Everyone has at one time or other experienced suffering or the suffering of a loved one through illness or an accident. Each of us has probably asked the question “Why?” Why is this happening?  And when it comes to our children, the “Why” is even greater.

We may do everything we can to safeguard our health; eat right, exercise, immunize our children, drive safe cars, enforce safety rules. And yet – one falls sick, a child has a hereditary disease, another is plagued with a lifelong depression or anxiety disorder. I appears that in spite of all out efforts there is more disease and distress today than ever before. Cancer strikes both young and old in alarming incidence. There is more pain medication and psychiatric medication prescribed than ever before, even in young children! Why??

To begin to understand why, one must be ready to question one’s perceptions and assumptions about illness, wellness, birth, death, and everything in between, which we call Life. When you experience physical illness and suffering, is it just your body that suffers? Everyone of us would say no, for suffering is felt in your very being or psyche. And who has ever seen or touched or measured your psyche?  When one suffers from depression we are told that it is due to a chemical imbalance in the brain. Does that limit the suffering to the brain? The suffering is still painfully felt in the very core of the being. The very core of the being is what we shall call your spirit. Indeed all experiences both joyful and painful are experienced in the spirit and are registered as joyful if they uplift the spirit and painful if they hamper, weigh down or obstruct the freedom of the spirit in any way.

Each of us is a spiritual being incarnated in a physical body for the purpose of experiencing an earth life. But this earth life is only a brief interval in the context of the entire existence of your spirit. You have been given a physical body or covering through which you can exercise your free will to choose and carry out all your activities, which consist of your thinking, speaking, and action. Even your children are completely separate individual spirits with a free will which they make quite clear to you from infancy.

Each one of us is a spiritual being in a physical body. When we are healthy, it is easy to acknowledge that we are healthy because we are taking good care of our bodies. But when we get sick can we acknowledge that we have overlooked something?

Perhaps that something has nothing at all to do with caring for our bodies or even with safety measures, exercise or yoga. That something has to do with the true state of our spirit.

After twenty two years of working with illness, I can emphatically say that many illnesses are spiritual in origin. Many physical and emotional illnesses are the material manifestation of spiritual conditions, even in children! For indeed, every child is as old a spirit as its parent, and has lived as many earthlives as its parent.

The diseases we suffer today tell us very strongly that we have neglected our spiritual life and well being. In spite of the fact that we meditate, go to church and pray for peace and health and well being, we are getting ever sicker everyday. Many find their belief in God shaken to the very core when they suffer and their efforts and prayers seem to go unanswered.

Perhaps it is our understanding of Life, Spirit, and God that needs to change. God the Creator, is not a man upstairs that we can pray to, to bring about whatever we desire, not can we expect that by meditating we can simply visualize peace, happiness and good health and make it so. If that were the case, we would have these things all the time.

God’s Creation is a perfect system maintained by eternal immutable Laws. We, being creatures within God’s Creation, are subject to these Eternal Laws that bring back to each individual man, woman or child what he or she once put into Creation by thought, word, or deed, either in this lifetime, or a previous lifetime, individually or collectively. Once we begin to understand that everything happens to us really is a means to show us ourselves as we really are or have been, not as we think we are, then and only then can a true sense of humility and appreciation of God and the Eternal Laws of God’s Creation begin to arise in us.

Only then can we begin to learn how to pray and understand that while we cannot change our past, we can begin to change our present and learn how to live in such a way as to ensure inner and outer well being and happiness for our future.