After my bowel cancer diagnosis, I started reevaluating my whole life and the way I treated my body became definitely my focus.
I am ashamed to say I hadn’t been looking after my body, mind and myself as a whole for years. I didn’t even know what selflove was, I truly didn’t…but when the certainty of living a long life was taken away from me, I couldn’t help but become obsessed about finding ways I could help my physical body to heal, ways to sort what was going on in my head/mind, how I could get everything back into balance.
I knew I had to make some drastic changes on how I was living my life if I wanted to survive chemotherapy and stay cancer free. All of a sudden, nothing else really matter to me, literally nothing, our financial situation, work, our house, any material things around us except what I ate, how much I exercised each day and whatever else I was doing for my body and mind daily.
I connected to my inner will to live, to survive and to thrive. For me this was the wake up call I needed but shall we need a wake up call to value our health a bit more? Don’t we all need to think how we want our health to look like in the next 10,20,30 years time?
Part of me thinks it was easy for me to make all the changes I did as I was told I had Stage 3 Bowel cancer but part of me thinks was it really?
When I hear people talking about their small ailments, I wish I could shake them and say: this is your body trying to tell you something? Why don’t you listen? Why don’t you stop what you are doing and focus on yourself, on your inner voice?
For me it is quite evident now that we have our values reversed nowadays. We would rather spend money on a new dress rather than buying good quality of food, we spend more time thinking about what to wear to a party than what we are going to have for lunch. As I get back to normal life, I am still constantly reminding myself what really matters when I get caught up with mundane stuff and I loose the connection of being grateful.
I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let the time make me forget where I have been, how grateful I must be and the importance of cultivating self love.
I hope this message encourage you to rethink about how you are treating your body, what self love really means to you and how you want your health to look like in 10,20,30 years time. Our health is live anything, if we don’t put effort in it, it won’t flourish, it won’t bget better, it won’t even stay the same…with the time and the battering of each day’s life, it will decline.
Remind yourself what it is really important to you as after all if we don’t have our health, we don’t have anything.