At the TEDWomen conference, Eve Ensler, writer, poet and activist, gave a talk about her discovery of her body and her collision with cancer…and the world. I suggest you listen somewhere private. It made me weep.

Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection.I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world, and it wasn’t happening later, it was happening now.

Suddenly, my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere, the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live down the streets from chemical plants — and they’re usually poor – the cancer inside the coal miner’s lungs, the cancer of stress for not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma, the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish, the cancer in women’s uteruses from being raped, the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness.

Our bodies manifest our world. The world manifests our bodies. Begin at either end, but begin with connection and then find healing.

 
Has an experience with severe illness ever shifted the way you see the world?