Nurturing the body

So many of us struggle with our body image as did I for some fifty years. It was not until I made peace with my body that I was able to abandon diets, start to love myself as I was, that I began successful and sustained weight loss. Ten years ago I had the great privilege of joining a group of international writers under the auspices of the magnificent Julie Jordan Scott. We would meet on teleconference once a week and write to prompts, very intelligently and creatively by Julie. When she asked us to write to a quote which referred to praising the geography of our bodies. The following came pouring out. I believe it was a pivotal point in my journey towards peace with myself.

I praise my own geography, at last.

Each rolling contour, hill and valley,
Each scar upon the white stretched landscape,
Each familiar line marked deep with memory,
Laughter, sadness, joy.
Each softly pliant mound of flesh,
Silent repository of pleasures past,
Promise of pleasures yet to come.

I praise my own geography at last,
a terrain once hostile,
Familiar, beloved, home.

Some ghosts from the past.

I found the following musings from around 12 years ago in a life before cancer and which reflect my struggle with my weight. This had been a life long battle from very early childhood. It sucked so much spontaneity and joy from my life but it gave me a deep insight into mental suffering, the challenge of low self-esteem and the power of resilience to overcome.

It seems as though my body has something to say...

Once upon a time my belly rumbled,
Complaining in volcanic anger,
Feed me. Feed me now.

Spitting acid fountain flames of rage,
Against this self held other, alien,
Stranger, separate.
Feed me love. Feed me love.

And if you cannot feed me love,
Then feed me food.
Feed me so my cells may swell and burst,
Stuffed with fatty residues
Of what might and should and could have been.

Feed me so I may no longer feel.
Feed me until the numbness comes,
And I am deaf and dumb and blind
To the starvation of my heart.

Once upon a time, my belly rumbled
Burning in unquenchable fire
A hunger that could not be fed.

Like all good fairy tales,
My belly longs to say,
"It ended happy ever after
For now we are one,
In love with who and what we are,
Body mind and soul
Replete, complete and loved."

This is not a fairy tale.

When I am gone.

When you face your mortality every day, the mind turns to challenging and painful thoughts. I saw a momentary glimpse of unfathomably deep sadness on my dearest husband's face. This is the dark fear it brought creeping to the surface mind.

Will you sit and look at photographs of me
Still life memories of our life together?
Will your shoulders shake with repressed grief,
Will tears burst through and have their way?

How will it be for you when I am gone,
Stripped of my presence, my touch, my love?
Who will comfort you when the shadow overwhelms,
Who will find those errant keys ,chameleon glasses?
Who will laugh at your absent minded ways,
And love you for each one, never in spite?

I do not fear my passing from this world
I fear the depth of pain I leave behind
Yet I must walk my path, accepting of my fate,
Leaving you all that I am, even beyond the grave.

Return to the Chrysalis

"As you know, you found me at a time when my subconscious was screaming at me to change, and I did not know how to begin. With your gentle and loving guidance, profound yet peaceful transformations have begun in my life. I count you as one of the few souls I know and would recognize anywhere. You're just beautiful."

Just over ten years ago, I started a newsletter titled, "Out of the Chrysalis". It marked the beginning of my journey into the most beautiful and fulfilling stage of my life. I spread my new found wings and flew into the world where my heart and soul belonged, being a catalyst for positive change in others. Every day became filled with the passion of my lifetime, to make a difference in the world through each individual who came to me for help. In the words of Joseph Campbell, I followed my bliss. I learned and I grew from every life that I had the honour to touch in some small way. 

Five years ago, I recognised that there was something seriously wrong with my body and set off on a nightmare voyage to discover what it was. Eventually I was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma and survived an eight hour operation to remove the kidney and its tumour which stretched all the way along the vena cava into my heart. I hovered on the edge of death and by some grace survived. One year ago, I was once again facing my mortality when three tumours were found on my spine and on the muscle running alongside. Renal cell carcinoma is incurable when it reaches this stage but precious time is bought by newly developed drugs which cut off the blood supply to the tumours. These drugs are not effective for bone tumours. 

Most of the last year was spent in a state of serious illness, the reaction to the first drug prescribed put me in hospital for three weeks, flat on my back, so weak I could not raise my head from the pillows, barely able to speak and in need of support for all the most basic of needs. It taught me a lot about the love and dedication of others and also about my own inner strength. I will write more of this later. 

I was much too ill to be able to do the work I love. Most of the time, I could hardly raise the energy to speak let alone be there, fully present, for others. I missed this so much.There is nothing of sacrifice about my helping others, it is my life blood and without it, my life lacks meaning. Call me a compulsive helper. Other people have a fetish for cleaning and tidying up; mine is for clearing emotional debris. I have a compulsion to help others live more fully.I can't help it. It too is incurable. 

