word up ~ confidence

The last two weeks I have been musing over which 'word' summed up last year, 2010. I think it was BALANCE. I devoted a whole lot time not just trying to improve my health physically, but also to think and feel radically differently towards my body. Where I reached, and where I currently reside is in viewing the extraordinarily HUGE difference between wholeness, feeling whole and strong, clear and good about oneself or being determined as being 'healthy' in the Western, medical sense of having every test result show up negative. They are very different places to inhabit, each with a whole different set of feelings and meanings.

I have worked towards (and reached) this nice place of not being so fearful as I once was. Fearful that every time I get inflamed meant I was going to die (or was closer to), that my kids would have no mother, left me paralysed with a dreadful fear for them. So it was interesting for me to see how the recent breast lump situation effected me.

Quite honestly I was quite fine. I meditated and felt instinctively many many times that the lump was fine. That it was a piece of my own good tissue gone amiss, but not drastically so. Sparkly pink healing energy I moved through my breast found resistance right where the lump was, and I concentrated not on DESTROYING, but on changing. Changing it, mellowing it, relaxing it back to normal tissue. I did this every night. I rubber st. johns wort oil in and drank strong nettle infusion several times a day.

Destroying one's self whether cancer or not seems pointless. Cancer is us, we made it, it's part of us. Why would we destroy ourselves? Why would we wish to go back in time to a place before the lump or cancer (and perhaps put ourselves right back in the same situations that created the dis-ease in our bodies to begin with). LOVE it. CHANGE it. Ask what it means, what it can tell you. Be receptive.

I have had so much swirling around me about wanting to attack and destroy and how it's the opposite of my usual wanting to NOT attack myself, my aim since having the unhelpful label of auto immune issues attached to me (which of course imply that one attacks oneself). Do I? In my mind I do, and I have, quite constantly; not being good enough in a million tiny ways all of the time. What is this but attack? I feel the body does as we ask it. Subliminally. On one level.

So it was with huge interest that I viewed this lump. What was it? What could it tell me? How could I change to accommodate it's meaning and presence. What ever sort of tissue it would be, it was me, part of me. I need to love myself to wholeness. So I need to love this tissue. That I made. In me, of me. I am whole. Always. The meditation takes me to this clear place of realising that I am not really my body. I use it, I have the gift of inhabiting it and being who I am, but it's not *me*. The phrase, me and my body, or we talk about the dead - she has left her body. We all *know* we are not *just* our bodies. Getting to a place of calmness and lack of fear means truly finding this and coming to terms with the what ifs. The what if I die. When you imagine the worst and don't push it away, it's not as bad as you imagined. Not really. Interested, explore it, see it and accept it's reality anyway. It's eventuality.

Sitting in the waiting room, waiting, that last ten minutes I thought how strange it was: I was going to be the same person tonight after a potential diagnosis as I was right then beforehand. But the anxiety, the fear, you could smell it in that oncology waiting room. We all waited to hear words dropped from someone's mouth to let us know if we could be happy or sad, in despair, or joyful, if our bodies might die sooner or not. It was the essence of what I had been seeking and feeling and wanting to express. Would I be swayed into the falseness of feeling either of these highs or lows? Would I be ANY different, really? But being human and emotional and fallible I of course felt things I wished I didn't. I opened and shut my book several times, shoved my knitting away and instead sat with my eyes closed and forced (oxymoron?) my body to relax.

I felt nothing much at all when the dr told me I had a benign breast lump, that as far as she could tell it was some sort of chronic inflammation, but that as it was not cancer she didn't care (her words) what it was, that I should come back to have it checked and measured periodically.

Later I felt relief when my family felt it for me too. But there was not the huge highs or lows I expected. I was grateful. Yet it was a whole game of chance. I saw a woman bounce in with smiles and leave like stone. How come the lottery of life picked her. The whys go on for infinity but are not worth the time. It's wise not to ask why. How maybe, that way there's hope, for redemption and meaning. 'Why' leaves none. I have felt very strange, and emotional. I think this is fine.

This year my word is CONFIDENCE. I will carry Balance onwards with me, it's a good word to hold close. But what I feel I need more of is confidence. Confidence to trust my body. Confidence to trust my decisions, confidence to trust my children in their choices, confidence in the people I love, confidence to allow life to happen. Confidence that no matter what happens to my body I can influence it with my trust.

Thanks so much for the comfort and kind words, they mean more than I can say. It is a lovely feeling to know there are other women, all of us the same, essentially, sending hope where it is needed.