When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I had the thought “I am going to die”. I felt terror. It was a terrible feeling.
When the brain thinks it’s going to die, it goes immediately in Fight or Flight mode. Stress was building up and I started losing perspective. I had crazy thoughts. My brain was going all over the place. I was in a permanent state of terror. I was trying to resist it or avoid it, which only perpetuated the feeling. By not accepting the feeling I wasn’t accepting myself. The emotion was controlling me.
It’s only when I allowed the feeling of terror to arise without reacting to it that I started to get a hold of it. I saw that the thought “I am going to die” was a possibility. But I also recognized that the opposite thought “I am going to live” was also a possibility. Once I accepted my emotion and made peace with it, I got to choose what I wanted to believe.
In a way, preventing myself from dying, I prevented myself from living. Once I allowed my feeling and saw that it was coming from an optional thought, I started living my life fully again.
With love,
Laurent