and “How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers” by Toni Bernhard. In addition to my spiritual seeking, I also sought emotional and medical support from the ME/CFS community, the burgeoning long COVID community, therapy, and just about every medical doctor and specialist available.
Living with an emerging infectious disease - a disease that no one understands, can explain, or can tell you the outcome of - is in itself a spiritual practice. In a very rapid period of time, I was ushered down a path of shedding all the built-up identities, confronting my own mortality, awakening from the confinement of capitalism, and learning to see the inherent value of my life no matter the productivity or normativity. I went through immense pain, suffering, and grief. Many days I still do. And yet, it was this sharp tool of loss that carved me into the person I am today.
For a period of time in my burgeoning spiritual awakening, I innocently felt that if I meditated or awakened enough, I’d heal myself. In time, I did notice significant improvements in the quality of my life. It’s undeniable that today, I can do so much more than I could a few years ago. And yet, recently, I’ve come to realize that there is no magical endpoint I will reach. I’m not devoting myself spiritually hoping for some sort of reward from God.
What if my disability is never healed? What if my disability is not a chapter in my story that I share with you and move on from, but something that stays with me and informs my every breath?
It turns out, the body matters. This realization is bittersweet. For one - socialized as a girl in American society, I spent my entire life ignoring my body’s cues and feelings. Secondly - several years of deep spiritual seeking made me feel as if the body was something to be overcome, escaped, to enter a ‘higher realm’. And, it turns out, how we feel matters. It really matters.
I believe that we are here to live within the body. To be an embodied expression of the Divine. I believe that the feelings and sensations and knowings of my body are the ways in which the Soul communicates. And it is only through deep relationship with the body that we come to know this language.
If the body I find myself in is disabled, then surely my disability is an essential part of my embodied spirituality, and not something to be overcome or merely an inspirational story to be brought out when appropriate.
This challenges what is normative and comfortable in spirituality, which is still a predominantly ableist space. Disability and spirituality coexisting is something that presently exists on the fringes. It’s a new way of being that doesn’t ask us to leave behind and elevate from the body, or require us to heal it to make others comfortable with their own bodies. Instead, it honors the unique lessons, disability wisdom, and disabled technologies our disabled body/minds have to teach the world.
Today, in my fourth year of chronic illness, my life is completely different than it once was. I have discovered my artistry and creativity, and I have discovered my connection to Spirit. I am blessed to be able to share my artistic and intuitive gifts with the world. I am dedicated to serving the Divine and supporting humans in their own healing and awakening journeys.
And I show up authentically, as all that I am. I live with chronic illness and disability, and these experiences shape my perspectives. These experiences influence how I show up to serve you as an intuitive medium and channel. I do not leave this experience behind or hide from it — I bring it front and center.
We are not something broken that must be fixed and healed to be made whole. It is within the brokenness that we discover we have been whole all along.
