Dealing with the Darkness of Chronic Illness: How Mindfulness Helps Me to Turn on the Light

By Kate Libby

The happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything but they make the most of everything. ~ Sam Cawthorn

Very early on in my illness, only a month or so after diagnosis, a neurologist who had been involved in some of my diagnostic testing urged me to try out mindfulness meditation. I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, characterised by chronic dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system – the bit that controls everything not controlled by your conscious mind, like breathing, heart rate and blood pressure. He suggested that, through meditation, I could help slow and steady my alarmingly fast and erratic heartbeat, and also that mindfulness was a great way of dealing with the stress and anxiety a long term health condition can bring.

Keen to try anything that could aid my recovery, I began to research mindfulness meditation and was amazed to discover the technique being prescribed as a non-pharmacological measure to help treat innumerable illnesses, from dealing with cancer and chronic pain to managing diabetes. I even watched a segment from the BBC presenting the story of a Lupus patient as she embarked on a 8 week mindfulness course, an MRI was taken of her brain to review pain levels at the beginning and end of the training and the results were extraordinary: in just 8 weeks she had acquired robust coping mechanisms through meditation and had reduced her pain substantially.

Buoyed by seeing the success others had had with mindfulness I began with a short practice each morning, just 10 or 15 minutes to start my day. I also read about the principles online and tried to be mindful of these as I went about my day: to be focused and aware in the present moment and to acknowledge and accept my feelings, instead of battling with them, so as to be better able to embrace them and ultimately let them go.

As Everyday Mindfulness so succinctly tells us:

“Mindfulness helps to change the way you think and feel about your experiences, especially stressful experiences. It involves paying attention to your thoughts and feelings in order to become more aware of them, less enmeshed in them, and better able to manage them”.

Within just a couple of weeks I really began to see results. I was calmer, better equipped to deal with illness in times of stress, and really thriving on the sense of achievement maintaining my daily practice was giving me. For me, a key aspect of mindfulness and accepting my emotions was the separation of my (rather decrepit) physicality from my feelings and perspective. In the past if I felt ill I likely would have felt down or frustrated, nobody is thrilled to have the flu after all, but when dealing with a long term illness these preconceptions have to be changed to save you from feelings of unhappiness all the time. Mindfulness helped me to accept the way illness made me feel, something I wouldn’t have thought possible, and to let this fall into the background so I could focus on the positives in my day. For example allowing me to enjoy sitting in the sunshine this morning drinking my coffee, instead of being focusing on my frustrations at not having the energy to take the dog out for a walk.

Mindfulness has also been wonderful in helping me deal with the longer term implications of my health condition. I have always been a problem solver, feeling I could organise or strategize my way out of anything, but this illness unfortunately is something largely outside of my control. Initially this was very difficult to cope with and endless horrible scenarios swamped my mind leaving me very afraid for the future. However, as mindfulness teaches us to focus on the present moment, instead of allowing thoughts to linger for too long in murky unknowns, I have become much more able to put those thoughts aside. Furthermore, the principles of mindfulness reminded me that those fears for my future were not facts – in reality they were nothing more than speculation based on the current stressors my body and mind were dealing with. Let’s be honest, illness or no illness, when was the last time our Grand Plans For The Future went exactly as expected? And if I am spending all of my time worrying that I may have to change those plans, when do I get to enjoy what’s happening right now?

As Everyday Mindfulness teaches us, taking the time for mindfulness each day allows us to cultivate and nurture our practice; to take from Jon Kabat Zinn’s analogy, we must feed our practice in the same way that we feed ourselves to build and maintain it. Having a daily reminder of the mindfulness principles as well as time to reflect on our thoughts and feelings really helps to ensure we apply the principles consistently in our lives. Mindfulness is a strategy, a coping mechanism and safety net. At a time in my life when many things are out of my control, mindfulness has allowed me to feed my wellbeing and to foster happiness and acceptance in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. It has helped me not just to battle through dark days, but to turn on the light.

Kate is a sometimes writer living with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome aiming to raise awareness of POTS and invisible illness. You can find her on Twitter @KateVLibby