Happy Again

*This story is excerpted from  Healing with Life Force, Vol 3 (Magnetism)

Her name suited her perfectly – Happy! Full of energy and creatively gifted, Happy delighted in her friends, who felt uplifted in her presence and were infected by her natural enthusiasm for life. 

Happy was passionate about sharing and serving. She loved theater, music, and dance and wrote, directed, and performed in plays about spiritually inspiring historical figures.

Uncharacteristically, Happy began to feel her energy flagging. Where she had been enthusiastically engaged, she now felt tired and less interested. When mysterious aches and pains appeared while she trained to run a marathon, she sought medical help and was subjected to a broad range of tests. No one could have suspected the diagnosis: Happy had AIDS. The doctors suspected that the virus had entered her body years earlier. Long dormant, it had now become active.

Life-saving medications were still in the experimental stages, and the doctors told Happy that she could expect to live perhaps eighteen months. She was uncertain how to respond – should she accept the diagnosis and prepare to leave this world, or should she fight hard to prolong her life? She asked her spiritual guide, Swami Kriyananda, for his counsel.

“If you die, you’ll just have to start over in a new incarnation,” he told her. “It may take you a long time to get to where you are now. If it were me, I would keep trying to live until I couldn’t meditate anymore, or until I felt that the treatments or the body itself were an insurmountable obstacle to spiritual progress.

“You have a wealth of techniques in Yogananda’s teachings that you already know. Use them: deepen your meditation, use the affirmations, and do the Energy Recharging exercises more often and more conscientiously. Chant, pray, and find ways to share your journey with others.”

His advice was a great comfort. By following his instructions, she became Happy again. During the ten remaining years of her life, Happy progressed remarkably in her meditations. She chanted, and she sang affirmations from Yogananda’s poems and writings. Regular practice of the Energization Exercises built her body’s immunity, revitalizing the cells. There were ups and downs, during which she was occasionally at death’s door. But when she was strong, she shared her remarkable journey with others through her play, The Ribbon Dance which she performed for AIDS awareness and support groups around the country, bringing hope, comfort, and joy to thousands, and receiving numerous awards for her work with AIDS awareness in high schools.

To friends and strangers alike, Happy became an embodiment of a favorite affirmation she had composed: “God’s power, vitality, good health and strength, flow through me, flow through me.”

--Excerpt from Healing with Life Force, Vol 3 (Magnetism)