Living with chronic health issues is a relentless challenge for Jane Brendgen. But deep self-reflection has also yielded great self-understanding for her
Looking back on the themes of the reflective pieces I’ve written since January 2023, I can see my attention has been predominately drawn out into the world.
In this post I’m following the impulse to return to the landscapes of my inner life, to reflect on something that feels particularly tender at this time – my chronic health condition. This isn’t a comfortable choice and I’ve been feeling uncertain for days as to whether to go ahead. Needless to say, I’ve decided to take the plunge.
As coaches, we know self-reflection is one of the essential practices that supports greater self-understanding and I recognise the latent potential in this topic for insight, novel perspectives and integration. I’m intentionally holding a few questions to guide me through: Does living with chronic health issues support my development as a coach in any way? What growth edges are showing up and what is my relationship to these edges?
I’ll offer some contextual details before moving into the exploration.
I’ve been living with illness for around nine years. The triggering event was a psychospiritual crisis that began in 2015 and coincided with the biological stresses associated with menopause. For many years I was too sick to work. My network of professional connections dissolved, my income stream became a trickle and I turned to essential savings to support myself. Prior to the onset of illness, I was teaching mindfulness, self-compassion and relational mindfulness as an adjunct to my coaching practice, and all of this fell away. The psychospiritual transformative process has thankfully stabilised. With the support of a functional medicine doctor and NHS clinicians, I’ve spent the last five years experimenting with ways to heal my digestive system. It took a significant beating due to the extreme stress associated with the crisis. I’ve been experiencing difficult sensations, pain and interrupted sleep since it began and there are days I need to rest in the afternoon to sustain my capacity to work.
Developmental edge
One of the core concepts in adult development theory is the subject-object relationship to experience. If I’m subject to my experience, I’ve become identified with it. I ‘am it’ and can’t see that I’m ensnared by it. I have no perspective. In contrast, if I’m able to step out of identification with the experience it becomes object. I’m in relationship to it. I see it, feel it, know it, and can choose how to respond. My biggest trigger areas are when I’m experiencing difficult sensations at night, I’ve tried to slowly re-introduce a food or a new supplement and have reacted strongly or when I don’t know what next step to take to help myself. I fall into identification with the part of me that doesn’t want to live – the relentless challenges feel too much to bear. This is my most significant developmental edge. With the help of my Internal Family Systems therapist, I’m learning to hold this part with love and compassion as she despairs and weeps. Invariably, just when I feel unable to surrender any deeper into acceptance, a surprising yielding happens and I come through the darkness again, carried by the primal will to live that I share with all life.
One of the experiences intrinsic to ill-health is loss – of the illusion of certainty, of the well-being that I took for granted, of a wide variety of dietary choices and the associated nutritional benefits and lifestyle restrictions. I’ve spent many hours in communion with grief. She has softened my heart and expanded my capacity to be with difficult feelings, with tenderness and appreciation.
When I first fell ill, I felt victimised by life. Through years of actively choosing to surrender this slowly shifted. My perspective widened as I connected with the reality, not as a conceptual fact but rather as a lived experience, that illness is integral to the phenomenon of life. This dissolved the feeling of aloneness that so many with chronic illness experience. I’m no longer caught in victimhood. The experiences associated with ill-health are happening through me rather than to me. And, this cannot be separated from the immediate contexts of my life and the broadest contexts.
I’m just completing a 12-week course developed by Fritjof Capra, an Austrian-born American author, physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. We’ve been exploring the systemic conception of life at the forefront of science and its application in various contexts. Capra’s definition of health is “a state of well-being resulting from a dynamic balance involving physical and psychological aspects and interactions with the natural and social environment” (2014).
In his book, The Myth of Normal (2022) Gabor Maté highlights the operating principles of Western medicine, where reductionist specialisms reduce the aperture through which the patient is seen. Furthermore, it’s predicated on our conditioned illusion of separateness. Capra’s definition highlights the fact that all living organisms are inseparable from their environmental contexts. If we consider the broad realities of climate change, geopolitical instability, the trauma of war, of societal breakdown, the cost-of-living crisis, factory farming, food production processes and more, it’s not surprising there’s an upsurge in chronic illness and general ill-health, physically and mentally. Where are the clear delineations between my health and the health of the systems in which I live? Do they even exist? I can feel my perspective widening!
Another experiential phenomenon I’ve frequently encountered intrinsic to the territory being explored is uncertainty. It’s one of, if not the, most fundamental of Nature’s laws – everything changes, nothing stays the same. Given the non-linearity of the inter-connected complex systems that are life, we cannot predict how things are going to unfold. We cannot control life. I recognise there are times where I feel the steadiness of equanimity and can swim in the stream of impermanence. And there are times when I look for signs of certainty that things are going to be OK – perhaps I should try this supplement, a different treatment protocol, go for more tests, stop eating this particular item of food and try this food instead. Perhaps this might finally bring me closer to healing? It may and it may not. This, I see, speaks of my relationship to the unknown of all unknowns, death. I’m increasingly recognising, in concept and in body, that I’m a part of the miraculous intricate web of life, where there’s a ceaseless exchange of energy and matter. As the clouds transform into life-giving rain, when we die, our physical bodies give back life-supporting nutrients to the earth. And, in the darkness of the night, I touch something existential, something deep in my cells, in my brainstem, perhaps a primal fear shared by all living things?
Appreciation and love
The biggest gift that has come from these years of difficulty is an embodied loving relationship to myself. I cannot know whether this is as a consequence of the transformation associated with spiritual emergency or whether it’s related to the self-compassion practices that I’ve been engaging with daily since the start of the turmoil. Perhaps it’s both, and more. What I do know and recognise is that there’s increasing capacity to hold the parts of myself with appreciation, acceptance and love. This has radically changed the way that I see and relate to others and the world around me. So, in closing, does living with chronic health issues support my development as a coach? It’s shaping me into a more compassionate, loving human being and, in the end, this is all that really matters.
References
- Capra, F. (2016). The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge University Press.
- Mate, G. (2024). The Myth of Normal: Illness, health & healing in a toxic culture. Vermilion.
- Jane Brendgen is founder of Compassionate Cultures. She is an executive coach specialising in authentic leadership, adult development and therapeutic coaching. She is a mindfulness supervisor.