Description

Are you living with or caring for someone else with chronic illness? Are you overburdened by the huge project that comes with managing an illness? Are you affected by, even traumatized by, society’s attitudes toward people with a chronic illness?

In The Koan of Chronic Illness: An Integral Approach, Lynn Fuentes, a longtime caregiver and patient as well as an educator in the field, offers multiple practical suggestions for how those living with chronic conditions might address these issues. In addition, she offers a wholly different view of the meaning and place of chronic illness in human life, as not separate from our humanness but as an intrinsic part of our being, as not something to push away but as something to learn from, as not a hiatus from “real” life, but as a path to more profound human development. Finally, she frames a vision of how society as a whole might address chronic illness in a more evolutionary, compassionate, and inclusive way.

Using the comprehensive integral maps of philosopher Ken Wilber, himself a person with long-term chronic illness, the author describes effective ways to frame and clarify the realities of living with chronic illness and then shows us how to work with these maps to improve each area of this life, from managing personal disempowerment and trauma, to handling relationship changes, to negotiating social attitudes, to shifting interior values and beliefs.

About the Author

Dr. Lynn Royster Fuentes

Lynn Fuentes has pursued a path of personal and spiritual growth for many years in conjunction with a varied career as a lawyer, mediator, journalist and university professor. She received her B.A. from the University of Michigan, her M.A. from Prescott College, her J.D. from George Washington University, and her Ph.D. from the Union Institute and University. Currently, Lynn and her husband own and manage their company, Transformation Teaching, LLC, which offers personal and spiritual growth coaching, courses, and related resources. Prior to starting the company, she designed and taught courses in conflict management, chronic illness, adult psychology, and writing at Prescott College and DePaul University, where she also founded and directed the Chronic Illness Initiative, a unique program to help chronically ill students obtain a college education. Dr. Fuentes also served on the board of the Solve ME/CFS Initiative. She has two grown children and lives in Sedona, AZ with her husband, Jose Ricardo Fuentes.