Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Quotes

Depression is supposed to be this genetic disease. Really? What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. What gets pushed down in depression? Your feelings, your emotions. Why would a person push down their feelings? Because they are too painful, they are too much to bear. In other words, the pushing down of feelings becomes a coping mechanism in an environment where you are not allowed to feel because your feelings threaten your attachments. So you learn to survive by pushing down your feelings and then 15 years later or 30 years later you are diagnosed with depression. Now, as a medical, biological problem, they give you a pill. I'm not here to fight against pharmacology. I've taken anti-depressants and they've helped me. They work sometimes. But they are not the answer. Because the answer is how does that childhood experience manifest in your life today. If you understand all of these historical, cultural, familial stresses imposed certain behaviors on you, certain self-view, certain patterns of emotional relating, now you can do something about it. Now it is not longer "there is something wrong with me", it is just that "this is how I adapted to what happened to me." And therefore I have the capacity now, as a conscious human being, to become aware of all this and to transform myself. It's not so easy to transform yourself because, of course, these adaptions that I've talked about, originally related to our very survival as young children and so we think we have to be that way. And we don't know any other way of being, except there's something telling us that "this is not right." Something is telling us. So we can see individual problems like depression or ADHD or multiple sclerosis or anything else as problems to get rid of or we can look at them as warning signs that we are out of sync with our true nature, that we are misaligned somehow with actually who we are. And that something in us is trying to wake us up.

A farmer had a beautiful, powerful horse that was the envy of his neighbors in the community. One day the horse jumped the fence and ran away. The farmer's neighbors were quick to come over and offer their regrets over the farmer's loss of such a horse. He simply shrugged and said, “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?” Then one day the horse came back to the farm along with five magnificent wild horses. The farmer and his son corralled the horses to train them for work on the farm. When they saw the horses, the neighbors rushed over to admire the horses and marvel at the farmer's good fortune. In response to their comments, he just shrugged and said, “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?” A few days later, the farmer's son was training one of the new horses and fell off and severely broke his leg. After several months, it became clear that the son would never walk normally again. The neighbors came by to offer their condolences over the son's infirmity. The farmer shrugged and said, “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?” Then war came to the kingdom and all of the young, able-bodied males were conscripted for the king's army, likely to never return home again. Because of his broken leg, the farmer's son was left at home. The neighbors, with much grief at their own losses, came by to comment on the farmer's good fortune in keeping his son. The farmer simply replied, “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?” Of course, the point of the story is you never know how things are going to play out over the long run, so why spend a lot of energy on mulling over whether any particular outcome is good or bad? Things can and will change. I think the reason Diane and I use “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?” as a catch phrase is that our experience with my multiple sclerosis has taught us to suspend judgment on what could happen or is likely to happen in life. It's taught us both to be more mindful—aware and intentional—about how we live our lives. In this final chapter of the book, I want to share some of those mindfulness lessons I've learned from MS in the hope that they'll be useful to you on your journey.