Do you suffer from a long term chronic illness? Are you a caregiver to people with chronic illness in your family or friends? Do you work as a provider for people with chronic illness or design practices and systems that affect them?

In any of these roles, you will have seen the overwhelm, fear, anger, and denial that arises when a chronic illness strikes and the individual and their family turns to deal with the condition. Multiple questions arise: which doctors should you go to, what information or opinions should you believe, and how do your potential treatment options have the potential to change all aspects of your life?

Chronic Illness expert Lynn Royster Fuentes looks at these questions as part of a koan, a puzzle you have been asked to solve, an all-encompassing and fundamental question that can be answered and re-answered as you investigate the approaches that will reduce your suffering, the ways in which you will reconstruct your life, and even the meaning of suffering itself.

Illness can be a trigger for unveiling issues at all levels of development whether physiological, emotional, mental, or spiritual. For example, because illness often requires changes around food, problems such as an addiction to sugar, the use of food as comfort and a social lubricant (now disrupted), and various dogmatic beliefs about a “good” diet can come to the forefront and create conflict within the person and between them, their family and friends, and their medical team.

During the 30 years that Lynn has taught about illness and been a caregiver to members of her own family, she has discovered many things about managing this puzzle. The most helpful to her, which she shares in this module, has been the Integral approach, based on the teachings of philosopher Ken Wilber. Lynn has found that the four quadrants, or perspectives, of the integral model offer the most complete assessment of the challenges that chronic illness can bring into human lives. By utilizing them, it is possible to reduce the overwhelm, find unusual and creative answers to the koan, and unearth practical approaches that can be taken to reduce suffering and the conflicts that often arise with it.

In this module Lynn offers teachings and practice on the following topics:

• Managing chronic illness as both a project and a traumatized event.
• Resisting the tendency to want to “fix” things.
• Becoming aware of constrictions in each of the quadrants of experience.
• Noticing where your emotions come into play
• Making a plan to work on challenges one at a time.
• Managing chronic illness as a path of spiritual development