A Renewed Sense of Purpose

On June of this year, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Adenocarcinoma (cancer). And just like that, the life that I painstakingly built for myself was crumpled into a little ball and tossed out the window. Naturally, my initial reaction was of shock and disbelief. How could a young, healthy, non-smoker like myself get lung cancer? How could this happen to me after deciding to devote my life to promoting health through food? What a repulsive irony. What could I have possibly done to deserve that?

That reaction was, of course, followed by a wild rollercoaster of emotions like confusion, anger, fear, anxiety, and sadness. The full gamut. My dreams of building an exceptional life were all suddenly crushed. It felt as if my life was a tiny sand castle abruptly washed away by the ocean waves. Earth-shattering to say the least.

All the hard work that I had put into improving my life suddenly seemed fruitless and meaningless. How could I have felt any different? What could I have made of such a life-changing experience. The flow emotions that followed was inevitable, but it was part of the package and there was no way around it. So I allowed myself to experience them.

This led me to acceptance. Thanks to my regular meditation practice and a recent introspective journey, I quickly realized that being consumed by my emotions wouldn’t help my situation. It wouldn’t change my reality or serve me any purpose. At that moment, I decided to just accept it all, my reality and everything that came with it. I learned that some things are simply out of our control, so I let go of my perceived sense of control and surrendered to reality.

And then came the peace.

But surrendering didn’t mean doing nothing to change my reality. On the contrary, accepting it all was the first step in making a significant change, not in my immediate reality but in my perception of it.

Surrendering meant doing everything in my power to regain my health but to allow my reality to teach me something. It meant fighting with courage for what matters the most to me. So instead of resisting it, I decided to use the adversity as a catalyst for my self-actualization and personal growth.

This was a powerful breakthrough in what seemed like darkest moments of my life. My entire perspective shifted and, once again, I was in a balanced emotional and mental state. Although I could not change my reality, I had the power to choose my response to it and how I perceived it. And that was an incredibly empowering thing to do.

What initially felt like a curse, suddenly began feeling like a blessing in so many ways. God only knows why any of it happened to me. But the moment I chose to accept it and learn from it, my experience became an invaluable teacher and taught so many lessons about life and about myself including the following:

• Although I may not have my health, I do have many other things to be grateful for like the love of my family, my partner, and my friends. I can lament the things that I don’t have, or I can appreciate and be grateful for the things I do have.
• Pain is an inevitable part of life but, suffering, on the other hand is completely optional. Throughout our lives we all experience pain in varying degrees and for different reasons, whether that is physical or emotional. But we can choose to let it be our teacher and grow from it instead of being victims to it and suffering from it.
• I have the power to choose how I respond to and perceive anything that happens to me. Both the pleasant and the not-so-pleasant. I have very little control over what happens to me but I am in complete control over what happens within me.

The list of invaluable lessons goes on and on, and I could probably write an entire book about what this experience has taught me. But perhaps the biggest blessing it has brought into my life is the renewed sense of purpose it has given me. Now I know what it feels to have my health taken away from me. Now I’m in a better position to help others who have also lost their health and are struggling to regain it.

But most importantly, now I know what my purpose on this earth is. Now I know why I am here; a pivotal point in my journey through life.

My renewed sense of purpose is to teach others about the healing power of food and show them how they can harness that power to regain control of their health. I am here to help them have access to Nature’s most nurturing gift to humanity; food.

Now I don’t know how much time I have left on this Earth, but the truth is, none of us do. That is just the reality of Life and, as someone very wise once put it, “we all have this terminal disease called life”. I just happened to get a powerful, life-changing reminder. And I could spend whatever time I have left being a victim to my circumstances and worrying about what might happen, or I can make every single moment count.

Either way, the choice is mine.

If you enjoyed reading this post and got some value out of it, I am very glad. That’s precisely why I wrote it. Please be sure to give it a few claps so that it gains more visibility and others can also get value out of it.