I suffered a major stroke on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend in 2011. What I thought was going to be the happy first day of summer turned out to be an unexpected, full-blown trip to death’s door. And I walked away from it by the skin of my teeth.

          I had been taken to our local suburban hospital, but they quickly determined that my condition was dire, so they rushed me to the Thomas Jefferson Hospital of Neuroscience in center city, Philadelphia.  I fell into a semi-coma for about thirty-six hours and when I finally regained consciousness, although I felt fine, I was told that I had suffered from a major stroke.

          An enormous blood clot had formed and had travelled throughout my circulatory system. If it had landed in the wrong place, it could have killed me within seconds, or maimed me seriously for the rest of my life. But to everyone’s amazement and relief, the clot came to rest in a benign area of my lower right cerebellum and caused me no significant harm.   

          They needed to thin my blood, so I was kept in intensive care for ten days. During that time, every doctor and nurse that saw me told me how fortunate I had been. According to them, my chances had been less than one in a thousand.

          I had become quite friendly with the head nurse of ICU and at the end of my stay, she came to check me out and wish me well.       “I’m glad I got to meet you,” she said.  “You seem like a nice enough person, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see you again.”

          She went on to tell me how incredibly fortunate I had been and that the hospital had no way of knowing why these kinds of outcomes take place. So, they have what they call their “Hand of God” file and that’s where my case history was being placed. It’s called “Hand of God” because that’s the only explanation they have for what saved me.  

          Then, with a most earnest look on her face, she said, “You’ve been here for ten days, but I’ve been here for over twelve years now, and I’ve seen every possible situation that you can imagine. And trust me, you are more fortunate than you’ll ever know.

          “You’ll never really be able to understand the miracle that has happened to you,” she continued, “But if you wake up every morning for the rest of your life and the first thing you do, before you even go to the bathroom, is get down on your knees and thank God for the gift you were given, you’d be understating it.

          “The truth is,” she concluded. “You will never be able to have the level of gratitude that would be appropriate for the miracle that happened to you here. You will never be grateful enough for it.”

           “Well, at least I can try,” I thought.

           I went back home to my normal life and as you can imagine, the whole experience left me with a lot to think about. Of course, having survived such a close brush with death put a major emphasis on the fact that your life is temporary and can be taken at any time, which certainly helps you set your priorities straight.        But there was another part to it that affected me on a much deeper and subtler level. The fact that a miracle had happened and that I was kind of taking it for granted didn’t sit well with me. Although I understood intellectually how amazing the outcome had been, I wasn’t fully connected to it. I guess it was because of the way I had experienced it. Basically, I had slept through the whole thing.

          All that I had experienced was that I had been feeling pretty sick, they took me to the hospital, I fell asleep and then I woke up feeling fine. Except for the hospital part, I’d had that kind of thing happen to me dozens of times in my life.

          My wife had a much deeper connection to the miraculous recovery than I did because she had consciously lived through it. While I drifting between life and death for 36 hours, she was involved with the doctors every step of the way. When it started, they told her there was nothing to do but wait, watch and pray, and that she should prepare for the worst as there was a real chance that I wasn’t going to make it. Then, a day and a half later, they told her that the clot had landed in the best place possible and that I was going to be fine. I think she was in the hospital chapel when she heard the news, so she had a real experience of the grace involved.

          Critically for me, when I came out of it, I felt absolutely fine and had no idea that anything had happened at all.  If they had told me that I was fine and they were sending me home, I wouldn’t have thought a thing about it. But during the ten days they kept me in intensive care, every doctor and nurse treated at me like I was a walking miracle and they all told me how lucky I was and how grateful I should be.

          Here’s a small example of what it was like for me. They really wanted me to eat a lot, so, for my first dinner, I ordered a huge meal with one of my favorite desserts - cherry pie with vanilla ice cream on top. One of the brain surgeons was in the room while I was eating and when I opened the lid of the dessert plate, I saw that they had given me chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla.

          “Oh,” I said, slightly disappointed.

          “What’s the matter?” the doctor asked.

          “Oh nothing,” I replied. “I had ordered vanilla ice cream for my cherry pie but they gave me chocolate. It’s no big deal.”

