When faced with cancer, there’s usually a feeling of shock followed quickly by a head-spinning sense of “lack of control”. Suddenly, you’ve been thrown into a nightmare. It’s easy to feel like you’re at the mercy of the disease, the surgeries, the treatments, and the pills. (You’re not alone in those feelings – even though you may feel alone.)
Here are five, easy things that you can do to take back control and boost your healing and recovery:
1. Pray/Visualize.
Try to think of prayer away from its religious affiliations, and instead, think of prayer as the thoughts you think. It’s important to pray as though you already have what you desire – in this case, health or perhaps a smooth surgery. It can be difficult to get to that place when you’ve got cancer at your door. Don’t deny your fear, but don’t pray from a place of fear or from a place of begging and mourning.(The sages have always told us that we don’t have to beg when we pray, we can declare a thing and have it be so. See Tip #4 below.)
If you’ve tried prayer and decided that it doesn’t work, really examine your prayers. If you pray with an attitude of “I don’t want this situation”, you encourage that situation. Instead, pray for health or that the surgery goes well. Pray for the doctor’s hands, but don’t pray something along the lines of, “I hope nothing bad happens during the surgery, or I hope I don’t catch an infection after the surgery.” Pray in the positive.
The same goes for visualization. If you are visualizing and your imagination starts running away with you, stop the visualization and come back to it later. Do not let it continue. I got great results from visualizing for my first surgery – amazing results. However, there were quite a few times when my imagination started taking me to some dark places as I visualized the surgery. When that happened, I stopped and came back to it later.
Let your prayer and visualization be a place where you see yourself as having successfully and victoriously conquered cancer. Picture it happening, and then pray thoughts of thanksgiving.
2. Take Charge of your health (as much as you can).
There’s a tendency to abdicate all authority to the medical staff. Yes, the doctors are there to assist you and facilitate your return to health, and you need the knowledge and wisdom they possess, but you’re the one in charge. You are the one with the illness, and after all, it’s your body. Work with your doctors as you would any other consultant. Being passive with cancer and letting it happen to you isn’t in your best interest. Be informed.
I was the one who recommended that I have a double mastectomy. My doctors recommended a more conservative treatment, but I knew what was right for me. (The doctors conceded that if I were willing, then the more extreme procedure was a better choice – even though it wasn’t warranted by the facts at the time.)
Cancer can be an opportunity to get back in touch with your intuition, with you as an authority in your own life. Many of us lost that at some point growing up. Cancer can be a harsh (yet, oddly freeing) exercise in regaining that authority.
3. Ask For Help.
This one is so hard for many women who are accustomed to “doing it all”. See cancer as a great excuse to get help. When people offer to help, take them up on it. Let them cook dinner, clean your house, drive you to appointments, and watch your children. Take all the help you can get – and then ask for more. As you learn to ask for and accept assistance, you learn to be a gifted “receiver” of good things, and this can help immensely in accepting and facilitating the return of health to your body. Asking for help creates receptivity. (I now have a weekly housekeeper thanks to cancer.) Give yourself permission.
4. Go through the Bible (or preferred religious text) and write down verses relevant to healing, wealth and power.
Why wealth? Wealth is more than just money. Wealth also includes health and long life. According to the Bible (and other religious texts), you are entitled to both health and prosperity. See for yourself. You could then read these verses daily or record them and play them in your iPod as you sleep. This puts wonderful healing thoughts into your brain. Since the thoughts you think affect your body, it helps with healing.
5. Get Understanding.
Read books and stories about healing – and especially about miraculous healings. This will lift your spirits and allow you to see the wondrous things that are possible in terms of healing.