I remember talking to my favorite nurse while receiving my cancer treatment…
Why he thought people got cancer?
Was it diet?
Was it the lack of exercise?
Was it age related? ( I was always the youngest by far in the whole treatment room – there were around 30 people in an open plan floor)
He then told me that he saw lots of early 20’s years old diagnosed with Leukaemia…
They were vegan, athletes…
They drank green juices, were physically stronger than anything…
I was shocked as I hadn’t seen one of these patients…
Then he told me…
I think the biggest issue is STRESS…
Back then I hadn’t started working on my stress…
on my old patterns around stress…
I was shocked to be honest…
He had been working in oncology for 8 years…
I think he knew a thing or two about cancer…
He was the one who told me
“Angelica, in 8 years of oncology I have seen 4 patients finishing this treatment and you are one of them”
He knew what he was talking about…
There is a vulnerability that comes from sitting in that chemo chair that it is hard to explain…
My nurses became my family for 7.5 months…
My life depended on them…
I shared with them who I was…
There were no facades…
I guess a lot of people did the same…
When he said that, I had to acknowledge I had been stressed for a very long time….
Emotional stress and physical stress…
Emotional stress came from the pressures I put on myself…
On the need to being constantly perfect at everything…
On the need to having it all under control…
All my shit together…
Emotional stress came from not acknowledging I had been angry my whole life..
I had gone through lots of emotional trauma in my teenagers’ years…
Physical stress came from abusing my body with alcohol for years…
(you don’t have to be a diagnosed as an alcoholic to damage your body from drinking too much alcohol by the way)
Physical stress came from not eating enough foods that came from the earth
From thinking that having a treat ever other day is necessary…
It is fine…
And this is what living is about…
Physical stress came from not attending to my body…
From keep pressing that “dig deep” button and you should be just fine…
So I decided to work on my relationship with stress…
I realized that:
Life without a stress is an illusion…
Life will always present us with stressful situations…
It is up to you how you react to it…
Most importantly the “little” stress in your lives accumulate into “big” stress..
Into chronic stress…
Into chronic illness…like I had…
The only way to keep on top of it is to de-stress yourself daily…
To create daily habits where you let go of the “little” things…
Create daily habits where you keep filling your cup instead of leaving it to get completely empty…
These days when I am going through a real stressful time…
I am more focus on my self care practices than ever…
I am more religious about carving out time for me…
I am more discipline about working through it all…
I don’t disregard anymore what I am going through…
My emotions…
My feelings…
I show up to them…
Every single day…
If you have been stressed lately, I have put together a course with some easy tools you can use to de-stress daily.