Shambhavi shares Anandamayi Ma’s advice for working with illness. She talks about her own illnesses and how to bring chronic illness and pain onto the path. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
Podcast First Words
Student: Can you talk about how one works with chronic pain as a part of practice?
Shambhavi: Sure, great question. So chronic pain, yes. Here’s Ma’s advice about when you have illness: Find the very best doctor you can afford. Find the very best, most accomplished doctors you can afford, and do your best to work with the illness. If that doesn’t help, or it doesn’t cure you, then understand that this is just part of what is going to be in your life. You’ll learn to work with it in other ways.
But her first advice was go to the doctor. Go to the very best doctor you can find. Get professional help. So she was very practical, which I love.
And then I’ll add some advice to that. Never only go to Western doctors. There are some things for which we need to go to Western doctors. But it should always be to complement someone who can give you actual dietary advice, perhaps herbs, and other kinds of treatments.
This is because Western medicine really doesn’t know very much about chronic illness and how to work with it. In general, Chinese doctors, Ayurvedic doctors, Daoist doctors, and pretty much any kind of doctor besides a Western doctor is going to have much more effective treatments for chronic illness.
We also know that Western medicine has just gone down some really weird rabbit hole of horrible medicines that are worse than what they are supposed to cure. You know, they create side effects that are just unimaginable, so don’t do that. Don’t take anything that’s not safe. If you’re someone who likes to go to Western doctors, or you have to go to Western doctors for whatever is happening, always package that with some other treatments that are more naturopathic because they will be more effective in the long run.
