In "The Art of Possibility" the authors give their students an A at the beginning of the music class, to free them from the fear that limits their performances, on the condition that they write a letter, dated a year in the future, describing everything that the learned and how they have grown from receiving the A in the class. They said to "fall passionately in love with themselves" in the letter, the self that they were writing about, the self of their possibilities and their gift.
It reminded me of what I suggest to clients with cancer. Can you find the gift? Imagine yourself on the other side of this adventure that you are facing, and tell me everything you have learned and how you have grown and how this is the best thing that has ever happened to you? Can you do that? Can you imagine this as the greatest lesson ever lived? Your greatest adventure that will open you wake you up?
Can you fall passionately in love with yourself and see yourself grow and glow and expand and become limitless precisely because of this chapter, and see beyond this to the you that you are becoming?
What is this engagement about? What is it freeing you to do, and be? What have you been avoiding that you can't avoid any longer? What is the choice in front of you?
Can you fall passionately in love with yourself and honor yourself and surrender to the teacher within?
I've brushed cancer 3x and each time it's a cold hard fast slap in the face. "WAKE UP" it said to me. Each time I looked and realized I was facing something that could very well kill me, and I looked at my other possible futures, and the possible choices, and the things I had been avoiding. Once it was my anger. The second it was my pride. The third time it was my voice. I had to laugh that I was willing to die rather than to speak my truth. How deeply that lesson is ingrained in us. Silence or die. Don't rock the boat.
So I vividly and creatively imagined myself doing what I had been avoiding, embracing it instead of running from it. And 3x the 'cancer' was a misdiagnosis. It disappeared off ultrasounds, off mammograms, or was benign in the biopsy. I heard what my system was trying to bring my attention to. I understood where my fear was, where I was limiting myself, my reluctance to live out loud...
So many times we play small, we hide. So many times we default to someone else's plan for us and we hide our bitterness and resentment, but under that bitterness, we also hide something else. Find that something else. Find it and know that this is your spirit calling to you to fly! Understand there is no time to waste! It's time to live and live it large!
Embrace the lesson in front of you, whatever it is, then go into the future, give yourself that A for the lesson well learned. Gift it to yourself now so you know that everything will be ok because you said so.
Then, my friends, pick up your wings and fly. The future is constantly changing-pick a different course.
I have a great new magnet-"don't try and change the wind-change your sails"...
If cancer is the wind, and it's blowing you on a course-giving yourself the A is changing your sails and catching another breeze!