A little more than five weeks ago I found myself on the floor. I didn’t how I got there. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get up. I kept trying but somehow my leg wouldn’t work. Then I touched my arm. It felt dead and cold. I couldn’t speak.

I was in the midst of an acute thrombotic stroke. Fortunately, my partner, Mark, found me shortly after it happened. Time is of the essence for a stroke. I am aware that, had it happened in my sleep, I would have died.

In the days that followed, the overwhelming feeling I experienced was delight. Delight in the sunlight on leaves, in the ducks landing feet first in the water, in the beauty of life. My friend, John Perkins, offered to do a shamanic journey where he asked the question, “What am I called to do as a result of the stroke?” The answer was that I wasn’t called do anything, I was called to be. From being I would know what to do.

When I say I am happy to be alive it has more meaning than you could know. I had an experience of the preciousness of being in a body, of the body as a gift that houses the soul. I could feel my body as separate from me – an entire separate entity with its own wisdom and intelligence. As I loved it and treated it with kindness, I was the recipient of the same. The sense of a separate entity that housed one's soul was so profound that I started seeing people’s essence shining out from their bodies.

It is a process, and I know that there is more to be revealed. I am still in recovery and as I go to my various therapies I can get discouraged and even feel sorry for myself, at times. Yet, if there is a gift in the stroke it is a call for a change from doing things out of obligation to letting delight be my guide. That being leads my doing. The awareness that permanence is the state of my essence and impermanence is the state of this life. In other words, anxiety and worry are a huge waste of time.

Being in body is a gift. Treat it as the most precious thing you own.