It’s more than the medicine

Brenda Michaels featured on a magazine cover

For about a year now I have been attending  Healthy Steps at The Wellness Community. It’s an exercise class focused on getting the lymphatic system moving for those of us who have had breast surgery.

I have always enjoyed my instructor Sally, who is also a survivor, because of her positive, upbeat attitude. Yet I have never gotten to know her on a personal level. Today I decided to hang around for a bit and we got into a really good discussion about spirituality and how powerful our mind is over our body and circumstances. It turns out, like me, she is a fan of books like The Secret and The Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer.

Now these books might seem like “hocus pocus” to some people — it certainly did to me years ago. But since my recurrence, I have relied on their principles to help alleviate fear, achieve happiness, and yes I believe, to promote healing.

Brenda Michaels, who is featured in my book, is another believer. The three-time, 23-year cancer survivor now interviews people like Wayne Dyer, Michael Beckwith, Deepak Chopra and other spiritual “gurus” on her radio program, Conscious Talk. When she was diagnosed with cervical cancer at age 26, she was leading an unhealthy lifestyle and in an abusive marriage. Later she was diagnosed twice with breast cancer, and started making big changes in her life.  Here’s an excerpt from her story:

I began to look at the emotional and spiritual components of disease. It opened my eyes, and I had this amazing and profound awakening as a result. I wanted to be the emotionally, mentally and spiritually healthiest person I could be, and I wanted to share that with others. I started being grateful for all the good in my life, including my cancer. In that moment, cancer was the right thing for me to be experiencing because it was part of my waking-up process. 

I began to look at where I was stuffing my feelings rather than offending people in my life.  …  I was always trying to control everything. It’s incredibly fatiguing to a system to try to be in control of everything in life when in actuality you are not. I woke up to the fact that while I couldn’t control events in my life, I could control my response to them. I could learn from it. …

It took me a long time to come to peace with cancer. Fears still come up, and they are very real. It takes a lot of courage, but we all have that reservoir of courage when we’re willing to tap it. We do this by walking into what we fear the most and surrendering to it.

People think if you surrender to cancer, it will kill you. But that’s not true.  … I heard from that little voice deep inside that cancer wasn’t there to kill me. I was being given this gift to transform my life and, therefore, transmute this cancer. That’s when I was able to finally release the fear of dying. I perceived my cancer as teaching me something so profound that my life was at stake. A miracle is merely a shift in perception. This was my miracle.