My Cancer - The story of a Cancer Survivor

At the time (Jan 2000) I had complete belief in the doctors and so I handed myself over to them, I followed all the instructions and made a full recovery. The power of the mind is awesome and with my belief that I would recover from cancer there was never going to be any other outcome.

Now I have a different view or more accurately a much wider view and therefore I am in a better position to understand more about the how and the why of my cancer.

Healing always comes from within, we are the only ones who can truly heal ourselves and the journey continues throughout ours lives. We take our healing from the same level of existence that we are currently residing in (I'll explain that a little more later). When we develop such a huge dis-ease as cancer then we know that we have been unaware of our body, mind and soul for some considerable time. This need not be such bad news because cancer and other such dis-eases are some of the body's final attempts to shout at us and to bring our attention to what we are not seeing….our bodies (as well as our soul) will always try to keep us safe and take us back to balance.

Once we know that our bodies are in crisis then we have the awareness to do something about it and so begins the journey back to balance and wholeness. This journey is about organic growth, back through each milestone of remembering who we really are. Changing dis-ease is about changing our lifestyle and finding out what it was/is that we were doing that made us so ill (dis-eased) or what was it that we weren't doing that was making us so ill.

Chemotherapy is a really brutal way of treating cancer but if that is the level where you are then that is what you use. I think of it as being back in the old times with the fights between 'dark' and 'light' when battles were won with swords and axes. Like the battles we see in Lord of the Rings. Sure we would like to be in a place where peace comes through talking and hugging and everyone being compassionate with each other but there is a progression through stages before we arrive at a place where that is possible…..the earth has and is slowly evolving toward and past that point and so it is with our own personal journey.

My cancer journey started with the cut and slash of the surgeon's knife and the indiscriminate chemical warfare of chemotherapy, the 'blanket bombing' that doesn't distinguish between 'good' cells and 'bad' cells. (It happens on a global scale too, the indiscriminate destruction of innocent victims because they happen to be in an area where there are a few 'bad cells' that are not as we would like them to be). I'm not saying chemotherapy is right or wrong but having been through it once and seen how much clearing up the 'after effects' (toxification of my liver) needed, I wouldn't use that method again. (Again on a global scale, the clear up operation makes you wonder about the method used)

Yet it was the right place for me at the time. I cannot emphasise enough that the right treatment for anybody is the one that feels right to them. Make up your mind about your treatment based on what you know at that moment and never go back later to berate yourself for what you didn't know at that time. For anyone who is trying to help someone with cancer, the support you give makes a huge difference but be careful not to let your own fears take over…don't become a bully about 'you should be doing this' or 'you should be doing that', it's easy to start down that road but it really doesn't serve the person you are trying to help.

Many times I wanted to talk about the fear and sadness that I also felt but I got 'nagged' about feeling positive because that was what was important…but you can't pretend positivity when you are terrified of leaving your three children motherless. Then on top of that I would end up feeling terrified that I wasn't feeling positive 100% of the time and therefore that meant that I was going to die….a vicious spiral to get caught up in.

The main factor for healing yourself is to stay in a loving space and not to get overwhelmed by fear. I acknowledge it's much easier said than done especially with all the fear factor that goes with the word cancer. Find that place within yourself that is filled with peace and visit it often, I would walk my dogs or ride my bicycle out in the countryside and marvel at the beauty of nature and life. Have lunch with all those friends who offer.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…"
(Charles Dickens - A Tale Of two Cities)

This quote reminds me of those first few months during my chemotherapy and the contrast between all the fear that cancer generates and all of the love that cancer generates. I have never felt so loved in all my life, the cards, the flowers, the offers of help…something about this dis-ease, at a certain level, brings out the absolute best in people and I am so grateful and honoured to have felt and received it. Thank you to all of you.

One of the things that I knew that would help me was happy success stories from people who had survived and yet I found them quite elusive. Why is that? I think there are two main reasons; firstly is that some of us don't want to 'tempt fate' by saying out loud that we have survived…how mad is that? Mad but for some reason cancer does have that hold over us. In the Harry Potter books nobody uses the name Voldemort, they say 'he who shall not be named' just in case it summons him but as Hermione quite rightly points out fear of a name only serves to promote fear of the thing itself. Well I'm going to stick my head up over the parapet and say it 'I have healed myself of cancer'. The second reason that I have noticed, particularly in myself, is that it just seems down right rude to be telling people that I have survived cancer and am living happily ever after when so many others haven't made it. Again, how mad is that? My healing doesn't take away the chance for anyone else to heal and in fact it enhances the healing of others because it is starting to overturn the myth of the Silent Killer, as ovarian cancer is sometimes referred to.

As my journey continued I found myself realising over the years that I still needed to do more to create a balanced body and soul. I recovered from my operation and I did my chemotherapy and I recovered from that and started to pick up the pieces of my life again. I knew that I could never go back to my old life. Previously I had planned to work hard and save some money so that I could move here to Finland when I was around 45…great plan…but when I was confronted with the fact that I might not be around then it suddenly occurred to me that NOW was the time to be moving to Finland and doing what I wanted to do there. Knowing this and doing something about it still took time and still scared me but I was to have some 'help' from a colleague. A lady had come to work with us for the last few months before her retirement after so many years of service, her and her husband had bought a place nearby and all the plans were ready. She died of OC 5 months before retirement. To me she was an angel sent to save my life and I didn't waste her gift to me, I left work and started my journey to come and live here.

