What is your weight? What is your age? How many zeros do you have in your bank account? How many likes did you get? How many followers do you have? How many steps did you get? How much weight can you lift? What is your resting heart rate? What is your white blood cell count? What is the size of the tumor? How long will I survive? How long before I know what happens after death?
How often do you define yourself by numbers? We all do if we are not consciously choosing to live differently from the rest of society. In some ways, defining yourself by a number is the most natural thing you could do today. No day passes when you don’t look at a clock. Our world is driven by time! It seems only natural to continue that trend in all areas of life.
Statistics are helpful until they are not. It helps to know the statistics of the number of sunny days in the place you want to move to or how likely you are to get malaria if you don’t get a vaccine before traveling. Statistics are most helpful when they inform us about how to make our choices. However, when they drive your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and relationships, numbers go from helping you to controlling you.
The same truth applies when cancer meets statistics. In acute care, medical doctors can make educated decisions based on numbers. For example, based on your bloodwork, your doctor can ensure electrolyte stability, avoiding neurological, cardiovascular, muscular, or worse issues. However, when we fixate on the survival rates of those who went before us with the same diagnosis, it drowns our hope - a vital factor in healing - and locks our attention to the past.
Defining yourself by statistics keeps you stuck in probability.
Probability belongs to the past. Cancer survival rate probabilities attempt to predict the future. However, if you want the future to be different from the past, you must step out of past probabilities and into future possibilities. What do you want your future to be? Do you want the same results from the past? Of course not! You need not be limited by the past.
The first step in your healing process, or vital evolution as I like to call it, is breaking your gaze from the past. Where your attention goes, that is what grows in your life. For example, when you think, feel, and behave as though you only have a certain number of months to live, your nervous system communicates this message to all 30+ trillion cells, and they respond to this message from their leader - you.
Your mind is powerful! It also heavily influences your body’s emotional state. Your body relies on the mind to interpret and communicate the happenings of the world around you. However, the body doesn’t know how to differentiate between what is real and what is imagined. It responds either way. Therefore, when you feed the fear of past probabilities, your body interprets this message as a present unsafe situation and reacts accordingly by engaging your stress-response system. Your stress-response system, just like statistics, is helpful until it is not.
What happens next is that your internal emotional environment creates a feedback loop to your mind that perpetuates your experience of dis-ease. When the loop is focused on past probabilities or comparing numbers in general, your stress-response system never turns off. You end up feeling anxious, stuck, and hopeless to get out of it. Your cells continue to listen to this message and produce the same levels of hormones, neurotransmitters, etc., as they have in the past.
I invite you to think about each cell being a community member of your body. As their leader, you use your nervous system as a loudspeaker to create the climate of the community. What environment will you create? Do you see that this is possible? Can you change your future and experience something different from your past?
You are not a victim of your body. If I ask you what anxiety feels like, it would be easy to experience the emotion of anxiety in your body. If I ask you to feel brave, hopeful, grateful, loving, or other positive emotions, most people struggle with this. But the fact that you can feel anxious without anything outside of you changing offers credence to the fact that you can feel hopeful regardless of anything outside of you changing. When you do this, you have effectively created a different climate within. You have communicated a completely different message to your community of cells, and they will respond to it.
Healing your body or creating a life of peace and joy will not happen by defining yourself by a number. Instead, I invite you to pay more attention to what thoughts you are feeding, what emotional climate you are creating, and what life you want to embody! By doing this, you have shifted your attention from the past - and the probability of being stuck in disease - to the future of possibilities.
By reading this, you may have just saved your life!
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