How Mindfulness Saved Me From An Incurable Illness

It wasn’t long after my diagnosis of RP that I was also diagnosed with anorexia, depression, and anxiety. I battled the eating disorder and took varying amounts of Prozac to numb myself for a decade, but the drugs just addressed the symptoms, not the root problem. I had developed an uncanny knack to seek out issues at every turn. If I could find something wrong with me, I did. If I could control something, I would. It was my favorite game of distraction; a subconscious effort of crafting troubles so that I didn’t have to think about what was really wrong with me—that I was slowly going blind and there was nothing I could do about it.

The way I see it, there are three ways to look at the hand you've been dealt. One way is to dissociate from them—that’s that boiling lava I’m talking about (Pro Tip: It never fails to burst through the surface later on). The second is to acknowledge them but with anger or sadness, living a life full of complaints, driven by worry, and fear. The last, and most difficult, is to acknowledge them with grace and gratitude for what good lies within.

I wouldn’t say I had a light bulb moment. Over time I began to recognize that I couldn’t control the things that were happening to me, but I could control how I responded to them. I came to accept that my condition wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t going to change—aside from getting worse—so I would have to change from within.

Knowing that being in the moment was really difficult for me, I decided to get more serious about my yoga practice. During my first teacher training, I learned more about meditation and began to practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is generally regarded as the act of being in the present moment, without judgment. When we are more mindful, we are more insightful. We become more anchored in the here and now.

After a while, senses other than my vision were enriched. I began to taste my food more. I started really listening and hearing what people were saying in deep conversations. I took note of the feeling of the sun on my skin or cold air on my nose. It was like I began to see life more clearly—not in a literal way, of course, because if anything my vision was becoming more cloudy and dark—but in a way that I could truly witness and connect with all of life's precious fleeting moments. Mindfulness has taught me to slow down the time between sensory inputs and reflect before I react. It has enabled me to notice when I am creating a problem to distract myself instead of addressing what’s really at the heart of the problem. Having lived for so long in a hyper-stressed state with mental and physical ailments feeding off one another, I can look back now and say that being more present has transformed my body, mind, and soul.

Today, I choose to see my deck of cards through a very different lens. What once looked like a dark curse has transformed into something light—a blessing, even. Without my visual disability, and the journey I embarked on because of it, I wouldn’t have ever been able to find the gratitude nested behind my eyes, seeking something so real and so helpful. I might not ever have become a yoga teacher, now professionally helping people who feel trapped or alone in their incurable conditions. And I certainly wouldn’t have created the online community I co-facilitate, a space for people with any kind of chronic illness or disability. Being an individual with an incurable illness is a fate that I’ve accepted—doing this led me to my purpose, and that’s something I would never change.