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Meditation helped me healed my heart

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


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Why did I get cancer?

I think we all go through this, right?

We ask ourselves the question ‘why me’ when we are going through a tough time…

going through something unexpected…something that we thought we would never have to deal with….

And in my case it was cancer…bowel cancer…Stage 3

When the doctor confirmed it was my cancer diagnosis and that I would need 12 sessions of chemotherapy.

I asked God: “Why me? Why now? Why cancer?”

My kids were only 4 and 6….

We didn’t deserve this….I didn’t deserve this…

At the same time, I put my hand up and said:

“God, I know I haven’t stopped in years…I haven’t been listening at all…and I kinda thought I was invincible, didn’t I?”

It turned out that I wasn’t invincible indeed.

I also thought God wanted to tell me I needed to heal my relationship with my family which had been troubled for many years….

Deep inside, I started to open…my heart…my body….my soul to a new life….to a new way of being and I knew that I was about to go through a lot of suffering…

But my desire to live started burning inside me….my desire to create a new life became stronger each day.

Slowly the “poor me” feeling, the guilt feeling of not having looked after myself, the ‘why me” feeling of feeling powerless started to change….

I felt a little fire inside me that slowly got bigger…

I felt empowered because I wasn’t scared to ask questions, to receive answers, to work on whatever I needed to work on…

I just wanted to live and that was bigger than any suffering and pain that I needed to face and go through….

When I reflect now how sad and powerless I felt straight after my cancer diagnosis and probably a couple of weeks after that….it pains my heart.

I know now that to work on my power within my body, mind and soul was crucial to my healing.

It made me go from feeling powerless to empowered.

I know cancer is not the only obstacle one can face, we face so many things that we don’t think we are able to cope with…

An accident that changes your life, a stroke, a chronic disease diagnosis, a death in the family, loss of a loved one, a sick child, a divorce…the list goes on.

Making the shift from feeling powerless to empowered is an important part of the process….

it makes you open to change, to learning, to creating, to forgive, to love, to share, to evolve and become the best version of yourself.

So now….tell me about your life?

Has anything happened recently or in the past that you haven’t dealt with?

Something that made you too scared to even face?

Something that you are still living with but that scares you, that make you feel like you want to hide in the corner in the dark?

How can you change your perspective from

‘Why me, poor me’

to

‘This is why….”

If you ask me “why do I think I had cancer?”

I can tell you it was because I needed to heal my heart, forgive…

I needed to appreciate life a little more….

be more grateful….

I needed to learn how to let go….

I needed to learn how to stress less….

to love more….

to laugh more…..

to rest more….

to enjoy life a little more..

.I needed to put my self first…

I needed to love myself unconditionally for who I was, for who I am and for who I was to become.

What about you?

Why has any life interruption happened to you?