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I remember a day where I was suffering with the after-effects of radiation on my brain: swelling, pressure, constant pain, with no real end in sight. The doctors had me on steroids, painkillers, and a host of other treatments and I was beginning to lose hope. I felt miserable and I did not know what was going to happen. Then I decided to take control of my life. I bought a book, a simple book, called Creating Power by Kareem Hajee, but it wasn’t just the book that changed my life, it was the attitude I had going into it and the feelings I had about getting to a point where I felt like myself again. It was knowing that everything is a product of the mind and that through conditioning of the mind, you can succeed in any aspect of your life that you want to.

It was all about figuring out what it is you want. In my situation back then, my first and foremost goal was to get healthy, so I focused primarily on that, with daily affirmations, visualizations, expanding on possibilities, and making sure I knew that anything, and everything was possible, and still is possible. One of my favorite examples from the book was he told a story of a man who was getting ready for work and accidentally dropped a jar of mayonnaise on the floor, shattering it everywhere. Some other family member comes in and makes a sarcastic comment about how you dropped the jar and now have to clean it up, therefore making you late for work. The obvious way to react to the situation in a reactive mode, meaning a defensive mode, sort of, is to yell at the family member and become enraged at the jar of mayonnaise, and clean it up grudgingly, and proceed to go to work in a huff, carrying that negative energy with you, and making your whole day miserable.

The alternative way to react to the mayonnaise situation was to say to yourself, “I’m cleaning up the mayonnaise and having a great day.” It may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but it works. You could spend your whole life in a negative state based on your external circumstances, and it won’t do you much good, but perhaps decoupling the feelings from the external actions and situations can somehow free us from emotional instability. If you can maintain an internal positive state at all times, you are less likely to be ruffled when things don’t go your way. It’s all about keeping things in perspective anyway. Let me explain:

If you are having a good day, a really good day, it may put you in a state of complete joy. You may be bursting with pride or whatever, but in that good day, it helps to realize that in order for this day to be a really good day, you have to look back at some other days and see that they were anything but good. Some of them were downright awful. But it makes the good days that much sweeter, knowing that they are not forever, that cherishing each positive moment is a sacred practice. But getting overly attached to these good days can be kind of unhealthy if you know where I am going with this. When things start to not go your way once again, if you are overly attached to the good days, a bad day could send you into a deep depression. But if you can look past the bad day, observe it, and say to yourself, “This may be a bad day, and it is a part of life, but there are more good days coming, as well as more bad days, as is the nature of life,” you may get a better bearing on understanding life is more about attitude than it is about situations.

I think it’s great whenever I talk to elderly people and I ask them if they are having a good day and they say, “Every day I wake up is a good day.” It shows an overall appreciation for life, no matter how good or bad it may be. If you can appreciate life itself, every part of it, be thankful for the good and the bad, then you are on your way towards enlightenment or whatever you want to call it.

I can honestly say I am thankful for everything, even my unexpected brain cancer. It was another form of “personal growth.” I know that it was a terrible experience, but it changed me for the better in so many ways and allowed me to no longer be afraid of who I really am and to share myself with the world, without any kind of fear or regret. I sometimes forget this and have to constantly remind myself of who I am and what I have overcome and that once I get the inside right, the outside will take care of itself. It is an overall approach to life, to have a positive attitude, to be thankful for everything you receive, and to prosper indefinitely with the fruits of existence.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I overcame the pain, the swelling, and if it ever comes back, if any sort of suffering comes back to me, I will accept it, and change my attitude towards it, be grateful for the health I have, thereby sending me more of the health I need. Good day.