Keeping Postive: Gotta Love This Guy

Rob Brezsny hands out cash at a freeway offramp.

I've mentioned Rob Brezsny before, but I want to share something I got in this morning's email. Disclaimer: I'm not an astrology believer, but I absolutely relish Brezsny's fresh approach to life and living. I receive his weekly newsletter, faithfully read my horoscope for the week, and always find it to be uncannily wise, thought-provoking, and inspiring. This I received for the coming week, starting Thursday:

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Have no fear of the damp and the dark and the cramped. In a place fitting that description, you can track down clues to a mystery that will inflame your curiosity and educate your soul; you can tap into a fresh surge of courage that'll render at least some of your suffering irrelevant. Expect a miracle to appear in the shadows, Aries. It could resemble a cornucopia spilling over with diamonds and potatoes, or maybe a charred fireman's helmet bedecked with sexual roses and fresh $20 bills.

To put this into context, for the last few months his horoscopes for me have pointed toward a life-changing challenge I would be facing, but his advice has always been from a positive perspective, one like my own, that no matter how tramautic and lengthy an experience is, it should be welcomed as best as possible, felt fully, not hidden from. Only in this way will it produce lessons and growth, the light at the end of the tunnel. Of course this mind-set is sometimes hard to maintain, so reminders from Brezsny and other sources, friends and family, help immeasurably.

During this same few months, I had vivid dreams, nearly every night, of walking or dream-flying vast distances over hills, canyons, mountains, great divides I couldn't cross, toward some goal I never reached. My parents were often part of these dreams, including my deceased father. I remembered a lot of these dreams and during the day they left me with a sense of certain anticipation that something big was coming in my life.

The dreams and my weekly newsletter helped me become mentally prepared and ready to accept whatever was coming, and when I got called back from my screening mammogram, I was certain this was it. Although the news of cancer was still difficult, I was able to move past much of the initial dread and fear, and address the urgent, immediate decisions analytically and rationally. I was ready to place myself trustingly into the hands of my excellent doctors, and felt the peace of acceptance for what was being done to my body.

There is a certain sort of surrender that I was incapable of until the births of my children. Because I had completely natural childbirth in both cases, I learned to surrender to the rhythms and changes in my body, moving with the waves of pain instead of against them, trusting in my caregivers. I've been able to achieve a similar state of surrender, not to the cancer, but to the discomfort and changes wrought by treatment, and to accept that I must go through all the steps of treatment in order, not only to live a long, healthy life, but to become who I will become when I come out the other side of this tunnel.