Illness is a friend — it saved my life.

When we get sick, the first thing we need to realize is that illness is not an enemy. It didn’t come to destroy us, and it didn’t appear overnight. It developed gradually — as a result of our long-suppressed anger, sadness, and other negative emotions that we never learned to express and instead kept pushing down.

Illness comes when our soul no longer knows how to get our attention. Nothing else works. When something in our life isn’t right or we’re not going in the right direction, our soul starts sending signals. We begin to stumble, bump into things, cut ourselves. If we ignore these signs (because we don’t know they’re signs), bigger ones follow — injuries, minor accidents, recurring headaches, and so on.

And if we still don’t stop to ask why this is happening, illness comes — sometimes serious accidents or falls.

When we’re healthy, we often have no motivation to change. That’s why illness arrives — to push us exactly where we need to be. Sometimes it doesn’t succeed, because we try to suppress it in every possible way: with pills, alcohol, drugs, and other crutches. I have nothing against medicine — life taught me a powerful lesson that sometimes it’s absolutely necessary.

But if, while taking medication, we don’t also look for why the illness came and what it’s trying to show us, it will stay forever. Medication only pushes it into a corner — but it’s still there. All it takes is another life blow, and it will come back again. It never left.

What helped me

When I became seriously ill at the age of 29, I suffered for 1 year and 3 months from daily mental pain — severe depression, brutal migraines, anxiety, sleep problems, weak immunity, panic attacks, and more. Twenty-four hours a day, nonstop — until after a year and three months, I recovered without medication.

I understood that I must not fight the illness. That’s what most of us do. Illness comes, and we immediately try to get rid of it by any means possible.

Let me explain with an example:

Imagine a wild wolf has its teeth sunk into your leg. It hurts. Now grab its ears and try to pull it off. What will it do?

……

Exactly — it’ll bite even harder, and the pain will double. So what does the wolf need in order to let go? To stop attacking you? Do you know?

It needs affection — a gentle touch, love. Try to imagine stroking the wolf’s head. He doesn’t understand, does he? He looks at you with wide eyes, confused why you’re being kind when he’s the one hurting you. He’s never experienced that before. He no longer has a reason to harm you — because you’ve stopped harming yourself.

He lets go — because you’re giving love to yourself.

That’s when you finally accept your illness. You no longer suppress it, you’re not trying to get rid of it. When we try to fight it, the illness — like that wolf — only bites deeper. But when we give it love, we’ve understood a huge lesson, and we can move one step further on our healing journey.

To healing ❤️