How Cancer Taught Me to Love My Body
Ever since I was young, I was unhappy with my body. At 11 I got acne that never really cleared up until I went on two rounds of Accuntane at 15 and 16. My hair was never quite straight and shiny enough for my liking. My mouth was too small. One time I asked my grandfather who was a dentist if he could perform surgery to cut the sides of my mouth and make it bigger. I was a shy girl and although I had really close friendships, it was hard for me to find the confidence to step outside my comfort zone in a group or with new people.
In my early 20’s I abused my body by over-exercising and obsessively controlled eating, which then transitioned to bingeing for many years. Just like I had been unhappy with my hair and face in my teens, in my twenties I became dissatisfied with my weight and how much fat I was carrying around. That quickly moved into partying a lot and drinking too much, which at the time was fun and socially acceptable (college, boyfriend in grad school at UF), but eventually the alcohol was just used as a numbing agent for shit I had not worked through yet.
After years of off and on therapy and a deep dive into my yoga practice, I was able to stop abusing my body, but I never started loving my body in a pure, spiritual way. I never asked my body for forgiveness for all the years of neglect. Getting pregnant, carrying two healthy children to term, and having two unmedicated births broke me wide open in the sense that I found immense gratitude for my amazing body and what it had done. And by that time, I had gained enough confidence in myself to know that I was more than what my body, face and hair looked like. I also did not have enough time or interest anymore to care about things beyond being a mom and learning everything I could about my new all important full time parenting job. I had fully invested in my health through yoga, nutrition and balanced exercise so I definitely had gained a new perspective on health and wellness and what it all really meant to “be healthy”. And because of all that, I thought I had let go of a lot of the negative attachment I had about my body and had found my way to health. It took getting breast cancer for me to realize that I may have intellectually changed my perspective about my body over the years, but I had never energetically let go of the past trauma and let my body know how much I loved it. How deeply grateful I was for it and how resilient it has been for the past 44 years.
For twenty years of my life I invested a lot of time and energy in resenting my body instead of accepting it. I felt I could abuse it. Whether it was 900 or less calories per day with no more than 3 grams of fat total, or copious amounts of alcohol all in the name of a good time, or so many negative thoughts that circled around the drain of a true scarcity mindset. And then I got cancer, and I felt betrayed by my body. Same scarcity mindset patterns that were deeply embedded a long time ago when it came to how I talked to my body. The lens I viewed my body through. If my body was a friend, who I had treated badly for so long, the only outcome of that friendship would be truly toxic and I would not have been surprised. Yet because it was my body and I was still so disconnected from it, I was blown out of the water by my cancer. But when I was first diagnosed 4 months ago, I knew a lot less about myself than I know now. And since I had healthy eating habits, was basically sober the past couple of years, and understood that nutrition was all about nourishing yourself and fueling your cells, I was surprised that my body was not up for the task of fighting off rogue cells.
What I understand now is that holistically, my body’s health was suffering and one of the reasons why was that I never fell back in love with it after the many years of struggling against it. My mindset never shifted from scarcity to abundance, and energetically, I never let go of the negative emotions embedded in my cells. I had an epiphany one night after reading a chapter in Radical Remissions by Kelly Turner. One of the patients she interviews speaks to how he had misused and ignored his body for so many years while in a stressful job, so he was viewing, treating, talking to his body that was riddled with cancer, like he would treat a sick, neglected child. With love and compassion and kindness. When I read that, I realized that this was a big missing piece for me when it came to how I was viewing my body and my cancer. The concept of loving my body, the body that I was gifted to inhabit on this planet for the blessed time I am here, was something I had taken for granted for a long time. And loving my body like I love my children had never occurred to me. But once it did, it was like a missing piece of my health puzzle.
So how have I been working on letting go of all that I am somatically holding on to in my physical self? I am doubling down on my meditation practice – gratitude meditations, compassionate body meditations, an energetic meditation by Joe Dispenza. I am slowing down in life and practicing more restorative yoga. I am focused on keeping my cortisol low by being outside as much as possible, focusing on breathwork, and taking pauses throughout the day. I have been attending Stacy Conlon’s Survive & Thrive once a month. It is a sound bowl healing, meditation, and Reiki event for those impacted by cancer. Sound bowl therapy can help bring the body back into a state of resonance, which can have a positive impact on health, longevity, immunity, and mental and emotional stability. After laying on my mat for an hour, feeling the sound pulse through my cells, while receiving loving, energetic Reiki, my mind and body no longer feel disconnected and I feel deeply at peace. And the simplest practice of all (remember simple does not mean easy), is telling my body how grateful I am for the years it has given me. For the support it has provided. For the fact that it never betrayed me, even after I did not show it the same respect. And that it works really hard on a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, energetic, and epigenetic level to heal itself because that is what it is naturally programmed to do.
