What can illness teach us? Can we gain insight & wisdom when we are ‘laid low’? Can an illness serve a higher purpose? I had to consider all of these questions when a bout of the flu knocked me right off my feet.

As someone who normally enjoys robust good health it was a shock to the system to find myself bedridden with the flu and at first I tried to ignore the symptoms & carry on regardless. Needless to say this was a foolish decision & the moment I stopped & went to bed my temperature soared. Struggling to go and get a drink, or get the energy together to visit the bathroom was not easy to accept. Yet a week confined to the house & mainly to bed did teach me some lessons & I’m grateful at least for these insights, which I believe many of you would also benefit from:

Rest is the best cure. As so often happens with illness I’d been charging around trying to fit 36 hours of activity into 24 hours & paying no attention to my own wellbeing. Illness can be Nature’s way of saying ‘Stop that right now, you’ve run down your batteries too low & if you carry on you’ll really do yourself some damage.’ Of course if I’d tuned into my body a little more carefully I would have noticed my energy was dropping & rested without the helping hand of a flu virus!

The world continues to turn with or without you. Sometimes in our very human egocentricity we imagine that if we personally don’t do ‘x, y & z’ & do them right now there will be a complete catastrophe. Guess what? Plans were cancelled, my schedule erased & time was made for me to be ill & get better. The world did not grind to a halt & nothing horrendous or irreversible has happened because I took time out.

Redefining our priorities When we rush around ‘doing’ we can lose sight of what is really important & what just feels urgent. Bedridden you suddenly get a new perspective. I feel I was given time out to look at my spiritual path and listen to the small still voice within, that gets too easy shouted down by all the 'busy-ness' in life. The question became ‘What does my soul need & want from this life?’ It wasn't a list of chores!

Your body knows best. I obviously had been throwing a deaf ear to the messages my body had tried to send prior to getting ill, but once it had my full & undivided attention I listened & listened well. Oranges were the main message. 'Give me oranges at all times of the day & night!' It would wake me for more oranges! Suddenly with my normal appetite switched off I was on alert for whatever my body really craved and the menu it designed itself was very healthy- junk food was completely unappealing & fresh, raw food with plenty of liquids a must. I’m going to try to keep the extra fruit & juice going in everyday life!

Sometimes the carer needs to be cared for. It isn't uncommon for healers to get 'burn out'. It means you've got things out of balance & been doing too much giving without taking enough for yourself. A week housebound gave people a chance to give back to me. I was very touched by the friends who shopped for me, did washing up, picked up my prescription, fetched my son from school, sent absent healing & generally checked I was okay. My teenage daughter pitched in & managed to cook a few meals for herself & her brother, admitting she’d quite enjoyed it. The habitual helper became the helped & a little balance was restored. It was nourishing to the soul to see that people cared enough to spare me some of their time & wonderful to realise that I really was completely supported by the Universe.

Space to please yourself. I picked up knitting. Really I relearned it because my mother taught me as a child. Being ill gave me the perfect excuse to try something new & slightly frivolous that I just hadn’t made time for, but it was such fun! I played with aromatherapy oil blends & came up with some real mood lifters. Maybe you’d while away the time with a jigsaw, read a slushy romantic novel, watch favourite old films. Why wait for illness to strike to indulge ourselves like this? Perhaps we should have a ‘just for fun’ list on the go at any one time.

Be patient this was the biggie for me. At the start of the illness I kidded myself it would be a twenty four hour bug. Then it would be all over by mid week, then the end of the week. Finally I had to accept that this was real full-blown flu & it would take as long as it would take to work itself through my system. In recuperation I have learned to be kind to myself, to be patient with my recovery. The diary has been cleared!

You only get one body per lifetime & I plan to listen up, get this one well & keep it that way!