Navigating Chronic Illness

Chapter 5 Connecting to My Heart by Doing “120 Days Do What you Love Challenge” A lifetime spent focusing on people outside myself and how they were feeling had created an orientation in my life of compromising who I was to make others feel better, which involved making myself small and avoiding conflict with them. I wanted to make people feel happy and not to offend them. The consequence was that it didn’t serve me, and I lost who I was at my core. I came to a point where I asked myself, “Who am I?” “What do I want?” “What is my purpose for being here?” I didn’t know the answers to these questions, so I went on a journey to find them, as mentioned in Chapter 3. After I finished doing the Magician’s Way training and learnt about the heart being an important source of energy, I was invited by a friend who also did the training to join a Facebook group challenge that she had created on a whim and named “120 Days of Doing What You Love.” This challenge would help me find out what I was passionate about. I’m always up for a challenge, and my intuition told me that joining would help me connect more to my heart and what I love. It felt right for me, helping me find some answers to my questions. I connected to the Facebook page and found nine people had joined. Pollyanna had created the idea whilst talking innocently with her partner. She had challenged herself to write something every day and thought it would be a great idea to create a 120-day challenge to do what you love, sharing it on her Facebook page to invite like-minded people to join in. It creates momentum and a commitment to the group to stay true to yourself and accountable to the rest of the group. In other words, it would take some commitment from me and the others to join in. Commitment can be a scary word for some, especially for me. Like a bird, I like to flit from this to that and come up with new ideas as they spring to mind—a bit like ADD-type behaviour. That is where the beauty of what I chose for myself was a blessing: to go for walks in nature, which I loved to do, but this time taking my camera with me. It gave me a profound sense of purpose and focus. There was a sense of co-creation between me, nature, and the divine. The more I stood still and appreciated the beauty in what I found and photographed it, the more the natural world responded to me. It was a profound feeling. I lost track of time, and it was like I had gone to another world. Such was my focus. I would jolt myself out of this time-lapse and say, “Where am I?” “What time is it?” “Nobody knows I’m here.” “What if I got bitten by a snake?” No one could hear me. I panicked when I came back to reality. But somehow, having a purpose in photographing what I found protected me. If someone walked past me, I didn’t look lost or lonely and fall prey to those looking for an opening or weakness. It was a new feeling for me. My camera took me to places I would never have dreamed of going by myself before. I researched places and environments that appealed to me to visit, or what flora and fauna were endemic to that area. This ignited a passion in my heart for photography and an appreciation for the natural world around me. But after a while, I started to become frustrated with some of my images, and this drove me to challenge myself to develop a better understanding of photography. By honouring my heart and what I loved to do, and staying committed to doing that, I created a ripple effect. I wanted to share what I found with others, and I considered starting a photography course to improve my skills and knowledge. One day, I was walking up the staircase to the upper section of the road that took me to the bushland when I heard a voice calling to me. “Hello, can I ask you what you do every day?” “I see you walking with your camera.” “What do you take pictures of?” I walked over to the fence and saw a beautiful woman dressed all in white hanging out her washing as she spoke to me. I told her that I walked through the Seven Hills bushland up the road and took pictures of the flowers and other things I found there. She was very curious and asked if I could come over one morning and show her some of my photos. I was interested to find out why she wanted to know about what I did, and I ventured over one morning with some of my printed images, which I had made into a small book. Her family was part of a religious group called Brethren, a very Puritanical group that was not allowed to mingle with people who were not part of their community. I found it interesting that she wanted to connect with me and what I was doing. She told me that she was an interior designer and was interested in framing and hanging some of my pictures on her lounge room wall. Wow, that gave me a feeling that what I was doing had value. She was happy to pay me for my images, and she could organise the framing. She picked out three of my images of different white flowers and asked if I could get them printed in a rather large size to hang on her wall, to my delight. I smiled to myself, noticing that all the flowers she had chosen were white. She confided in me that she suffered from depression and was very inspired by me going off for walks in the bushland by myself. I asked her why she hadn’t done it herself, and she confided in me that her husband had forbidden her from walking through there, telling her that there were witches in the bushland. I had heard that story too, but I hadn’t found any evidence of it during my explorations. I felt that he controlled her and used fear to hold her back. I felt empathy for her situation.