I've had psoriatic arthritis for five years. I've seen different doctors and two rheumatologists in that time. None of these learned folk have indicated to me that increasing happiness would have the slightest affect on my pain and disease. Yet not only does it make a difference, but a profound, life-changing difference.
I was very aware, through experience, that 'stress' contributes to illness and disease. Our negatively skewed health system acknowledges the bad lifestyle choices and circumstances, but completely overlooks the health promotion factor of happiness! It never occurred to me to view the positive promotion of happiness as a way of limiting my disease!
Here is the story of what has happened to me to bring me to the realisation that being happy will change my life.
While on bed rest two years ago, when I was pregnant with our third child, I learned a lesson about acceptance. I learned to accept what I couldn't change, to relax despite chaos around me, and to preserve a piece of self-soothing calm. These were significant lessons for me. My baby's birth was tinged with a great deal of sadness, my Dad was in hospital (a different hospital from us!) 5 minutes up the street from me when our youngest was born. Then my family were sick and between one thing and another, Dad didn't meet his youngest grandchild until she was 2 weeks old. My delight in her existence has often been marked by a huge burden of caring for my Dad, his continuing illnesses falling mostly on my shoulders to assist with, and no family support for moving him either in with us, or to our neighbourhood to ease the burden. Throughout all this, I have maintained a degree of calm, through learning to let go more and more, but not without some cost in terms of missing moments of peaceful joyfulness and delight at our small baby. There is a sense of loss of some of those moments that I will not be able to get back, but it is that kind of new baby happiness that makes all the difference!
And then Bruce Springsteen happened, and like a bolt of lightning, my happiness levels skyrocketed. One of the most significant parts of this was the evaporation of my mid-life crisis. I'd been experiencing a degree of bleak thinking, as I have high blood pressure, and I'm caring for my Dad, whose high blood pressure is at the end stage of its affect on him, giving him vascular dementia, chronic renal failure and chronic heart failure. It is a shocking thing to see him so frail, he was until the last couple of years incredibly robust and independent. I am very conscious of my 'middle-age' and young family, and the combination of these factors often had me questioning my mortality, the inevitability of death for all of us, and the fact I felt that my time with my children was oh so limited (as my time with my father, and his fully faculties, had already almost run out). These are all valid concerns, but it took the song "We Are Alive" for me to face my biggest fear and realise that despite our brief time here, we are all part of a bigger humanity, and to draw comfort from that. I'm the kind of person who 'bucks up' when I realise that yes, the physicality of death is gruesome, but it is only partially the ending of my story. My story will pass in fragments on to others, and join the collective story that surpasses the individual. I find great comfort in that.
Furthermore, as I've previously mentioned, Bruce Springsteen as a live performer is incredibly uplifting and inspiring. Not only for the boundless energy he exhibits, but for the infectious delight and enjoyment he so clearly wants to spread throughout the audience. I am particularly amenable to charismatic influence, so not only did I take the enjoyment away, but I consciously went out of my way in the following days and weeks to build on the happiness I found in my first Springsteen concert. This industriousness was just the beginning of the overflowing happiness to follow.
By chance, having stumbled across extra concert tickets for Melbourne, I saw him again, this time with a friend, in the GA, or standing 'pit' area. I intended to enjoy myself and dance!
Between Springsteen and my inspirationally fit friend, I realised that I was soley responsible for my life's current situation, I was at the helm, in charge and commander of my own self. This shift in perception away from being a 'victim' of various circumstances / disease / other people made a huge difference to my outlook. Suddenly I was extremely happy and light. I didn't hold onto grievances or sorrow, but between the eventual three concerts I attended, I simply became determined to continue to enjoy, to be the best me I could be!
My happiness overflowed. I smiled, I didn't shout or swear, I was calmer, because I was enjoying myself! Arriving home I went out of my way to continue to be happy, to find the absurd and amusing and hold onto the post-concern silly grin whenever I could. On days when things appeared to be going wrong, I looked on the bright side, I looked towards solutions and never at the problems. Overall my satisfaction with my life would have gone from a 3/10 to an 8/10.
I was also walking between 15 and 30 minutes every day, going out with my favourite Springsteen music and putting a smile on my face while letting the exercise pump out the endorphins.
The most incredible thing happened! My auto-immune disease began disappearing into the background of my life, pain levels plummetting and the visible psoriasis on my arms fading to scars. Its not a pretty picture, but it illustrates the point :)
The past couple of week have been more difficult, this week since Mothers Day I've had a particularly nasty virus, so finishing off this blog post has been quite a reminder for me to take some time to find a happy place, for the sake of my health.
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