Life's Silver Lining

I’m always looking for the silver lining in difficult situations that life brings me. For me, there always has to be positive benefits if I have to go through something tough. I look for the learning, the goodness that’s being brought to me from a hard place I have in my life.  Cancer is certainly no exception to this and the continuous challenges it brings to me .

I woke up this morning to the sound of cat claws scratching on paper accompanied by a stream of meows, a typical wake up from my cat, Charger.  The hint of blue sky out the window encouraged me to begin my morning wake up a little earlier than I had planned.  I felt good though and I thought, ‘why not get up and enjoy an earlier meditation and start my day.’ 

First things first in our household though. Nothing happens until Charger is fed!

Prince Chargie! It's a good life!! 

I went to open up a new blog post and this was already at the start of it. Something I had begun awhile ago and haven’t got back to yet.  I’m smiling to myself as I read the first lines because it’s exactly how my morning went today as well.  Only this time, I have decided to pull out my computer and begin writing to try and capture the thoughts that I woke with in my semi dream like state. 

Yesterday, I was doing some healing work and was asked what is the first thing that comes to your mind when I ask you, ‘what’s been positive about having cancer?’ I closed my eyes, took a breath and immediately said, ‘time to take care of myself.’  When in my adult life have I felt justified just focusing on me and spending time wholeheartedly doing exactly what I feel I need to do everyday? 

It’s not that I haven’t done things for myself since I took on the many varied roles of a woman in our modern, busy world. That’s just the paradox and part of what confused me about being told I had cancer.  I did do things that I enjoyed and took time for myself to exercise, to do yoga, meditate, get into the outdoors.  However, I realize now that partly it was the way I was going about it, I wasn’t quite resonating with that sweet spot of deep renewal.

This is where my personal work begins.  When your body develops an illness and especially an overtly life threatening one, it becomes apparent that the deepest and most important relationship you’re going to have is with your Self.  No one can tell you what you need to do on an inner level, but you. 

This is where listening to your inner voice or intuition becomes everything. It has to be your voice and no one else’s.  If you’ve been used to listening to other people’s voices about what you need to do or being driven by a stream of constant ‘shoulds’, the challenge becomes to now turn inward and listen honestly and closely to your voice.  From this place the Wellspring of life can begin to flow.

Reading, researching and gathering information is important and a natural step to take when you’re trying to decide how to move forward to deal with a massive imbalance in the body. However, it’s also incredibly overwhelming because there’s a part of you that wants to just get the recipe for success to health and begin implementing it.  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.  What came up over and over again for us as we read and discussed treatment approaches was the realization that there wasn’t one way, there were many and it depended on a lot of variables. 

There’s conventional treatments and then there’s all the complimentary approaches which are as broad and plentiful as an alpine meadow in bloom. They all look like great options, but which ones are best for me? What is the combination that will bring me back to my healthy center of being? 

This is the question that calls for a dive down into the very core of your existence. Whether you call that center Spirit, God, Creator, Soul, or another name you identify with, it’s critical that you connect with this place inside yourself.  It is the opening to your inner voice or intuition and here is where you will uncover your personal path. 

During this ‘time off,’ I have read in different places that illness is a time to ‘reset’ your Self, your Body, your Spirit.  It is the body’s way of saying, ‘you’re not listening to me so I’m making you STOP your life and pay attention!’  For this I am grateful. 

For a long time I struggled to keep my daily routines running. I felt weak inside, I didn’t have the vibrant, core energy I knew I could have and I didn’t know where it had gone or how to get it back.  I knew I needed to do more self care for myself and I increased the time I spent meditating and doing yoga. Trying to find ways to unwind from my work day and release stress.  It didn’t feel like enough though and I wasn’t sure how else to go about helping myself.  It never entered my mind that I might be really sick especially with something like cancer.

This all started a good year and a half before my body finally just said, ‘enough is enough. You’re done! You will have time off to figure out how to really care for yourself!’  Dis-ease, chronic illness, life-threatening illness are all big wake up calls. They happen for a reason and when they visit you, it’s time to listen!!

My silver lining so far has been the gift of self care I have been able to have the time for.  Every week, I am engaged in healing sessions where I am the receiver of care from another person.  Shifting my intention to focusing on healing my own body and in turn strengthening the union of bodymindspirit, has been a deep turning point for me.  Having space in my head to listen to what my inner voice is saying to me has felt like a renewal. 

I realized just how distant I had become from honoring my own intuition over the years.  How did this happen? At one point in my early thirties, I was teaching others about how to open up to their intuition and make choices based on what was true for them not others.  It’s not so important to wonder where, when, did I get lost, but that I am reconnecting with this place inside myself that only I can know and act from.  The choices I make when I tune in and listen to my intuition are the right choices for me. That’s all that matters.  The choices I make about how to heal my body become all part of how I transform my bodymindspirit back to a balanced and healthy state of being.  This is my personal treatment protocol that is true to who I am.  There is no one recipe. Each human being is a unique individual and this becomes the challenge.  To trust yourself enough to follow your inner guidance.  

If you wonder, am I doing it right, making the correct choices?  Look for feedback. Are things falling into place that support you, are you feeling happy, content, satisfied? These are signs that say ‘Yes’ back to you.

Back in February, I had a dream where I was the experiment.  We were recording everything that was going on in my body and observing changes.  There were two parts to the dream, one was about letting go and the other was about feeding and nurturing.  Like a scale weighing out both processes and searching for a balance or a homeostasis in the body. We were seeing how effective everything was working and what kind of progress there was. 

Life is an experiment. We don’t know what we’re doing all the time and so we try different things to see what feels right, what works best, what provides the results we are looking for.  Now, this practice is my life and it has opened me up to so many wonderful exchanges with people and supported me to not be afraid to listen to my intuition again and again and then to make choices that place me in the center of my personal power.

UPDATE 22 MARCH 2017

After the meeting with my Oncologist yesterday, I was left with a mixture of emotions. We talked for a long time about the exam results and acknowledged that I was showing the best possible outcome from the chemo treatments and that he doesn’t usually see such good results.  I reminded him that while we’re talking about conventional medical interventions, I have also been doing a lot of other complimentary therapies as well.

These additional therapies and I include all of my circles of support from friends and colleagues all over the world, I know have made a huge difference to my experience of meeting cancer and helping facilitate my healing experiences. 

However, even with all of the shrinkage of the tumor to the point of not being seen with the camera, the biopsy taken of the surrounding tissue did come back showing cancer cells are still residing in the area.  I wasn’t surprised by this. I know my body is busy working at getting rid of all the cancer cells. I have a picture of all these little people working inside me, shoveling out all of the garbage and getting it out as quickly as possible.  There is still more to go. More work to do and discipline needed to stay focused.  

With this new information, it opens up the conversation for other possibilities besides surgery.  This is a good thing and this is where life gets messy again.  There’s no clear answer at the moment about what’s best to do so it’s sitting with uncertainty.  This is not an easy place to be.  I want to fill it up with answers and a plan.  I know this isn’t the way to approach it right now so I’m waking up early and choosing to meditate, to write, to practice just to BE with what is arising.  To not solve the problem today. This is my mindfulness this morning and it will continue through the days.  I will keep reminding myself to come back to open space, a place where I can accept just being with wherever I’m at and knowing that I can choose to know that my bodymindspirit is healing me all the time.  Now is the time when there will be a lot of weighing of options, risks and other specialists opinions.  It is necessary to collect more information and then discuss this with the different specialists.  Through all of this, I will practice staying centered and grounded in an open field of awareness to help me find a path through unchartered territory.  No one said this was easy.