The Healing Power of Helping Others

A few years ago my friend Rob was diagnosed with leukemia and given two months to live. Rob fought the cancer with everything he had, going through chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, until deep in a skyrocketing fever he found himself in a misty train station, a train waiting to carry him to the other side. But Rob knew he had more to do still and came back, beating the cancer to survive.

Survival was a great gift, but Rob soon realized that as amazing as survival was, it was not enough. He knew he had to do work worthy of the gift he’d been given, worthy of his second chance at life. He knew had to reach out to help others around him. Along the way he found that helping others was not only the right thing to do, but held the key to healing himself. And he’s not the only one.

After talking with Rob, I started finding others who have faced their own traumas, shaken by any number of great challenges, from car accidents, to divorce, to the death of a loved one. While their challenges were varied, they all found that the key to beat their challenge lay within themselves and in the power of reaching out to help others.

Alyssa Phillips was told she had a 5% chance of surviving her rare and aggressive cancer, but held on tightly to hope, knowing she had a purpose to fulfill that was bigger than herself. Today she is reaching out to others to help them beat their own cancer, kindling their own hope as well.

Mark Black was born with aortic stenosis, a congenital heart defect, and by the time he was 23 he urgently needed a heart-lung transplant. Just days after his surgery, still weak and wired to equipment, he decided to run a marathon. Today he has run multiple marathons, and travels speaking to groups about the important lessons he learned by overcoming his challenges, lessons that anyone can use to overcome their own problems, no matter what they are.

Jeff Bell struggled with crippling OCD for many years, until he started reaching out to tell his story to help others, finding the key to helping him manage his condition. By remembering the greater good, he is able to overcome his doubts, and lead a rich full life helping others to do the same. The stories are many, and the results are amazing.

Time after time, person after person told me a similar story, of the immense challenges they had overcome, and the help they had found by reaching out to help others. Rob and I have collected their stories in our new book Gifts from the Train Station, now available on Amazon. You can sample the book to get a feel, have a look at the website, or stay tuned for more of those stories here. But one way or another, give it a look and a thought, and see what it might mean for you.

The Gifts from the Train Station book can be found here: Gifts From the Train Station

The Gifts from the Train Station website has more information here: http://www.giftsfromthetrainstation.org