Chronic Illness and Awakening: A Journey of Healing and Transformation
When people think of the combination of chronic illness and awakening, they often tend to long for outer world experiences. Imagine experiencing certain spiritual moments in a different realm. In this realm, you can also escape from your daily suffering. When we think about those experiences, we often think about dreams or visions. Maybe you have experienced these kinds of moments yourself. But what’s the purpose behind these experiences?
When I was suffering from ME/CFS myself, I had six months of hardly any thoughts after I gave up on everything. Because of that, I felt amazing. Despite still having severe symptoms, I was really happy. Life was good, and I could sleep much, much better. I improved a lot in those months. The funny thing, however, was that instead of just going to another realm, I also really arrived in the here and now.
Presence as the gateway to awakening
Via the here and the now, I accessed what we can call that spiritual part of me. I stayed with God or with source and oneness, and that made me feel good. Sometimes I was gone, not here anymore, but in a different realm—a realm with silence, nothingness, peace, and love. And then once in a while, I came back to my body here on Planet Earth, suffering, disease, my room, four walls, the glass of water that was still standing next to my bed to my surprise. Everything was still there, but I always took something with me from that spiritual place.
Memories and the Answer to “Why Am I Here?”
I started having memories of who I was before Planet Earth, before this lifetime, before I became Daniel. And that changes everything. Suddenly, the question, “Why am I here?” was answered. I know exactly what I’m going to do with my life and why I’m here. I’m not here to stay in that spiritual realm or in that place of oneness. I’m here to actually do work, to be practical, to do things. And I’m going to do those things because of a plan that I made. Well, not really alone, but there was a plan made for this life, and right now, I’m living it.
It doesn’t mean that everything I’m going to do in this life is easy. Maybe it’s even harder because, in order to have this experience of this life, I needed to go through a chronic illness and awakening—not just one year, or two years, or three years, or four years. I needed to be very extreme. Otherwise, I couldn’t do what I was here for.
Understanding Coping Mechanisms in Healing
At the same time, that experience of having no thoughts and mental silence taught me a very big lesson. The mind can’t really see reality; it merely labels it. This is a tree. This is a house. I am Daniel. Et cetera. So, we are labeling everything. And all these labels become a filter that we look through. As a consequence of all these labels, we don’t really see the things anymore that we’re labeling. But life is a constant change. But in our mind, we’ve created stuckness. Stuckness because we keep holding on to those old concepts. But everything changes.
Even concepts can change. Concepts can be manipulated. There is a constant change going on, and the mind can’t really see that. Everything is much more alive than the mind likes to make you believe. But the mind becomes a filter, and in the filter, you can become stuck. The addiction to the mind and its thoughts is a coping mechanism. A coping mechanism is there to make you avoid feelings and emotions. So with every thought that you’re having, what is it that you’re trying to avoid?
It’s important to understand coping mechanisms in your healing journey. It’s underestimated. There are three types of coping mechanisms. There is the coping mechanism in the form of an action that you do to overcompensate a feeling that you’re having. Let’s say you feel worthless and you want to reach the opposite. Then you would like to have status. You can do that, for example, via working and pleasing. Then working and pleasing becomes a coping mechanism to deal with the feeling of unworthiness. But by not looking at the unworthiness, you make the unworthiness even more unworthy. Therefore, everything that you do from that space will enhance the underlying wound. But that will also make you need to do more of those coping mechanisms. The coping mechanisms will never make you arrive at worthiness. It’s merely a distraction. Because as long as you’re very occupied with doing something, you don’t notice the underlying feeling of unworthiness.
Overcompensating, Surrendering, and Avoiding
That’s overcompensating. You can also surrender to a feeling and emotion. If you surrender to the feeling of unworthiness, you keep, for example, mentioning in every event that you’re so bad at this or that you’re so worthless. And you can also avoid. So every action that can possibly trigger the feeling of unworthiness, let’s say a competition, for example, or dating, you go and avoid that. And then you can avoid that with watching television, for example. So all these things are coping mechanisms. And it’s important to understand that. Because what you’re doing in those moments is that you prime your brain that the feeling you are avoiding is very dangerous. That’s the coping mechanism.
