#5 What If Your Diagnosis Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You?

Today, we'll discuss how the greatest struggles often spark positive life changes and why your diagnosis might just be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Today, we'll discuss how the greatest struggles often spark positive life changes, and why your diagnosis might be just the best thing that ever happened to you. I will start today's episode with a quote from a book, The Myth of the Normal by Gabor Matej. It is part of his interview with Eve Ensler, amazing author, activist, and also a cancer survivor.

A disease is not like a thing. It is an energy flow. It's a current. It is evolution or devolution that occurs when you're not awake and connected and trauma is essentially ruling your life. I think it's such a mistake to identify it as a thing because that makes it a hard matter when it is, in fact, a much more psychological, spiritual, emotional condition.

What if, when you got sick, you weren't in a stage of a disease, but in a process and cancer, just like having your heart broken or getting a new job or going to school, were a teacher? What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart.

When I got my diagnosis, I saw myself as a victim. I thought it was not fair. I was asking, why me? How is it fair that me with all the healthy lifestyle that I have, that it's me that got diagnosed with a tumor? And I saw the tumor as something that came to punish me for something, as something that came to ruin my life, as something that I have to fight and I have to get rid of as soon as possible.

But then as I departed on my healing journey and during that time I started to get rid of all the baggage of the past trauma, all the limiting beliefs. I started to release all the emotions. I took decisions that I would not have taken was not for the disease. But I started to see my diagnosis as something that didn't come to ruin my life, but as something that came to actually improve it.

And it was in fact one of the most important moments on my healing journey, this understanding that the illness is there as a teacher, as a gift even, as a guide on my journey that's leading me towards something better that came to teach me things that let me understand things, that let me change things, that let me take the best decisions for my life.

And as I was in this process, my entire life just started to change in such a profound way and the way I see my life, the way I see the entire world, the whole existence just completely shifted and my whole awareness shifted. And it's almost hard to describe because it has happened in a place where there are no words. It's just a feeling, just a deep feeling of in a calm and understanding that everything is okay and that everything is happening for me and for a reason and that my whole existence is much bigger and infinite opposed to the... limited view of myself and the whole world that I had before the diagnosis.

Before I got my diagnosis I was already working on a system that would use meditation, mindfulness, visualization, and other techniques and changes of your lifestyle to naturally heal from chronic illnesses and looking back my own illness really came as a beautiful gift and an opportunity giving me the option to actually try and test my ideas on myself and also improve and change the system that I was developing and maybe take some things out because I understood they didn't work and then I added many things because I understood that the system that I had before had some spaces. and there were things that were missing.

And taking all of this into consideration, looking back now, the diagnosis was really probably the best thing that ever happened in my entire life. Because comparing the way I lived before and the way I experienced every single moment of my life and the way I experience it now, there is just such a tremendous difference. And I thought I was okay back then, but I had no idea what does it mean to live and to appreciate life and to enjoy living.

I would love you to be able to say the same thing. And it can be a physical disease, it can be a mental problem, it can be you losing someone, it can be you going through a broken heart, it can be any hardship in your life. But I want you to be able to use this to make your life into something better. I want you to be able to use this as a stepping point towards reaching your full potential.

And you might find many of such examples in your own life. For example, going through the first breakup of your life. Oh my God, what a pain. And probably like many of us, you thought that it might be the end of your life that actually you cannot live without this person. But obviously looking back, it was the best thing that could happen to you because only because of this breakup, you were able to meet another love and another love and then also do things that you would have never done if you stayed with that first person.

And there are many, many examples you might be able to find in your own life, breakups, losing your jobs, maybe not passing some exam in school, things that at the moment felt like it's horrible, it's a tragedy and it's something that was supposed to ruin your life and they turn into the best thing that ever happened and into something that actually sent you in the right direction of your life.

So understanding this, that the worst things can often turn into the best thing, there is really no point in labeling the experiences of your life as bad or good because they are really just experiences, all of them are teaching you something, all of them move you forward and trying to resist something, trying to fight against something is usually the only thing that creates the suffering, that creates the tension.

And as my favorite spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says, would you resist, persist, and would you fight, you strengthen. And this can be beautifully seen in the case of chronic pain, where with many of my clients we were able to significantly decrease it through the use of visualization, hypnotherapy, but mindfulness meditation especially, where we learn that pain is really just a sensation.

