I am not sure if you have read the previous posts but on the last blog, I talked about how breathing and yoga helped me on my path of healing, self discovery, self love, physical and mental well being.
Ya know after establishing yoga as one of my daily habits during chemotherapy, I knew I needed to take a step forward…
I had used meditation to help me to sleep at the beginning of my cancer treatment especially during the day when I was so tired but couldn’t physically get to sleep as I was on so many steroids as part of my anti nauseous medication.
I had also experienced a little bit of meditation while doing yoga and focussing on my breathing…
But I realized pretty quickly that I needed to learn how to sit quietly, by myself and this is how I started meditating daily as part of my daily routine too.
I tried a few free meditations on Youtube, on Apple podcast app but one day I came across a powerful meditation while listening to a Cancer Symposium online organized by Kris Carr (a cancer survivor and thriver who has been living with Stage 4 cancer for the last 16 years).
There were many integrative doctors, health professionals, motivational speakers, healers and survivors speaking at that Symposium.
The meditation was done by Iyanla Vanzant, a spiritual teacher and life coach – an amazing human being as I later found out.
It was a beautiful meditation and I felt so connected to my body, to my cancer while doing it….
In the middle of the meditation she asked me to put my hands on my cancer/or wherever the tumour was.
Then she asked me to ask the question to it, to my cancer “why are you here?”
“My cancer” answered loud and clear…it was almost as if it had shouted at me: “Anger”
I was so shocked…ashamed…sad…but I knew that listening to that answer, acknowledging was going to be an important part of my healing.
I had been so angry…angry with my family…with their family…with my life, the life and challenges I had been given…the life that I felt to that point it had been a lonely one because I had never felt supported by my family.
I had put all my happiness and fulfilment on external factors and people as supposed to look for it within myself.
I had blamed external things and people for so many things that didn’t go right in my life and I forgot to take responsibility, to accept my reality, to accept the life I was giving…which from where I am sitting now…is full of blessings.
Incorporating meditation in my daily routine allowed me to uncover my wounds, my pain that was buried inside my soul and so ingrain in it…
There was no more running away from myself….I knew the work to pull it all out was going to be a process….and once more I was up for the challenge.
I was finally open to trust the process and to do whatever it took to do the work to uncover it all.
I knew that the anger inside me was a fundamental part of my cancer…an important cause that contributed for the growth of disease in my body…I knew that in order to be healthy I needed to work on healing my inner self.
This is how meditation helped me and still does…
If you have never meditated, I would love you to give it a go…
My biggest advice on meditation is don’t set any expectations before you do it, meditation is simply a time for you to sit quietly with yourself…some days you will be able to free your mind more than others…the most important thing is to let go of any expectations and to keep doing the work daily…trust the process.
Let me know how you get on….I would love to hear…
If you want to try a meditation, click on the link below as I have recorded a couple of meditations for you:
Meditation 1 – to connect to your inner body in times of uncertainty
Meditation 2 – to cultivate self love