BALANCE
Before I was diagnosed with cancer, I had a general understanding of what holistic healing technically was: an approach that looked at the whole person versus just the symptoms in order to heal them. But, I didn't truly understand what healing and staying healthy on multiple levels meant or how much all of these levels interacted with and affected one another. It's one thing to know about the mind-body connection, about mental health and emotional health, about spirituality, and another one entirely to go through the process of discovering, exploring, navigating, and attempting to tap into all of them to heal.It took me a while to accept that I didn't just need to focus on my physical health in order to heal from cancer and go on to thrive, to give myself the best chance of never having to go through this again. And that's because physical healing is actually the more straightforward one. You have doctors, research, well-laid out plans and steps, therapies, drugs, and tons of advice and input on what you should do. But when it comes to mental, emotional, and spiritual health? It's easy to feel lost, unsure, scared, resistant, and therefore unwilling to look at and explore these areas of health and healing.
Trust me, I have been there. These areas of our health require digging, they require changing, they require exploring ourselves and maybe accepting some difficult truths. But it is my firm belief that these parts of our healing are so very important and just as necessary to our health as the physical level. Working on my mental health has better prepared me for cancer PTSD and living day-to-day with the fear of recurrence and the truth of our mortality. Supporting my emotional health has allowed me to discover long-held, negative beliefs about myself that were simply not true and that I needed to release, building self-worth and personal growth in their place. And exploring my spirituality, something I had never done before, made it possible to release much of the anger and resentment and bitterness surrounding being diagnosed and open myself up to all of the gifts that adversity can give us, if we let it. This exploration also helped me to fear death a little less, because it helped me to begin discovering my beliefs around what I think happens to us after this life.
In short, exploring these areas of my health and healing that I had never really considered before, let alone connected to, is what got me to where I am now. It's somewhere I couldn't have even imagined on the day I was diagnosed. It's a place of strength, determination, self-love, confidence, achievement, connectedness, flow, and yes, sometimes fear and anxiety and anger. But I have far more good days than bad, and that's really all we can ask for. It's what got me to who I am meant to be and the life I meant to live. The Anishinaabe have yet another ethic in their code which beautifully illustrates the importance of the connectedness of all of these levels of health and healing.
"Keep yourself balanced. Your Mental self, Spiritual self, Emotional self, and Physical self - all need to be strong, pure and healthy. Work out the body to strengthen the mind. Grow rich in spirit to cure emotional ails."
And I really couldn't agree more. I feel the rightness of this need for balance deep in my gut. I believe it has played such a role not only in my healing but in the foundation of my thriving after cancer. So, if you haven't explored these corners of your healing and growth yet, now is the time to start. You have no idea the number of ways your life can grow and change for the better, and it all starts with one step: opening yourself to possibility that there is some work to do on these levels, and then exploring what that work is for you. It could be healing traumas, releasing anger, asking for or granting forgiveness, exploring your spirituality and what it means for you, reducing your stress and getting better at managing it, or something else entirely. Whatever the work is, the important part is that you do it.
Happy Healing