It is not something that needs to be resisted. And when you take away this resistance, and instead you actually almost lean into the pain, you let it be what it is, just a sensation. And the suffering associated with the pain is no longer there. And I experienced this myself during my Vipassana retreats. And the Vipassana meditation courses are 10-day silent retreats, where you meditate in silence for 10 days, every day. And the schedule is quite intense. You wake up at 4 in the morning, at 4:30, you already have to be sitting for your first meditation, and the last meditation is finished at 9:30.

And this, with some pauses for rest or food, gives around 11 hours of sitting in meditation a day. And sometimes you even have to stay seated in the meditation without changing your posture, so you cannot move. The position of your legs, you cannot move your hands, you have to choose your posture in the beginning and then stay for hour, hour and a half in the same position and this, after some time, generates unimaginable levels of pain. Your body is just going crazy, giving you all sorts of signals that it wants you to move and this kind of meditation also works in a way that it unties some knots of some blocked emotions and some blocks in your body and unblocking these things also generates pain.

So you are in a lot of pain quite often during this retreat, which anyway is wonderful and I've been doing it every year ever since. So even though it's painful, it's... the way you feel at the end, and the way it works with your being, with your soul is just incredible. But what I want to share that due to this pain, the first retreat I suffered a lot, especially at the beginning, oh my God, I was just in so much pain.

But what I found in the second retreat that I took, that I was suddenly able to sit for two hours, three hours without moving, and without actually experiencing the suffering. And at the end of the retreat, when you can already talk with all the other people, one of the guys who was sitting just a few rows behind me, he told me, oh my God, it's you, you are the girl who was sitting there for three hours, four hours, and you were not even taking the breaks that we could take to go out and stretch the legs.

Oh my God, it's incredible that you don't feel the pain anymore. And I thought about it, and I actually felt the same kind of pain, like the pain wasn't going away, it was still there. But it just didn't hurt anymore. So I was feeling the same sensations, and in Vipassana, what you learn, that the pain, you can kind of separate in different sensations. When you go deeper and deeper, and some parts of the pain, they become just heat, and some of them just tingling, and maybe there is still like one center of the pain, but it's no longer as intense, and then sometimes even the center of the pain just turns into heat and into just this feeling of electricity so I was still feeling the pain.

I was still feeling the same sensations of pain but it just no longer made me suffer because when you take away this anticipation of not knowing how long is it going to take because at the beginning I was like oh my god because you cannot even look at your watch or usually you don't even have watch and you cannot open your eyes to see how long it's remaining and you just feel like sometimes the last 15 minutes they feel like 15 hours and just this anticipation oh my god when is going to and please and then also being afraid that it might never go away because sometimes it comes to my oh my god like that the pain my leg is just so strong I must have done something and now probably even when I stand up the pain is still going to be there and of course you stand up and it's no longer there but just all these things that are going on in your head those create the suffering and then also if you don't see this pain as one long continuous suffering but you are actually able to see it as just continuous successions of microscopic present moment so it's just tiny present moment after another present moment and another present moment and just a second of a very strong pain is like taking an injection it is quite intense pain like something is piercing through your skin but because it is just a not even a second it actually doesn't hurt that much like you can take it because it's just tiny moment and then if you see this pain as so many tiny moments that you can take very easily the suffering is no longer there.

So I really had the experience of feeling pain but without actually hurting without actually making me suffer and I could sit there for three hours four hours without taking breaks without changing my posture and sometimes or most of the time it was actually enjoyable so this is something you can learn as well and then I was saying that to deal with chronic pain we also used hypnotherapy and visualization and it's because pain is really just a signal of your body that there is something wrong that there is something that you have to pay attention to sometimes in a cause of fibromyalgia it's the pain is there as a signal that you are too stressed or there is some trauma that you have to take care of or there is some suppress emotion that is causing some problems and your body has chosen this pain as the signal even though if you have some check there's no real cause for the pain is really just your brain doing it but it doesn't mean that it's real like you can really feel it and what you can then do with hypnotherapy and neuro linguistic programming is to negotiate with your subconscious that you felt the pain you know about the signal and promise and show that you are actually taking steps to solve the problem and that in the meantime because you are already taking care of it and so you can take care of it even better, your subconscious can decrease the pain to let you function normally so you can improve even faster.

But as it is just a negotiation, if you actually don't take the steps and if you don't take care of the problem itself, the pain will come back because your body will be like, okay, well she didn't understand, let's send her the signal again and maybe this time even stronger because last time it was not enough, she didn't change anything. And so the uses of our own mind and imagination in dealing with pain are tremendous and according to one study, the effect of mindfulness meditation on chronic pain is actually bigger than morphine which is incredible and it's a lot bigger because morphine decreases the pain on average by 25% and mindfulness meditation was on average 40% effective.

