I know that many of you are tired of hearing about positive thinking. Why, I don't know especially when many of you welcome an onslaught of negative thinking into your lives each day. With that said, let me tell you my story and how positive thinking changed my life.
In my sophomore year of college, I started to develop hand tremors which I dismissed as nerves. At the end of my senior year, my opthamologist said that my one eye, which always had an astigmatism, had lost most of its vision. I just put it off to bad genes and went on. I had no time to think about these trivial things. I had a wedding to plan, a job to find and a relocation to a new area to complete. Besides,the eye had never really been that useful, so I didn't see the impact. No pun intended.
When I was 26, I gave birth to my daughter and within months my world started to cave in. Nerve problems in my back, which eventually led to back surgery, turned into a barrage of health problems. Our lives were turned upside down with hospital stays, a slew of specialist visits and a final diagnosis of Progressive non-remitting MS.
During one hospital stay at a prestigious teaching hospital, the doctor told my husband and myself that I had the bad kind and to expect no improvement and get used to the idea of living in a wheel chair. After he delivered this bit of cheer and left the room, my husband and I looked at each other and just laughed and said, "Bull*@$#!" From that day forward, we made up our minds that this was not going to be the end of our journey.
Yes, we had some tough years. I went from walking with a cane, to leg braces and crutches, but always in our minds we saw me walking without any aids. We saw us together on vacation walking on beaches, riding bikes - anything that was active we visualized doing together. The visualization brought us hope and eventually started to make me stronger. I took up swimming and exercises. Every visit to the doctor came with a response, "I do not know what you are doing, but keep it up. You just keep getting better and better."
This week my daughter goes off to her senior year at Penn State University, and I can honestly say our vision has come true. With the help of a very open minded family practicioner, a great chiropractor,the emotional support of my family, and most importantly, God, I walk on my own without any help from anything. In fact, my husband and I walk two miles a day with our dogs. This year, I even jogged with my daughter when she was home on summer break.
Doubters will say this is a remission or I am a fluke, but I just laugh at their lack of faith. I say my major struggles are over. I have no doubt in my mind that the worst is behind me, and the best is yet to come.
I know everyone's disease is different no matter what the ailment, but as more and more research comes out about the unbelievable effect a positive attitude plays in all medical health issues, I have to believe that my constant faith in God, my positive mindset and my family's attitude allowed us to overcome the physical obstacles that were put in our way.
I know how fortunate I am, and I have to confess something strange here too. I am grateful for the disease that almost wiped me out. Why? Because without it, I never would have found my writer's voice.
In my worst days, I got the inspiration to try my hand at writing. It was always a dream of mine, but I was always running here or there and never took the time to take it seriously. Limited mobility sucked, but it forced me to take a shot, and today I am a published sports, business and humor writer and author.
For years, people couldn't understand why I wrote humor or how I saw humor in life. My response to those negative souls was a simple "How could you not? You have to find joy in everything. If you find joy in your present, there will always be joy in your future." This has been my mantra for pretty much my entire adult life.
My husband and I have taken our belief in positive thinking and visualization and applied them other aspects of our lives. We started PossessionPoints.com and MyVeryOwnFan.com in the midst of these darker economic times. We used visualization and positive thinking to shed weight ( I will write a blog on that later), and we instilled our positive mindset in our daughter as well. (She still has a way to go on this, but she is getting there.)
I have witnessed the miracles that gratitude prayer, a positive attitude and visualization can bring about. I see science embracing these ideals each day too. Unfortunately, I have also seen the devastation that negative thinking brings about: bitterness, isolation and even premature death.
I invite you to take the journey with me and learn about the benefits of a positive mindset. Why give negative energy so much attention? Why let it fester and grow?