cancer disease - Angelica Alen

I started meditating just after I started my chemo treatment. I thought meditating was another trend, another hype that the rich and famous talked about and the rest followed through but I was desperately trying to find ways to help my body and mind to heal. I needed something to help my mind to calm down, to sleep at times.

I started listening to guided meditations to help me sleep during the day but the more books I read about how to achieve physical and mental health, the body and mind connection, the more I read about the benefits of meditation.

I slowly started doing meditations that focussed on the breathe and for me I started learning how to give my mind a break, how to breath and focus on the moment.

I then signed up to the Headspace app and every day I would sit for 10 minutes doing a guided meditation that focussed on stress, calming, gratitude etc. I would sit religiously every day to meditate and most of the time I would feel silly, feel like I wasn’t achieving anything and getting anywhere.

Little I knew that small shifts were being made on my innerself…I started noticing the present moment a lot more by focussing on the feeling of the wind on my skin, listening to the birds chirping.

This was around a year ago…I have been meditating during this whole time…I can say that I did it more often than not most days in the last year.

Today I write you from my holidays…we have been away for a week today and I haven’t been meditating for over a week now. I have noticed that my mind can’t get into the present moment as quickly as when I was meditating daily.

All of a sudden I realised that all the work I have been doing was so worthy. When I can focus on the exact moment, I feel so much joy. I have realized that it is almost as if the ability to do that easily had to be taken away from me so I could value how important it is to meditate, to work on your mind, to exercise your brain muscles so you can fully live the present moment.

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.

Tag: cancer disease

The power of meditation

The future of your health