The results were actually ranging from 11 to 93% which gave the average of 40 but some people were able to decrease the pain by almost 100% so it almost went away completely and in this study it was not just the subjective feeling of the pain that was also reported but the scientists were actually studying the brain function of the people who were in the study and they saw the activation of the pain centers just shutting off and these are really hard data showing the exact percentage and what is also amazing about this study that these people in the study there were not some trained yogis because for these kind of people the ability to deal with pain they are really they are superhuman but most of us unfortunately we don't have the time to meditate in a cave for three years so then we don't feel our pain anymore but in this study the people were either complete beginners or they had some experience but they were in no means professional and just after a few 20 minutes sessions on mindfulness where they learn to use the techniques they weren't able to use it to decrease the pain so effectively so as I said pain is just a signal that is there for us to let us know that something is wrong in the same way everything in our body works for us.

So even your whole body, every single cell, day and night, works to make you healthy and to make you feel well. And the better environment is given, the better job it can do. But regardless of the environment, it is always doing its best. And even something like autoimmune disease. We sometimes see the autoimmune diseases as your own body turning against you and using the immune system to actually destroy its own tissue. But it is much more helpful to see your autoimmune disease as an alarm bell, as something that is there for you to let you know that something inside of you is really not going well and that there is something that you have to take care of and you have to change and you have to pay attention to.

And your body is using one of its strongest weapons, which is the amazing army of your immune system to let you know, not to harm you, just to let you know that there is something that we have to take care of. And when it's taken care of, there is no need for the signal anymore and the disease can go away. And so as even disease can be seen as something positive, as something that came to teach you something, that came to show you the way, the same way anything that happens in your life, broken heart, some huge personal loss, some mental issues like depression, all of them can be seen as a teacher, as an opportunity to take your life to the next level.

But what we need to learn is to just let it happen because if everything in your life is just quite okay there is usually no need for change and you're always just doing something else and focusing on something else but the moment you really hit the bottom then you have no other choice than to take some steps and for many people it can be the reason to bring meditation into their life it can be to change something it can be the reason to start therapy it can be the reason to change your job and go traveling no matter how you decide to use it it can be an opportunity it's just the way you decide to look at it and as I mentioned Eckhart Tolle at the beginning he is one of the superstars of spiritual development of the current time.

He is the author of many bestseller books. He has his own podcast with Oprah Winfrey. If you don't know his work, I recommend to start reading his books. They can be really life-changing. But even for him, as it is for many spiritual leaders, as it is for many healers, many people that also make it in many other industries, for many of them, the first steps towards these destinations were after some huge personal suffering.

And for him, it was being sick physically, but especially mentally. So he was suffering from very deep depression, anxiety, and he was actually planning on ending his life. And just when he planned his own suicide and he was actually determined to do it, he describes that something changed in him and he understood something. And he and his ego died. And it was exactly this moment of just absolute desperation and the moment of not being able to live with yourself anymore that led to this huge change and to let towards him being this amazing teacher and spreading wonderful ideas, wonderful messages, and helping millions of people all around the world.

I will close this episode with a quote of Stoic philosophy. Rumi, womb is the place where the light enters. So let the light enter you, let your womb being just what it is, just a place that helps you grow and something that teach you something, a guide, a teacher, just let your life flow without resistance and learning how to let your life just happen without resistance, without judgment is one of the biggest gifts that you can give to yourself and it is also one of the basis of the Buddhist religion.

Today's meditation that you will find in the description of this episode is the mountain meditation a beautiful visualization that will help you not to react to things that happen in your life and letting them just flow that will help you to learn how not to resist change because change is one of the very essences of life nothing ever stays the same and resisting the change is really resisting life itself.

Thank you so much for being here with me today. I hope you liked today's episode and if you found it interesting, if you found it helpful it will really mean the world to me if you can share it with someone specific or even better if you could share it publicly on your social media it will really help me a lot. I'm just starting this entire project and this podcast and any shout out is always greatly appreciated.

Please also keep sending me messages, keep sharing your own life stories, your own personal experiences. It can be as a private message or publicly in the comment section. There is such a huge power in sharing your own stories because for someone who is going through the same thing there is really nothing more helpful than reading that someone is experiencing the same and maybe even giving some examples of how to change the situation.

So thank you so much for all your support, thank you so much for all the messages and I wish you a wonderful rest of your day and I am looking forward to seeing you again in the next episode. Take care!