Why I Wrote “Permission to Live”

I’m writing a book titled Permission to Live, and it is about how, as I faced a battle with cancer, I faced strategic medical and spiritual choices about how I was going to navigate it. What I learned about love and hope helped me find my way home and reimagine my life. Through this walk, I had to reconcile our larger cultural dialogue about caregiving with my personal views about living as a compassion advocate. Along the way, I found the permission to unearth a playful, healing and enchanted life.

Journey through My Garden

These images from my garden provide the perfect symbols and metaphoric language as an introduction to me, Peggy Fiedler, and my upcoming book Permission to Live.

When I think about how to explain what I mean about our interdependence as vital for healing—about the importance of self-care and reliance on a network of love around you—all I need to do is turn to my garden.

A garden is a place that reminds us to cultivate our sacred values. We must tend to these as much as we would attend to the hurts of physical body. We must remember, too, that any time something threatens the physical body, it affects us emotionally and spiritually as well.

The news that you are facing a life-threatening illness can be such an emotional blow that we are thrown off balance. Our sense of self-reliance is shattered, and in our culture that’s a double blow, because self-sufficiency seems to be the medal of achievement, the pinnacle of worthiness. Our sense of self-reliance, then, must be reconstituted in a new way that installs us into a framework that includes resourceful, knowledgeable and kind allies in healing.

Gardens hold spiritual space for us. They create a certain sanctuary that protects us as well as an invitation to open our hearts. They remind us of the healing power of the aesthetic. In a beautiful garden, we can bathe in appreciation and know we are accompanied.

Permission to Live blog

In this blog, I’ll explain why I call myself a compassion advocate, as well how we can practice Permission to Live. I write about how we can thrive on interdependence and stay in the flow of life. Here you’ll find musings on the human factor, positive psychology and the science of happiness.