A few weeks ago, I walked into my therapy session and spent approximately 56 minutes talking about nothing important.
On minute 57, I finally blurted it out:
“I can’t stop thinking about dying. And not in a way that’s productive. I need to find a way to stop.”
My therapist handled what she called my “doorknobbing” in stride and gave me a recommendation for a book called Journey of Souls.
It’s been an emotional game changer.
If you’ve run into me in the past few weeks, chances are good I already told you about it. Which is a little out of character—well, not the part about me offering unasked for recommendations, which of course is so IN character—but that it would be about something spiritual and kind of woo woo in nature.
But I feel like I can’t NOT say something. Everything that I read—even though some of it was TOTALLY WILD—made sense. I had that sensation of all these little things that I had never quite connected clicking together into a perfect Tetris of my life.
The book was written by a hypnotherapist who spent a career regressing patients into their past lives—and their life in between lives. He paints a picture of souls working toward spiritual enlightenment, life after life. In between lives, spirit guides help them assess their progress and opportunity areas—and sometimes these guides appear during the lives themselves. Each soul chooses their subsequent life based on what they need to learn and how they need to grow, with visibility to the key defining elements—a life that is short or long, with these parents or those, with this particular calling or challenge, etc.
If that’s true—IF THAT’S TRUE!!—it means cancer didn’t just happen to me.
I chose it!
And I chose it for a reason: because I knew it would help me to grow and develop.
I chose it knowing whether I would get through my life’s biggest challenge or whether my life would be cut short. And when I chose it, I had the confidence to know that, either way—I would get the life I needed.
It would also mean that the kids chose their lives, even knowing what they would go through with me.
This reframing was so instant and dramatic, I could barely believe how much better I felt—about everything.
The following week I practically burst into my therapist’s office. “OMG! Do you really believe all this??” (She does.)
We talked about how a spirit guide might manifest during one’s life, and I remembered all the times I heard voices in my head that seemingly came from nowhere.
Those first three times I walked out of an ultra-depressing oncology appointment: They don’t know you.
The time my therapist urged me to find a mantra to remind myself I could get past bad side effects, and I closed my eyes: You know how to bounce.
That strong sense that I’ve had from the very beginning: that my cancer is here for a reason, that it’s going to be a valuable journey rather than something to go to war against.
And a night many years ago, when I went to bed grieving and called out to a spirit—and then fell asleep and dreamt of a future I could barely imagine at the time—a vision that changed the course of my life, a vision that came true with shocking accuracy several years later.
Honestly, I’m still not 100% sure I believe it all.
And yet – I feel lighter than I ever have. All those death worries are pretty much gone. I’ve had more people tell me I look good in the past few weeks than I have in months. Maybe it’s because I’m healing. Or it could be because I’m completely off alcohol! But probably it’s because I feel like I understand why I’m on this journey—I’m not worried about where it will lead—and I’m excited to learn all it has to teach me.
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