The Power of Thoughts: How My Mom Survived Ovarian Cancer – “You are not your thoughts.” This is true only if you choose to believe them. While it can be challenging to wrap your head around this concept initially, understanding it is valuable.
So, what does this statement actually suggest? It sounds good and even hopeful in some instances. You mean I am not a sad girl because another guy said he could not give me what I want? That would be fantastic. Yet, my reality does not feel this way, and if I am not my thoughts, then who am I…really? The answer is complicated because you feel so connected to your thoughts, which create your emotions. The images in your head seem very real. Your thoughts create your perceived reality and felt senses in the body.
However, thoughts and emotions are like passing clouds against a blue sky. Your unhappy thoughts are like dark, foreboding clouds that can block out the blue sky. On other days, you have white puffy clouds that dot a blue sky—your happy thoughts. Either way, there is always a blue sky behind the clouds. So, thoughts do not have to mean anything significant or defining about you. What gets in the way is your natural tendency toward a negative bias that holds your mind, intellect, and ego tightly to limiting thoughts, affecting how you feel and see the world. Then, add that your negative thought patterns may be so habitual that you are not even conscious of how often, how automatically, you choose the negative over the positive.
Pay attention to your thinking. Learn to reframe the thoughts that are not serving you well to those that do by being curious about your reactions to thoughts versus the thoughts themselves. Yet, part of the difficulty of viewing your thoughts, meaning yourself, comes from the way you phrase your self-talk.
- “I am mad.”
- “I am unlovable.”
- “I am not good enough.”
Your subconscious considers it true when you say or think, “I am,” followed by a negative description of yourself. It is important to always praise yourself and be kind and gentle. Knocking yourself locks into your brain a negative pattern that will not serve you. If you consciously separate yourself to become the observer of this negative self-talk, you will probably find that your statement is not valid. You understand that your ego is talking in the form of a limiting belief instead of the real boundless you.
Negative messaging, when left unchecked, will cause you to start breaking down after a while, maybe even years of being in a constant state of unconscious high alert. I believe that most diseases begin in your head, how you think, and your perception of the world. It is critical to your wholebeing (mind, body, and spirit) that you remove the mental and emotional energy that prevents you from living vibrantly. Your mind and body get tired of being battered around, sending out distress signals that cause your fight, flight, or freeze mode to be permanently switched on. Eventually, it can manifest into illness, from a mild cold to the advanced stages of cancer.
Disease, dis–ease, is your mind not at ease, and a sickness like cancer could stem from deeply held resentment, the pain eating away at the body. Some research findings suggest a link between suppressed anger and breast cancer, in particular. You can help counter some diseases, ward them off, or even reverse them by observing your thoughts and reframing the negative ones into constructive ones. Scores of doctors, health practitioners, contemplatives, and first-hand witnesses endorse the power of the mind’s ability to heal itself. Years ago, I watched my mother do this to overcome ovarian cancer.
When they put my mom on the operating table and opened her up, she was already at an advanced stage of cancer. The surgeon kept her for three hours, losing a lot of blood. I arrived at the Cleveland Clinic from Los Angeles the day after her surgery. When I walked into the hospital room, there she sat next to her bed instead of in it. She never once asked for pain medication when she was in the hospital. What was an angry red, a rope-sized incision that ran from her navel to her pubic bone eventually became a barely perceptible thin pink seam. She reached her fifth cancer-free anniversary with remarkable ease. The doctors claimed her recovery was miraculous.
I know my mom applied positive thinking and prayer to beat cancer. I am convinced that doing these two things was a significant part of what pulled her through. Witnessing my mom’s recovery from cancer taught me a profound lesson about the power of observing your thoughts, faith (however you define it), and what goes on in the subconscious. The power of your subconscious to affect outcomes in life is proportional to your belief and your faith; the quality of your thoughts matters. You can change your limiting thoughts. When you obsess about the past or worry about the future, shift your focus to what is going on now and what is right about it. Change your thoughts, heal your life.
This article is an excerpt from “Take a Shot at Happiness: How to Write, Direct & Produce the Life You Want.” Voted “Best Personal Development Book of the Year” by this magazine and the recipient of the Silver Nautilus Book Award 2024, which recognizes books that promote spiritual growth, conscious living, and high-level wellness. Gift: pages from my book.
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