Yesterday,I made my mind up to start living that compulsion again, to bring what I have learned over the 61 years of my life,back out into the world. I have always loved to write, to express my thoughts feelings and experiences in the written word. Words have always seemed magical to me. They weave spells; they heal; they enter the mind and create the seeds of change. Whatever life is left to me, as long as I can think clearly and use a keyboard, I dedicate to bringing those magical words into the lives of those who may need them. 

The quote above came from a wonderful woman whose life I was privileged to enter, to journey with her through a period of profound transformation. I came across it on my computer today as I reviewed old files. It reminded me of who I am, of my calling. 

Watch this space. The butterfly wings are ready for flight.

The Challenge of Choice

I wrote this a few years ago. It seemed appropriate to print it again today.

It is not just at New Year that we can wipe the slate of the old year clean and chose to start again. Although we can chose to make this the start point for our new choices or the time to jettison some old ones, we know that there is nothing intrinsically magical about the New Year Bells. The world does not come to an abrupt halt at midnight of the outgoing year and the laws of time are not suspended to allow us to erase the past in order to give us a clean sheet for the future. We can do this at any time. It is our choice.

We are gifted with creative imagination and with this we can chose in each and any moment to put time on pause, to visualise a glistening blank canvas waiting for us to paint whatever we wish upon it. We can chose to create our lives anew in every moment of each new day and choice is the key to transformational change.

The complexity of who we are is in part a product of our past experience but we are not our past experiences. Failure yesterday does not mean failure today just as it does not mean that I am a failure, just that in one discrete part of my life I did not achieve what I set out to do. Should yesterday have been shrouded in sorrow for me for whatever reason it does not mean that I cannot chose happiness for myself today. Every thought that we have, every choice we make, every experience we process, creates a new version of who we are.

Sometimes we freeze frame our perception of ourselves so that we chose to remain a picture of our past selves but even then the reality is that we have changed - we are now someone else holding on to a snapshot in time of who we were yesterday.

We chose to hold ourselves back in the past. We “wallow in misery” ; “we are lost in grief”; “we slide into depression”. Yes, it is hard to make alternative choices in the face of real emotional and physical challenge but that is what makes the human spirit such an enigma - we always have choice unless we have certain psychiatric conditions.

Sometimes it is not us who freeze frame ourselves but our closest loved ones and those whose opinion of us touches us most. They hold our image in the past and refuse to accept the evidence of all their senses, that we are not today who we were yesterday. Once again it is our choice whether to permit the reflection we see in their eyes to be who we perceive ourselves to be, to hold ourselves back, to be less than we know ourselves to be. We always have choice. We can be who we have become or we can subjugate our true expression to the transient needs of others.

This is especially the case for those who begin to tentatively step out of the chrysalis of change, shrugging off our old caterpillar shape to spread our wings as a butterfly. We still long for the security of the cabbage patch but there is no nectar of creativity to be found there to feed our dreams. We need to move on or something very precious will die within us. Sometimes our loved ones seek to hold us back out of fear of being left behind, or out of jealousy of our transformation and sometimes they do not see our newly developed wings and fear that being incapable of flight we will hurt ourselves. What we do with their perception of us is once again our choice. We can gently help them to shift their perspective to see who we truly are or we can conform to their old image of who we once were. There is always choice and with choice comes consequence. We can be who we are or we can be less.

When we wake up in the morning, we can curse the darkness or we can switch on a light. We can be bad tempered or we can smile. We can dwell on all that is wrong in the world or we can bless each and every gift we have been given, every wonderful person in our lives; we can rejoice that we have been given another day to paint glorious pictures on that blank canvas.

Even in the midst of grief, we have choices. We can bury ourselves with our dead or we can live our lives gloriously, fully, vibrantly in honour of the love that we have for them. I see so many people who channel their pain

into creating something that makes the world a better place, not to take the pain away but to transmute it into a gift of loving service. Several years ago, a young girl was horrifically murdered in my home town. Her parents were

devastated but they chose to honour her memory by setting up an organisation to help parents through the same situation.

Several years ago an 18 year old boy from my son’s school was studying in Israel during the gap year before taking up a place at medical school in London. Joni was killed in a suicide bombing and in the midst of their anger and grief his parents made a magnificent choice. They honoured Joni’s life by allowing his death to save the life of a young Palestinian girl who needed a kidney transplant. They also went on to create a prize in his memory for community service here in Scotland where he grew up. Choice is sometimes all that we have to bring light into the darkest places of our lives.

So my friends, what choices will you make today?

Will you let light and love into your lives?

Will you put aside the past and allow the richness of the
present?

Will you chose to smile at a stranger?

Will you chose to be the being of light you truly are?

Will you chose to exercise the gift of choice today?


“Create each day anew.” Morihei Ueshiba - Founder of the
Martial Art of Aikido from The Art of Peace


To every man there openeth
A way, and ways, and a way.
And the high soul climbs the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low.
And in between, on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth
A high way and a low,
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go.

John Oxenham

We are our choices. - Jean-Paul Sarte
(1905-1980), philosopher, writer, and critic