For some people the phrase “they fought a lengthy and courageous battle with illness” implies a journey of many years navigating cancer, the treatments, timelines and pharmaceutical helpers.

When I die, which I hope will be in some 30 years time I would hope that sentence will no longer be applicable to me but then I ask myself would I feel cheated in some way? Would the fourteen years I have dedicated myself to navigating cancer in my own body be obscured by my future achievements? How do I feel about that?

You see the thing is this cancer business has occupied so much of my prime time. From 38-52 years of age already. Sometimes it makes me feel left behind my peers in terms of success, work and earnings, mortgage and kids… though tbh I have lived in queer femme time most of my days where the conventional markers of life don’t create my dawns and dusks and achievement rungs.

For fourteen years I have applied myself to healings and leanings, learnings and yearnings, trainings and feignings and bouts of crazy discipline and strict regimes, to times of profound inertia – either through despair despondency or once, betrayal (by a nice radiologist). It is a long time. The whole of my forties have been dominated by this relationship of tidal malfunction with my body, a body that is random and unruly and not operating totally as it should be …. a relationship with all the ebb and flows of precariousness, hope, dis-ease, health and dogged perseverence.

I write this dear reader as I prepare to do an intense 30 day juice fast with herbs, tinctures, distilled water enemas and a rather outrageous protocol of hypothermia which I haven’t yet decided to engage with.

Let me just share (and feel free to wince) that it involves sticking 10 garlic cloves and chilli up where the sun don’t shine followed by biting hot baths full of chilli and mustard seed, followed by being wrapped in an icy sheet for 8 hours. You can see my hesitancy which could easily translate to common sense refusal. I will try and keep you informed of what I decide.

As those of you who have followed this blog for a while know, I am no stranger to the stranger aspects of health protocols that to the common eye seem extreme (as if destroying all cells in the body with chemotherapeutic medicine wasn’t extreme, right!). This summer gone I had a healing during a plant medicine ceremony and subsequently lost 25cms of tumour. It simply rotted away a cm a day. Leaving healthy pink skin under it. Unfortunately my body couldn’t hold the healing  energy and it just grow back with some added extra bonuses. But it let me know that my body can actually do this, can take down tumour cells. And that maybe ultimately the message for me was that it has to come from me and my quantum field. Its a bit of a cheat to go to another healer to heal you, like getting some-one else to sit an exam, or write your phd. Help is good, I mean we all need encouragement and direction pointing and therapies that help us reconnect to that part of ourselves that knows shit and can help us in our journey and catalyse our healing (like Reiki or sound healing for example), but ultimately for proper healing to happen we need to be 100% on board, 100% engaged with our own parts, hidden and seen.

To this end I am minded to share that meditation is a super effective and amazing way to make bridges to parts of ourselves we can’t recognise, but also and more profoundly to connect to the part of us that is timeless, ageless and healthy, whatever the state of play in our physical, emotional or mental dimensions. I have been a regular meditator since 1997, and it has certainly contributed to my ability to thrive and function, deal with emotional and physical pain and keep sane,  yet I have noticed a gradual progression over the years in time squeezing from my regular morning practice in order to feel more efficient. What was once a core embedded hour morning practice of an hour (which seems like a luxury these days) became 30 minutes, then 20, then a snatched 10 minutes, and then a negotiation (I will do it tomorrow, I promise).

S0 for me 2018 is the year of upgrading my meditation practice and restoring that golden hour in the morning. The reasons for this are numerous, and the benefits will also be numerous. One of which will be to help me embrace the conscious 100% more often. To connect with the part of me that is 100%. To keep present in the case of distractions. Instead of surfing each individual wave that makes up the ocean I will focus on healing in the ocean herself and swim in source. The quantum Tao, or cosmic soup which connects us all and is available to us all.

And if that means adding my healing energy for the benefit of the ocean then even better.

Wishing you all Love Peace and Empowerment

And a transformative and beautiful 2018.

Calliope xxx