Charting Your Own Course to Self-Healing

I was visiting with a friend of mine who happens to be a well accomplished healer. I was lamenting the direction I should take with a certain condition in my life and she asked me a question that caught me off guard. She said, "Tonja do you want to be a cork or a captain?" Not sure I heard her correctly, I asked her to repeat the questions. "Do you want to be a cork, or a captain?" she mused.

"I'm not sure," I stammered. She laughed and then explained, "Corks are people that float along, lost at sea, the winds and waves take them from place to place. Corks feel like they don't have any power in their life, they just have to do exactly as they are told. If you are a cork and you are dropped in the ocean in Hawaii, good luck getting to San Diego."

She continued, "Captains on the other hand, gather all the information they can, they plan out a strategy and a course. They are the drivers of their ship and they decide when to take off, which way to go and how to get there. There may be changes along the way but they are always in charge of their own course."

Suddenly, the answer became clear to me. I wanted to be a captain!

I recalled very vividly when my mother received the alarming news five years ago that she had stage IV lymphoma cancer. By the time it was discovered, the disease had spread throughout her entire body. She is now doing very well and is clear of any cancer. My mother was clearly the captain of her own ship with regard to her own healing. She did many of the things the doctors suggested, but she also followed her own course. She said "I need to laugh" and rented funny movies every week. This was her own self-prescribed Rx. She posted signs everywhere that said "Thank you for my healing." When she began to lose her hair from the chemo, she shaved her head and made jokes about running off to join the circus. The doctors told her to change her diet but she refused and continued to eat a high fruit and vegetable diet as recommended in the book Beating Cancer with Nutrition. She also went against doctor's orders when they told her to take additional chemotherapy rounds and she refused. When her care team was pushing her hard to do additional chemo rounds "just to be sure" she flatly replied, "The cancer is gone, if you want another round than YOU take it!"

My mother was a captain, but I wondered, how many of us would have been corks? The truth is, no one is more capable of healing you than you. Your body has a marvelous innate self-organizing principle that allows it to self-heal. If you get a paper cut, in less than a few days, the cut will be healed. My mother began drinking lots of water, she started sleeping more, practicing meditation and doing daily walks and yoga when she felt up to it. She saw her chiropractor every week and worked hard to keep stress to her body and mind at a minimum. All of these things helped her self-healing. She also went down some unique roads with regard to thinking outside the self-healing box. A year after she went into remission, she joined the AIM program of Energetic Balancing. She first learned about the program by reading the book Sanctuary: The Path to Consciousness, a novel about a woman with cancer who self heals with Energetic Balancing. If people thought my mother's self-healing ideas were silly or far-fetched, she didn't care. She said my self-healing journey only has to be logical to one person....me!

Most of all, I think my mother learned that her thoughts, emotions and well being, were all linked. She knew she had a responsibility to keep her thoughts and fears from running out of control. As her attitude about her situation got more positive, so did her actual physical condition. I asked my mother once, in those first few months after her diagnosis, "Mom, how did you stay so strong and so positive?" she smiled and said, "I faked it, till I made it. I acted as if I was already healed."

It is interesting to note that the knowledge about how thoughts play a role in our own self-healing is getting more widespread. A recent movie, The Secret, seems to demonstrate the strong link between positive thoughts and extraordinary healing.

So I guess the question to each of is....to be a cork or a captain? When it comes to self-healing, there may not always be calm seas. But each of us has the ability to choose, we can take control of the ship, and chart our own remarkable course.

Tonja Steel is a free lance writer who lives in Las Vegas, NV.