Month: February 2016

“Today I Decide to Live” – Sabrina Fuoco

The above is the tagline for Sabrina Fuoco’s website and blog at https://cancergirlsmiles.wordpress.com/. Sabrina has been handed six cancer diagnoses in her short lifetime and has survived them all. I encourage you to check out her blog. It’s inspiring, it’s life-affirming, it’s a living example of a cancer patient who is living every day to her fullest. She inspired me to write the following response to one of her recent blog entries:

I want to say thank you to you for posting these blogs. I went through cancer with my husband and am familiar with much of what you are going through, although if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that every single cancer journey is unique. I wrote my way through his cancer journey with a daily journal and sent out regular emails to keep everyone informed and ended up publishing a book called “10 – A Story of Love, Life, and Loss” based on those writings. I found the act of writing it all down was beneficial to me: to see it all in perspective, to give us hope, to give us signposts along the way to gauge our journey. A friend sent me this Anne Frank quote, “I can shake off everything as I write. My sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”   By making it public, I hoped to give people a view of cancer, so that they would be less fearful and more hopeful and more conscious of living a better life. That’s what your blog does for us.

There are so many cancer patients. It seems I hear of it every day. Your blog posts keep us informed to the fact that they are always trying new drugs and treatments. They allow us to believe in the power of faith and healthy attitude. They let us smile with you and care about you. We learn how to live better lives ourselves. We learn that as long as we keep living, we can keep hoping, staying focused on what we do have and getting the most out of every moment that we can.

Keep writing. I keep reading, caring, and praying. We can all make this journey together.

Radical Self Love

013February is Radical Self Love month.

My friend, Nathalie, asks “How do you practise #RadicalSelfLove?”

Radical Self Love, first of all, needs time – to stop, to breathe, to listen to one’s body, to be fully aware, fully connected to one’s physical self. If we take that time to know our bodies, then we will take that “knowing” and ensure that we give our bodies nutritious food, adequate rest, and constant movement.

Radical Self Love means connecting to our heart self, our emotional, intellectual and spiritual self. It is a deep journey inwards through prayer, meditation, contemplation or creation that builds an understanding of our capabilities, our soul, our true essence. We learn our true magnificence as an irreplaceable creation of the universe. And when we realize our own greatness, we see that same greatness in others. We are compelled to keep moving forward in curiosity, love and fulfillment because we know our true potential and seek a venue, a path, to express our uniqueness and help others to realize theirs.

Radical Self Love knows that because we are so loved, we are capable of loving others through kindness, camaraderie and service. When we have this full deep awareness of ourselves on all levels, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, we have a love so big and full that it can’t be contained and it naturally reaches out to others, our homes, our planet, in fact, all of creation.

Time – awareness – connection – growth – commitment – discipline – balance, all become necessary elements of Radical Self Love. We must set aside sacred time to build this deep awareness of ourselves, to connect with all of who we are. We keep seeking new growth, to keep moving forward. And we do this with a sense of commitment and discipline. We balance all of these elements to create a balanced self.

With Radical Self Love, we not only know and change ourselves, we know and change the world.