The lived body has structures of ability built up over time through habit. Serious illness, injury, and incapacity can disrupt these capacities, and thereby, one’s relationship to the body, and to time itself. This paper focuses attention on a series of healing strategies individuals then employ on the “chessboard” of possibilities intrinsic to lived embodiment. This can include restoring past abilities (pointing to the future to recreate the past); and/or transforming one’s bodily structure or use-patterns, or the external environment, to compensate. With many conditions, including progressive aging, no full rehabilitation is possible. Nevertheless, one can also seek consolation, richness, or hope by remembering the past; anticipating the future; or presencing, that is, living fully in the now. Insofar as past, present, and future are interwoven in one’s life experience, many also meet adversity by a life-story revision, constructing a new narrative to render events meaningful. Some also access a sense of transpersonal timelessness, whether through anticipation of an afterlife, or a sense of the eternal present. There is a literature on the adaptive coping mechanism used by the chronically ill, but with its diverse patient populations, methodologies, and categories, it has proved difficult to systematize. This article suggests that the structures of lived embodiment, as explored by phenomenology, provide a way to understand the modes of wholeness individuals access over time, and in relation to time—what is here termed chronic healing.

活的身体具有通过习惯随着时间的推移而建立起来的能力结构。严重的疾病、受伤和丧失能力会破坏这些能力，从而破坏一个人与身体和时间本身的关系。本文将注意力集中在一系列治疗策略上，个人然后在生活化身内在可能性的“棋盘”上使用。这可以包括恢复过去的能力（指向未来以重建过去）；和/或改变一个人的身体结构或使用模式，或外部环境，以进行补偿。在许多情况下，包括逐渐老化，完全康复是不可能的。尽管如此，人们也可以通过回忆过去来寻求安慰、丰富或希望；期待未来; 或在场，即完全活在当下。就过去、现在和未来交织在一个人的生活经历而言，许多人还通过对生活故事的改写来应对逆境，构建新的叙事，使事件变得有意义。有些人还获得了一种超个人的永恒感，无论是通过对来世的期待，还是对永恒现在的感觉。有关于慢性病患者使用的适应性应对机制的文献，但由于其不同的患者人群、方法和类别，已证明难以系统化。这篇文章表明，正如现象学所探索的那样，活生生的具身结构提供了一种方式来理解个体随着时间的推移以及与时间相关的整体性模式——这里称为慢性愈合。