LIMITED BY CHOICE

If you were diagnosed as being HIV+, would you reveal your status? Or would you choose to go into self-imposed exile as a victim of your own shame and fear of rejection?

HIV has hopefully started to move away from the "leprosy" status it attracted thirty years ago, when ignorance blighted people's reaction to the virus. The media has done a lot to correct these dangerous misconceptions and HIV is slowly starting to take its rightful place.

When we confine anything to secrecy, we give it a power way beyond what it deserves. The moment we talk openly about serious issues, we disempower them. It is that act of sharing which enables us to take back our power and to refuse to continue being hostage to something that doesn't warrant such destructive attention.

For several months I have been involved in assisting people going through a HIVEX treatment for HIV. As their physical well-being begins to recover, so they start to examine the mental and spiritual issues around this illness. Every adversity, including HIV and Aids, is a profound opportunity to grow, to become MORE! HIV comes to mirror our inadequacies and to enable personal growth in ways we could never have envisaged.

Many of those who visit this treatment centre tell me how they have lived a shut-down exile since discovering their HIV infection. One woman even left family and friends and a significant career to go live abroad as she tried to run away from her new HIV+ existence. Just in the past week, she has engaged family and friends and revealed her status. The lightness of being that has emanated from this positive disclosure is clearly visible on her face. She now radiates light rather than projecting the darkness of her burdensome secrets.

As people emerge from this unspoken veil, they are most frequently met with overwhelming love and support, rather than facing the torment of rejection that is the root of this tyrannical fear. Rejection always begins with self and this creates the energetic space for others to choose to reject us.

HIV forces us to deal with our fragile ego, to learn that the more authentic we are about everything, the more powerful we become. When we stop projecting rejection and start to love ourselves enough, we find a world that welcomes us with open arms, despite HIV or any other perceived affliction.

Life gives us everything we need to expand us into the fullness of our being. We need to become conscious to the several disguised opportunities to become MORE, rather than being grounded by self-pity and the inability to look for the high ground.

Life is about choice and best we make choices that are expansive and valuable not only to ourselves but to everyone around us. When people start to face their reality with candour and with the desire to become MORE, that is the space where considerable myths get debunked where limitation is conquered.

HIV is not a death sentence! HIV is an opportunity to live differently and to engage life significantly. HIV generates the need to make considerable choices and should be the conduit for positive transformation rather than a pitiful degeneration. This attitude soon teaches us that the most apparent limitations are created by our own thinking anyway.

If you were HIV+, would you continue to be ashamed of your status?