And then after 10, 20, 30 years of conditioning yourself that way, whenever those feelings come up, after a good moment in life, let’s say safety, love, freedom, spare time, holiday, or maybe something magical like a pregnancy, all these old stressors that you’re trying to avoid for years, they come up. As a consequence, your brain is creating symptoms to protect you. This is very practical because when we let people think about these triggers or about these stressors, we can turn these symptoms on immediately. But when we release the underlying stressors, let’s say fear or unworthiness, when we dive into this, the body starts to release this, start shaking, shivering, sweating, crying, etc. Then there is no reason anymore to make you feel protected from this with these symptoms. And then the symptoms, they are gone instantly.
Chronic Illness and Awakening: Is This a Spiritual Process?
So is this a spiritual process then? Is this already an awakening? Not really, right? This is called stuckness. The awakening is that after a moment of safety, a moment where you are yourself and you remember a part of you after the hypnosis of your own mind, feel some freedom, some lightness, some love, some safety, your truth. The old stuff in your body doesn’t resonate with that anymore. The old stress, fear, anger, shame, loneliness. It needs to get out of your body. But the brain perceives that as a danger and protects you from this. As a consequence, you experience symptoms. The longer you have symptoms, the longer you’re stuck. Nothing resolves itself. So you need to release those stressors and emotions. And after that, you’re good again until the next layer wants to come up. Because what we see in these, let’s say spiritual awakenings, is that there may be 100 layers or 1000 layers. It all depends on the difficulty of your life and the amount of trauma and stress that you have inside of you.
We can’t really generalize this. Not every practitioner had thousands of layers, maybe only one. And then they become a practitioner. Just do this. This is the way I healed. But it doesn’t really work that way. Because if your practitioner has no experience in many different types of layers, then you’re going to be stuck again and again. I know that what I’m saying is not attractive to everyone. It doesn’t resonate per se. And maybe it doesn’t have to resonate with you. Maybe we need this friction. We need to get you out of the comfort zone of your own ideas and beliefs and what you perceive to be okay. And healing methods that are globally accepted right now. Because all of these methods are very complicated and dogmatic.
The Battle Between Freedom and Imprisonment
You maybe need to do it at least 30 times a day. All these rounds of brain retraining or Pacing very slowly. You might have experienced results. Most people experience results in the short run. But not so much in the long run. I tried to turn this around as well. You don’t have to work hard for a release. There are preparation tools to be done and everybody has their own speed and time. But after a release, your symptoms can be gone instantly. Then you’re empowered! You know exactly how to do this. If you did it once, you can do it again.
You probably noticed that a chronic illness and awakening made you feel so imprisoned. Stuck. But this feeling is not new. The truth is that we’ve all been imprisoned. Imprisoned by our own minds. Imprisoned by our own trauma. By our own beliefs and by society. We are controlled by the unconscious desire to not feel, to not feel the pain. There is a battle between freedom and imprisonment, but also a battle between the darkness and the light. The light is everything that we can see and the darkness is everything that we can’t see. When you have symptoms, there is something that you can’t see. As soon as you can see it fully and feel it fully, there is no darkness anymore and the symptoms disappear.
Chronic Illness and Awakening From Coping Mechanisms and Their Impact
The coping mechanisms that we have to avoid feeling, let’s say feelings of unworthiness and shame, they also imprison us. How exhausting is it to always need more of something? More status. More money. More approval. To be seen. To be heard. To be loved by others. To be accepted by others. It’s a constant work. A constant effort. And we often repeat our childhood trauma to ourselves. We become the adults that treat ourselves in the same way that we have been treated as a child. By adults who also treat themselves that way. We repeat the cycle again and again and again. Society is based on this. Society is thriving on this. We want it to be that way. We want our children to go to school and to be completely trapped in their minds. Because we think it’s important. Why? Because the child needs to earn money. Why? Because otherwise it might not survive. Why? Because we are afraid that we don’t have enough.
If everything we do then is a coping mechanism to deal with that underlying fear of not having enough, we are imprisoned by not feeling that there is not enough.
But everything changes, right? Not really. In the darkness, things can stay constant for a very long time. You can have the feeling of shame that happened when you were five years old in your body when you are 80 years old. It’s probably ruining your life. In the beginning, it wasn’t that obvious. But because you kept coping, you kept enhancing the underlying wounds. Therefore, many adults become funny over time. It’s like how can they not see anymore what they are doing? That’s what I thought when I was a child. But I was growing old rapidly because of all this trauma and feelings that I didn’t want to see. I became just like them. When I was 30, I was just as crazy and a nuthead as someone who was in his 80s. It was a bit more extreme. And that allowed me to dive into this. To really free myself.
