HIV/AIDS....MORE OR LESS?

Growth only occurs when we traverse personal frontiers of experience and understanding into the uncomfortable unknown!

Like most others, I believed HIV/Aids was something other people contracted, much like a cancer, stroke or other life threatening illness. I read about the great suffering wrought by the pandemic spread of HIV, but somehow felt that I would be immune to its influence, until fatefully diagnosed some four years ago. My experience of this virus would take me to the point of confronting my own mortality, as two savage episodes of full-blown Aids would severely challenge my ongoing existence.

I was not unlucky to be infected with HIV!

In truth, I had loved myself little enough to willingly engage in unprotected sex which I knew could lead to the transmission of this deadly virus. I cannot blame anyone but myself and take full responsibility for the consequences of my actions. HIV/Aids is the disease of self-love... It is generally given an opportunity to cross human boundaries by those with inadequate levels of self-love who take dangerous chances. Once infected, HIV/Aids comes to teach the art of self-love, as those infected need to exercise considerable and regular acts of self-love to preserve their ongoing life.

As a young man, I asked for a BIG life. BIG can never happen when trapped in tight boundaries and HIV/Aids was one of the vehicles that came to provide an opportunity for extreme personal growth. This is not what my perception of BIG was all about, but fighting to regain a fading life is not a small experience. Feeling life ebb away under the onslaught of repeated different opportunistic infections requires an inestimable desire to live through the dark valley in order to find the glow of life again.

Not only was this a struggle for physical survival, but my fragile ego took strain with a relentless fear as to what others might be saying or thinking. HIV/Aids taught me that the opinion of others is irrelevant and needed to be studiously avoided. More important for my mental health was the need to hold empowering thoughts to provide the mental armoury to effectively conquer this considerable life challenge. My limiting self-beliefs of feeling unwanted was also firmly revisited through the process of HIV, as I began to wonder whether anyone would willingly wish to hold and kiss me ever again. Here again HIV/Aids taught me that rejection always begins with ourselves and that stigma needs to be rooted out at source. We need to be the change we want to see in the world... it has to start with us!

Four years later, medical science and an indomitable spirit has enabled me to regain a life which today is substantially larger than before encountering this BIG experience. Apart from popping a few pills daily to ensure my ongoing survival, HIV has become a minute part of my overall life landscape. I have taken back my power and studiously keep the virus in correct perspective. I choose to live "positively" and openly with HIV, as secrets always disempower their owners.

The journey with HIV has not been easy; the journey with Aids was a nightmare! But in truth, like every adversity, HIV/Aids has expanded my life in more ways than this article permits. HIV/Aids has inadvertently made my life to be MORE rather than LESS, because I chose to live and continue to choose to live fully. Adversity is the crucible where we decide whether to grow or succumb, to be MORE or to be LESS.



Please share this testimony with others who are either curious about HIV/Aids or those whose lives have been incontrovertibly infected or affected by the virus. Let's actively move beyond a victim consciousness and change the negative impact that HIV is having on our planet!