hopefulandstrong wrote:I had a talk with my cancer yesterday. Told it that it that as much as I have grown to appreciate the preciousness of life in the past six months, it no longer sparks joy. I thanked it sent it away.
Kidding aside, wonder what others' experience with visualizing the disease leaving your body -- vaporizing, dying, disappearing --- whatever you've experienced. Love to hear about it. That conversation felt empowering, and I keep repeating it to myself...
I've always liked this take on meeting illness and befriending the places of pain by John O'Donohue. This is an extract from his book
Eternal Echoes: Exploring our Hunger to Belong, 1998. It gives an example of how you can language an energy of healing and
adapt it to your unique circumstances, and personalise the experience.
When different places within us are in pain, we should extend the care of deep friendship towards them. We should not leave them isolated under siege in pain. A friend of mine went to hospital to have a hysterectomy. A priest friend came to visit her on the evening before her operation. She was anxious and vulnerable. He sat down and they began to talk. He suggestd to her that she have a conversation with her womb. To talk to her womb as a friend. She could thank her womb for making her a mother. To thank it for all her different children and who had begun there. The body, mind and spirit of each child had been tenderly formed in that kind darkness.
She could remember the different times in her life when she was acutely aware of her own presence, power and vulnerability as a mother. To thank her womb for the gifts and the difficulties. To explain to it how it had become ill and that it was necessary for her continuing life as a mother to have it removed. She was to undertake this intimate ritual with tenderness and warmth of heart.
The operation was a great success. Her conversation with her womb changed the whole experience. The power was not with the doctors or the hospital. The experience did not have the clinical, short-circuit edge of so much mechanical and anonymous hospital efficiency. The experience became totally her own, the leave-taking of her own womb.
When a part of your body is ill, it must be a lonely experience for it.Upping the ante on quirky, must be so lonely being a cell that's a malignant neoplasm. Nobody loves you, you get hammered with gamma rays and poisons then
there's that shiny sharp cutty thing and giants wearing masks ..... then all your family is gone!! Your friends!!! They were just there a moment ago......then
there's a blast of cold air and ....the Light! Bright light bright light....then .... you're being squashed between two pieces of glass and squirted with dye and then....oh no!! .....there's an EYE at the end of a dark tunnel....and you feel so naked and exposed, like the EYE can see right through you.....then you spend the
rest of your life in a box in a cupboard.