In this personal, first‑person video, Jane Slack‑Smith recounts her experience undergoing brain surgery in August 2019. She describes how, rather than viewing the operation as a catastrophe, she adopted a proactive mindset encapsulated in the phrase “focus creates reality.” Two weeks before the procedure she researched visualization techniques, purchased a guided meditation, and committed to twice‑daily 20‑minute visualizations of a smooth, blood‑free surgery and rapid recovery. She also communicated assertively with her surgical team, offering to wait if they were tired, thereby positioning herself as an active participant rather than a passive victim. On the day of surgery she visualized the blood moving aside and the tumor being removed. After a successful operation—described by the surgeon as the blood moving away and the tumor being excised—she awoke in recovery and recognized that her focused intent had aligned with the outcome. The narrative emphasizes resilience, the power of mental focus, deliberate action, and the transformation of a medical crisis into an opportunity for personal growth.
Chapters
And so I look at this, focus creates reality, and for me it really came home to me when— so 2019, end of August 2019, was going in to have brain surgery. And I had seen a lot of people be defined by an illness or a significant medical event, and I was just like, well, this is a, this is a shock, it's a opportunity for me to just get through this, come out the other side. It doesn't define me, but I'm not going to like just go all peace and mung beans on this and go, let's just hope that just because I get the best surgeon that he's going to get it. I'm going to take some decisive action to create the result that I want. So what is the result I want? I want to come out of brain surgery with minimal impact. It's not going to come back. The tumor's gone. It's benign. It was easy surgery, and I'm going to recover quite quickly. And I thought, well, that'd be pretty good to imagine that, but I should probably, you know, see if someone else has kind of done this before and if there's anything out there that I could use. And so about 2 weeks before surgery, always last-minute Jane, I was doing some research and I thought, you should be able to visualize the end result really of what you want to create. And I was Googling, you know, imagery for post-surgeries or something, and up came this meditation. And I bought this guy's meditation, beautiful little meditation, they're all lights and fairies and everyone's feeling good. And it's like And, you know, the surgeon comes to the area to operate on, and magically the blood moves aside and the tumor or the growth is there, and they cut it out, and then all good blood comes back and it gets better really nicely, and you recover and it's all good. And I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna visualize that. So twice a day, morning and night, 20 minutes, I'm just visualizing this. I'm laying in the room ready to go in, I'm like, I've got this. Visualizing the blood moves away, and the surgeon says, like, it's new age surgery here, we're not gonna cut open your head and try to find your pituitary gland. We're gonna push a hole up through your nose and we excavate up there. All good. And that should take the ear and nose guy about an hour, and then I'll spend about, you know, 2 or 3 hours getting involved and finding the tumor and pulling it out. Okay, so it's probably a 3 or 4 hour process. He's, uh, I was supposed to go in at 1 o'clock and then 2 o'clock, and it's got to 6 o'clock, and I'm saying to him, look, if you're tired, I'm happy to wait. Like, you know, I know that, you know, you guys have kind of probably been concentrating all day long, but I'm happy to wait. We this. He's like, oh no, no, no, we'll go for this. And he's like, you know, it'll be 3 or 4 hours. Okay, so I go in at 6 o'clock and I wake up in the recovery room and it's 7:30 and I'm like, oh, something's gone really wrong here. I don't know what's happening. And so, and the doctor comes in, I'm still kind of high on morphine or something, and he says, that was amazing. I said, oh, what happened? He said, well, we punched up in, the blood moved away from the tumor, I pulled it out and the blood came back and we patched you up and It's done. And I'm like, "Oh, oh." And I said, "I did that?" And he's like, "No, I did that." And I'm like, "No, I'll tell you later." When I think about this, the focus creates the reality. I was completely in the endgame. I wasn't a victim. I didn't have a medical catastrophe. I had an opportunity for me to demonstrate that I could get over something, become resilient, but I also took some actions. That allowed me to get to that result.
