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| Lifestyles - Health/Wellness |
| Written by Elysia Skye | Thursday, 11 March 2010 - 18:28:56 |
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By the time this issue is published, Mercury will have just gone out of retrograde. For those of you who are Virgos, Saturn has been sitting on your sun for over two years and it has been a rocky road. For the rest of us, there’s this thing called life. What a pain in the ass! I turned 28 a few weeks ago (I’m a Leo… of course!) and all the cliché thoughts of being in my late 20’s ran through my head. “I thought I’d be married/rich/have kids/own a huge house, have my career off the ground and be successful BY NOW. The irony is, success is only measured by how happy you truly are. So then I had to take step back and really truly ask myself, “Am I happy?” “Am I afraid of failure?” “What am I worried about?” “Am I angry?” The more I thought about it, I realized I had felt spiritually disconnected and was forgetting to breathe. Your breath is your true connection to the divine (be it God, your higher self, whatever you’d like to think of it as). I don’t think I’ve been breathing all year! I hadn’t felt this overwhelmed since I had breast cancer... When I was 24, I was diagnosed with stage 3-breast cancer. I had two evil tumors living inside my body. One of them migrated to the northeast—i.e. my armpits, causing me to go through chemotherapy because they had invaded my lymph nodes. My doctor told me if I didn’t have surgery Friday, I’d be dead in a month. So I had surgery Monday (I had a trip to Palm Springs planned for the weekend after all!). Then I went through 18 weeks of chemo. One Mohawk and a marijuana license later, this baldie was ready for radiation. Everyday for 6 weeks, I had to wake up at 6am, to drive to Burbank and lay on a table for 10 minutes. Before I went to work each morning, I would massage utter cream on my right breast and close my eyes for 15 minutes before I had to get up and drive to Beverly Hills for work. Those 15 minutes were the highlight of my day.
So now what, why aren’t I “successful”? What was missing? What did I still need to learn or be reminded of? That is key. Because we almost always know what is truly best for us. Our instincts, 99% of the time, guide us in the right direction; it’s just up to us if we’re really listening. And I wasn’t listening. I had forgotten how to manifest, how to feel joy within myself, and how to just BE. Once I acknowledged that what I missing was my own fault, I began to put the pieces back together. The point being, I became very present. Anytime I started to feel frustrated, be it money, a relationship, work, a relative, I would take a breath and think about how good it feels to breathe. I would think about the tips of my fingers and toes. Could I feel them? What did they feel like and what were they touching? I’d think about the smells in the air, and see the beauty in the surrounding flowers, or lizard on the sidewalk. I know this sounds like a bunch of hippy non-sense, but it is SO much better to smile at a lizard than to be mad at your grandmother! In fact, it’s a whole different world of emotion! It is coming from a present place of gratitude. Otherwise you might let what you think is your life, get the best of your emotions. Emotions are the spirit’s connection to the ego. Some would call themselves “emotional” others would call them whiners. Whatever the case may be, the idea is to not let your emotions take the lead in your relationship with yourself. When you find yourself feeling angry, or fearful, or sad, it is important to remember that you have total control over how you feel in that moment, and that you are actually choosing to be negative. This is not how we were designed to live. Negative emotions build up like tar and manifest a sickness inside the body. Worse than actually getting upset, is holding in how you feel. Imagine an atom bomb about to go off, but it doesn’t, so its insides just begin to rot and deteriorate. The best thing would have been if the bomb (your negative thoughts and emotions) had never been created in the first place, but it is very difficult to learn to control your thinking.
Maybe a few good screams might have prevented me from stage 3 cancer, but probably not. It was how I handled my thinking that pushed it so far in the first place. Sure there are genetics (my grandma had very mild cancer in one breast, but I was negative for the b.r.a.c. gene test), and there’s environment (especially if you’re breathing in smog in L.A. and eating processed foods) and these things are almost unavoidable. So what you can do to prevent yourself from getting cancer (or any kind of illness brought on by negative thoughts and emotions aka STRESS) is adjust your way of thinking. Change your perception of how you see every bad situation. Adjust it to the point where a situation is no longer perceived even as bad. See it as more of a challenge you would rather not take. For example, I’m sure many of you are worried about money right now. You can’t pay your bills, creditors are calling, or your relationship is on the rocks, your job is unstable, if you even have one. These situations are terrible, and they make us feel bad. So when you are confronted with an uncomfortable situation, your body tends to tense up. Spiritual teacher and Author, Eckhart Tolle explains this as the physical side of fear. He says: “Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness. If you cannot feel your emotions, or you are cut off from them, you will begin to experience them on a purely physical level as a physical problem or symptom.” All negative emotions are derived from fear or anger, just as all positive emotions are derived from love. If you break it down, and truly dissect what it is you’re upset about, you will find it is because you are afraid of something (how you appear, your reputation, loss, death) or that you are angry about something (you’re a victim, you’ve been taken advantage of, you weren’t treated fairly). When you need to react to a situation, it is always better to come from a place of love, even when you think you were wronged. Look, I’m a Jew who was raised Buddhist, so now is the time when I bring up Mr. JC himself (because why not?). If someone came up to him and punched him in the face, he wouldn’t get angry. He would love them and forgive them for they are just like him, only they don’t know how to process their thoughts, so they take things personally, and their ego has their panties in a bunch. When you choose to let the outside world affect you, you are giving into the egos temptations. Your sexy little ego, with a bottle of wine, fancy shoes and eyes like the sun, luring you into its trap - then BAM! You’re upset about something and you’ve begun the manifestation of physical pain in the body. My advice is to make a reminder for yourself. Whether it’s a post-it note, or an alarm that goes off on your cell phone, remember to not get wrapped up in the moment. Sometimes one angry moment, can turn into a lifetime of disease. My very wise friend Gary Renard was teaching a group of us about forgiveness lessons in “A Course In Miracles”. He said, “The Holy Spirit is within. Wisdom will be there for you when you need it.” When I find myself in a challenging situation, I remind myself of that mantra. I trust in the source energy that created me in the first place, and remember that I am taken care of if I choose inner peace over suffering.
If you find yourself feeling lost, angry, fearful or just plain empty, I strongly recommend Renard’s The Disappearance Of The Universe and Tolle’s The Power Of Now. You are always welcome to email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . I created this non-profit to share a message of love, laughter and healing, and to remind everyone that through your sense of humor and a change in your perception, you will lessen the severity of any illness or trauma. Photos provided by Elysia Skye |
| Last Updated on Monday, 02 November 2009 23:58 |
Last year we interviewed 
Slowly but surely my hair grew back, my period came back (yay babies one day!!! But not when I’m 28 despite my earthly plan!), and my LIFE came back. Since then, I’ve been dealing with this side effect called 
I wish I had done that in 2005. I was buying a condo after quitting my job, my boyfriend cheated on me and it was the messiest situation in relationship history (use your imagination) and in the meantime, I was producing a table read for a film I was trying to raise money for. My relationship with my Father and Grandmother was very unhealthy, and I was holding the opinions of my peers and co-workers, more important than my own opinions about MYSELF. Despite feeling and thinking about these negative things, I was keeping how I was feeling inside. It built up, it corroded, it was ticking and ticking in my chest, my heart couldn’t handle it, and then I got sick, right where my heart sits and my breathe was trapped.
It is possible to be joyous about all of life’s dealings. I looked at cancer as an exciting challenge, and an endless world of teachings that I knew I would eventually put down on paper. My book:
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