          “Do you know where you are?” the doctor asked. I looked at him quizzically. “You’re at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital of Neuroscience, and ninety per cent of the people that come in here with the magnitude of the stroke that hit you get either wheeled out of here or carried out in a box. But it looks like you’re walking away free and clear. So, if I were you, I wouldn’t be thinking about chocolate or vanilla anymore.” It was all very much like that.

          Once I got home and started living my normal life again, I couldn’t help feeling a little strange. The nurse’s parting words to me kept ringing in my ears and I knew they were true – I would never be able to feel enough gratitude for what I had been given.

          But I couldn’t just leave it at that. I had an intuitive sense that there was something important for me to learn here, that there was something valuable waiting for me to discover. So, without knowing where it was going, I opened myself up to exploring the idea.

          What followed took many years of research and inner evolution, and it’s still going on to this day. I’m actually writing a book about it that will be called “The Friend at the End,” but here is a very brief overview of some of the key points.

          It all started with exploring the idea of gratitude itself, and it soon became apparent that you can’t have gratitude without appreciation. If you don’t know the value of something, how can you be grateful for it?

          For example, let’s say you’re out for a walk and you find a funny looking little coin in the dirt. You take it home and put it your coin jar. A few years later, things get tough financially for you and you finally take your coin jar to the bank to get some cash. Things are pretty tight. You dump your coins into the coin counter and it rejects that one funny little coin that you completely forgot you had. Rather than throwing it out, you casually show it to the banker.

          The next thing you know, you find out that the coin is a rare treasure, worth over a million dollars. Suddenly you are overwhelmingly grateful that you ever found that coin.  It has completely changed your life. But the truth is, you had it for years and you almost just threw it out. But once you understood its value, your whole life changed. Simply put, your gratitude for it came from your appreciation of its value.

          I started to see that gratitude and appreciation can run in a cycle. The more appreciation you have, the more gratitude you have. And the more gratitude you have, the more appreciation you have. It builds on itself, going on and on. And fortunately, there’s no end to it.

          And importantly, this great cycle keeps bringing you more and more happiness. Like everything else in our consciousness, it grows stronger with use and eventually becomes second nature. You find yourself spending a lot less time wanting the things you don’t have and much more time appreciating what you do have. And this brings about some very powerful changes in your overall being.  

          Then things went a little deeper for me. Not really being connected to the miracle that happened for me with the stroke led me to realize that I wasn’t really connected to the miracle that was happening to me of being alive.  

          Now being alive is so commonplace, why would you call it a miracle? The answer is rather simple. It’s a miracle because it defies all scientific and logical explanation. Nobody knows how or why it works. And even though breathing is the very basis of our life and we can’t do a single thing without it, no one can purchase, own or obtain one single breath in any way.

          If you look at that fact deeply enough, you can easily come to the conclusion that life is a gift. You don’t have to do a thing to get it and it stays with you no matter what you say, think or do.

          So, if it is a gift, then what is my role in the process? Well obviously, I’m not the giver. Although I’ve heard and read a lot of different ideas about a giver, the only thing I really know for sure about it is that I’m not it. I don’t have the power to bestow the gift of life upon one single cell amoeba. And neither does anyone else, no matter how rich or powerful they may be.

          So, if I’m not the giver, the only thing left for me to be is the receiver. And this is where I saw something profound. I realized I could become a better receiver of the gift, and I knew on many levels that doing this would radically change my life. And it did.

          From what I’ve learned, I don’t want to be in the same situation with the miracle of life that I was with the miracle of the stroke. I don’t want to be asleep to it, I want to be awake to it. I don’t want to be unconscious of what a wonderful gift I’m being given. Quite the contrary, I want to be conscious of it. And I want to be appreciative of it and grateful for it while it’s actually happening. Not after the fact.

          That seems like the real trick. We all appreciate the good things in life when we look back on them, but what about when they’re actually happening, in the present, where the power of life is? I can tell you from decades of research, every esoteric tradition in human history points you in this direction, saying that the key to real happiness and freedom is hidden there.  

          On one level, getting to it is kind of a tall order. When the ICU nurse told me that I could never be grateful enough for what had happened to me, I instinctively thought, “Well, at least I can try.”

          And maybe I’ll never get to the point of being a truly conscious and grateful receiver of the miracle of life, but well, at least I can try. And I’m more than willing to die trying. Actually, that might be a really good way to go.

          So that’s the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened, and let’s get together in the next one.