What Cancer Taught Me

On August 5,2015, right after my 47^th birthday, I got the call from my doctor who told me something I could not have prepared myself to hear…” you have cancer.” Those dreaded three words left me shattered with disbelief as I struggled to not go into complete panic mode. I thought, “How could this happen to me?” I was in great health, exercised at least 5 days a week, was conscious of what I ate, juiced every day and made wheatgrass a part of my regular diet.This made no sense to me. I kept thinking how this could be happening? Then I began to think the worst, thinking that I was going to become very sick and die. In my mind I had good reason to feel this way as I had witnessed the decline of many friends and family who had succumbed to this “dis-ease.” And now here I was unable to fully process this diagnosis. Eventually as the shock settled in, my deeper fear was not so much what would happen to me but how would this affect my only child who was just entering his senior year in high school. What would happen to him if I died? Had I adequately prepared him to meet the demands of life? Would he be able to draw on his own inner strength to realize his purpose and dreams if I wasn’t here to guide and support him? Every question I had offered no answer which sent me further on a downward spiral to the point where I became numb. Even as I attempted to put on a brave face for those around me I felt something changing inside of me. I began to question my faith, my beliefs and everything that I once trusted.
 
As the days turned to weeks I began to understand that cancer was my wake-up call of how precious this gift of life is. I began to think of all the time I had wasted worrying and stressing over inconsequential things like what others thought of me and all the what ifs. What if this happen or that? What if I was not able to pay my bills? All the things we have been conditioned to siphon the joy out of our journey. What I realized is that somehow everything seem to always work out. I came to the awareness that I had been silently suffering for most of my life. Cancer was an indication that there was discord within my soul and my responsibility was to be open for both my physical as well as my soul healing. I heard so many people say, “You are fighting cancer.” I was not fighting cancer. “Everything we fight weakens us,” says Wayne Dyer. I made the decision not to attempt to fight cancer but to allow it to be another lesson on my journey. Because I know there are no wasted experiences in life, I began to understand that everything that goes seemingly wrong in our lives is an opportunity for us to grow into more of who we are. “What did I need to learn was the question I began to wrestle with.” What I now know is that pain or dis-ease is information. When we ignore the information, we suffer. When we take heed to the information, we grow.