The journey here wasn't easy either, I had court battles and other people's fears to overcome. Some people get very uncomfortable when someone breaks out of the comfort zone and doesn't conform to the 'norm' anymore…I faced a lot of prejudice and finger pointing for my decision to give up my detached house, huge mortgage, civil service career etc and go to live in the forest….you can imagine! But I had realised the trap of the vicious cycle I had got into, of going to work to pay for my house but living in that house because it was close to work. It was a despairing moment but the courage to break the cycle was easy to find compared with staying in that cycle now that I was fully aware of what I was doing. To stay would have brought death to me…. It would have meant that I learnt nothing from my cancer. Already at this point I could see what a gift my cancer was to me.

I studied reiki, moved here, set this place how I liked it and settled down with my life.

Then about 2 years ago I realised that I hadn't really changed anything with my emotional level. I began to see that ovarian cancer has a lot to do with the sacral chakra and the sacral chakra is the energetic centre for our emotions. I know that I have been blocking my emotions since I was a child…I come from a family where we just don't do emotion. I knew that in order to stay dis-ease free I would have to start working on unblocking my emotions. For a while I was in great 'fear' that I had missed the point of my cancer and had put myself in danger by not changing the emotional aspects of myself but I also still had my deep trust in the Universe and the compassion therein. God or the Universe doesn't strike us down with illness if we don't see the truth of things the first time or even the second or third etc. The journey back to health is a continuing one, we slowly progress at whatever speed is right for us through the various layers and distortions. Sometimes it's only when we look back that we see the significance of events in our lives. Why was I so drawn to painting my living room orange when I came home from hospital? Orange is the colour of the sacral chakra, yet that never occurred to me for years. I had also painted my bedroom walls bright yellow, the colour of the solar plexus. My sacral was blocked from all my blocked emotions and my solar plexus was solid from all of the controls that I had placed on my life to stop me from being subjected to emotions.
The journey had begun to start unravelling that lot…..

And this is where you find me now

My reiki led me into and through emotions such as sadness and anger…finally I could start to feel them and 'own' them without feeling it would destroy me. What an amazing relief that was and yet I had been unaware of my belief that my emotions would annihilate me until the events of my life had gently led me to that moment. This is the way that the Universe works and I am so grateful for my awareness of it.

My reiki led me to energy healing through the 'coincidence' of finding a Barbara Brennan book 'Hands of Light'; on the floor of my reiki masters house. I picked it up and flicked through it and knew immediately that I would order a copy. I ordered it and its sister book 'Light Emerging ' and read then both straightaway. It took me further into the world of healing using the human energy field and I knew that this was what I wanted to do next in my life.

I found the UK School of Energy Healing and read their prospectus. The 3 year course would teach me more about healing which was what I wanted to do but it would also be a personal healing journey for me….it was as if the school had been created overnight specifically for what I wanted.

Now I am in a position to help others with their journey. It has been 8 years since I felt the first pain in my back and 7 years since my surgery and the diagnosis and I have come a long way. I have no doubt in my mind that every step on my journey was the right one for me at the right time for me. If somebody had tried to heal my cancer by insisting I use all the techniques I know now all those years ago it wouldn't have been right for me, as I have said before we operate on a certain level and to try and force our evolution is bullying and that serves no one.

Imagine a woman with a new born child and she shows that child all the endless possibilities of its life such as walking, talking, counting, running, jumping, acquiring knowledge, etc. Does she expect the child to be able to do these things straight away? No she doesn't, she understands that it all takes time and it will all happen at just the right age when the child is ready for it. We can all be mothers to ourselves and trust that when we are ready for something then it will happen. We can all be mothers to ourselves and be compassionate, to put down the stick that we use to beat ourselves with and to love ourselves instead.

I don't know if this will help anyone but let me give you a little insight into some of my emotional issues. I'll use the example of anger as that is quite a common one. When I was a little girl and didn't get the love I wanted I would stamp my feet and get very angry just as many children do. That is all quite normal because there is an underlying primitive fear that if we do not get all the love and attention that we want from our parents that we are being abandoned and if we are abandoned then we will die because a human child cannot survive alone. This is just basic psychology. Parents, depending on how they were brought up can react to this anger in many different ways but if we remember that a child has just arrived from its oneness with God then we know that a parent can never satisfy the child's demands for love and attention. It's a basic 'flaw' with having human parents!! The child also realises that it shouldn't be angry with its parents because that means that they won't love her…and then she will be abandoned and she will die. This is duality at work…welcome to the physical world! The anger gets suppressed and the child grows up. When I was about 15 I found that all this anger was starting to seep out of the cracks, I couldn't contain it very easily anymore because there is only so much room in the vessel. One day I lost my temper with my sister and hit her over the head with a tennis racket. It really frightened me because I had felt the power of this anger and I thought that I could have killed her. I vowed there and then to never lose my temper ever again. But of course that wasn't dealing with my rage only suppressing it. I started to turn the anger onto myself and would self harm. Keeping all that anger inside me and turning it on myself ultimately manifested as cancer, I was destroying myself from the inside, something was literally inside me eating me away…that was my cancer, that was my anger.

Now that I have learnt how to look at my health holistically, energetically or metaphysically I can see so much more clearly how I arrived at the place that I did and the good news is that I can see very clearly the path back to balance (healing is all about re-balancing the whole). I'm not at the end of the journey yet but I'm on the path and that is what matters because the path is what we call life. I am also in a position to help others who feel a resonance with anything I have spoken about here. I have created a healing space here at Mairela, a space where I can help people to help themselves.

And so it is.

I recently came across a very good and balanced website filled with unbiased information on all forms of help and therapy for tackling cancer. I would recommend a look at Canceractive

Alternative Views on restoring health from cancer

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