The Goal of Chronic Illness and Awakening
I think that’s the goal of spiritual awakening, or awakening is to free yourself from all the bullshit ideas, beliefs, coping mechanisms, trauma, ideas, opinions, etc. But then, who is left? Who do you leave behind after this process? For many people the idea of not having to cope anymore sounds foreign and maybe even ridiculous. Maybe all your life you’re trying to become a good boy. Maybe you do that with all kinds of methods like going to the gym, being muscled, dating with women, having a girlfriend, etc. Not having to do those things makes you feel pointless. But the points that we have are thoughts that we pinpoint on our external and internal reality. We make them fixed. But by not having any points or thoughts, you can really be there. Be free.
Stuck In A Virtual Reality Game
For example, let’s assume that you’re playing a virtual reality. Let’s assume that you’re playing a virtual reality right now. And maybe you remember who you really are. If not, maybe you will need a chronic illness and awakening. But let’s say you remember that you’re the player playing this adventure. What are you going to do in the game? Let’s not make the game Grand Theft Auto where you steal cars. What are you going to do? You can just play, right? That’s what we call it, playing video games. Unfortunately we’re not doing that here. We’re suffering. We’re working very hard. We’re putting pressure on ourselves. We need motivation for all the coping mechanisms because they’re so exhausting. We get tired. We grow old. If we grow old and die only from a place of imprisonment, I think it’s a hell of an experience. That’s also what we’re here for. It’s the very opposite of who we really are. But it can also be seen as a wasted life. Game over, try again, another 80 years, 90 years or 100 years.
Being Seduced By The Darkness
The funny thing is that the darkness always creeps in again and again and again through the back door. Let’s say you’re healed and you want to become a healer. In the beginning, your intentions were pure. But after a while, you notice that they’re not anymore. Or maybe you don’t want to see it. Maybe you go to seminars where it is about how to earn six figures in a year. Maybe you want to be seen. Maybe you like the attention? But who wants to be seen? Someone who doesn’t see himself. Who wants more money? Someone who doesn’t feel safe. Who wants attention? Someone who doesn’t feel loved.
In the healing scene, we see that a lot of things are corrupted by the darkness and therefore they lose their power. It can be a pretty toxic scene. Therefore we need to do whatever we can to make this pure. With every action that I’m doing, I have to ask myself, why am I doing this? Do I count likes? Do I do this for the money? What is the idea behind this? You can be rich. You can be famous. But don’t need it out of lack.
But we have to be very careful of why we’re doing things. Very careful, especially when you’re working in the healing scene. I knew this four or five years ago and that was the reason why I coached donation-based, I knew that I didn’t have all the answers. I knew that it’s probably not easy to copy my own results to everyone else. That’s why I started working for free, later this became donation-based with a donation-based course. That made me able to learn and to have over 1000 one-on-one coachings, over 10,000 people who did the old free program. That allowed me to receive feedback, a lot of feedback. Suddenly I was questioning everything that was in the healing scene to be accepted as normal.
Awaken Again and Again
That’s exactly what we do in an awakening as well. We have to awaken again and again and again and again. All these ideas and beliefs, things that are supposed to be important actions that we need to do.
If you are wanting to work as a recovery coach, for example, why? Where does that come from? Do you really want to do this? Is this going to make you free? You might say yes, financially it’s going to make me free, but you can always get more money. If it’s not coming from a place of freedom, then every action you’re doing is coming from a place of imprisonment. As a result, you will manifest more of that, what you’re trying to avoid. This is imprisonment.
It is important to make the most out of this chronic illness and awakening. Look at all your pain ful truths and emotions. Analyze your desires and see where they come from.
A different perspective on chronic illness and awakening
If we look at it from this perspective, a chronic illness and awakening are polarities, a war between the old world and the new world. The awakening is inevitable. But a part of you resists the pain that comes with it—the pain that needs to leave your body in the form of a release. This also means that you won’t gain anything during an awakening; instead, you lose what isn’t true
I hope to have given you a new perspective on the topic of chronic illness and awakening.
chronic illness and awakening
