Cantaride tells us about her experience of meeting her inner self through a healing process.
My story of reflection, transformation, and overcoming my illness begins a little over ten years ago.
It still continues today and will accompany me throughout my lifetime because, even though I have fully recovered, it has transformed my body and asked my mind and my emotions to transform accordingly. When I think of illness as an opportunity to meet new parts of myself, face them and teach them a new grammar of life, I find that this is also my experience.
It was when my “clinical” phase was already finished that Falco Tarassaco proposed the reading of the disease as a sign of the proximity of the Grail force. I recognize being in Its proximity even more so today.
I am an artistic restorer, I have two children and in 2008 the doctors told me, after the usual tests, the need to completely remove my breast. A little because by nature I am not one to wait around, and partly because I did not feel ready to face a path of death, I entrusted myself to them to begin the long surgical cycle of the therapeutic and the reconstructive phase.
The relationship
Facing that path was not easy, especially for me as I had a great deal of discomfort with invasive therapies. I am, or rather I used to be, among those people who fainted during blood tests, but luckily, I was able to see many stimulating aspects from the beginning. First of all, I necessarily had to rely on doctors and surgeons, discovering that delegating someone to look after me, as it was against my nature, could make me discover the preciousness of people. Then I understood it even more by the explanation about my illness: there are cells that are no longer able to communicate with others nor to understand that their life cycle includes death, and so they become a disease. In short, there was a “relationship” disease within me. So, I committed myself to enter into more profound relationships with the people and environments that I came into contact with. From practitioners in so many wards of many different hospitals to so many women who were experiencing the same thing as I was (or who lived exactly the opposite, when I was a guest of maternity wards). I sought and found deeper relationships and it was fundamental to be able to elaborate on the meaning of what was happening to me.
A new style of life
It is the relationship between us, with the women with similar illnesses, that has mostly moved me: among us, there is the ability to really share what one is experiencing because there is no need to explain anything. I found the Diana project, to change lifestyles starting with nutrition, and it was another important point of work, and still not only do I stick to the indications received but I participate in events within the project. I wrote that in the Grail theme I feel more involved today than in the acute phase of my illness. My body has been modified, I know, and I live with that every day. A new breast, which is mine but not completely, is something that always takes some of my attention, and sometimes it’s like a dress in which I don’t feel completely comfortable in. And because, just like a wardrobe, it is something that in time must be renewed, it leads me to reflect on what I want for me, how I feel, how I want to be thought of and how I want to meet others on a deeper level.
The ability to do my part
It is a reflection that reminds me of the very meaning of life and my relationship with myself. Of course, the fact that I am privileged does not escape me. Thankfully I had time to intervene in a difficult situation and met some very smart people who were able to assist me. Also, I had the ability to do my part, maintaining a positive attitude, bringing new attention to my way of eating and nurturing myself, moving with, and trusting others. I came back from this adventure full of energy and desire to do more things. I even opened a new restoration laboratory! I don’t feel like the ancient works that pass through my hands: I don’t belong to the past, I belong to today.
