Dancing With Cancer: Take Back Your Health

Cancer. The word instills fear in the hearts of many who have been touched by this event in life. Cancer has visited my family many times over the years. Some have lived to tell about it. Others have fallen by the wayside. And others, still, dance with the beast this very day. In this day and age, cancer is becoming the norm. Very few are left unscathed in its path.

Okay, so that’s the dramatic opener to an article that I hope will arm you with all sorts of useful information for dealing with The Big C. Whether you’re a family member or friend who is supporting someone else through their ordeal or whether you’re facing this experience yourself, read on. I will do my utmost to untangle the fear from its icy grip on your heart and help you to realize that cancer does NOT need to be a death sentence.

This article will be extremely dense on information. I’m not sure that one particular aspect is going to be guaranteed to be more important than another. Essentially, I’m of the opinion that the only way to address a serious illness is to look at all the aspects and work with all the areas of your life to effect healing.

The Thoughts You Think

First on the agenda are the thoughts you think. This category is itself a hugely broad and deep topic, so I’ll probably need to address it more in another article. That said, we can get a good feel for just how important our thoughts are when it comes to our health. I’ll try to break things down to help you see just how layered our thoughts are and just how many complex dependencies we can experience at their behest.

Thoughts About Self

Our “inner talk” about us — our perception of Self — is extraordinarily powerful in driving our health experiences. When we see ourselves as unworthy of love or undeserving of abundance due to some perceived misbehaviour/sin, we tilt our immune system and dramatically impede its ability to perform. The mind-body connection is absolute, which means that whatever the body experiences reflects in the mind and vice versa. If our thoughts are negative with regard to our self-image, those thoughts will unavoidably have a negative impact on our health and well-being. Because of that, it’s vital that we develop and nurture unconditional love for Self. Unconditionally accepting and loving yourself is a huge stumbling block for many of us; it should, therefore, be completely in our sights when we’re working on any issue to do with well-being.

Similar to potential self-esteem and self-worth issues are how we identify ourselves with our habits or experiences. One of the biggest dangers with regard to health is integrating our experiences of illness. Many people have the tendency to think and refer to illness in a possessive voice, e.g., my cancer or my arthritis. Any time you express an experience with a possessive voice, you take on the energetic signature of that experience into your etheric body.

Read that again. If you take possession of an illness, you energetically make it a part of you. This behaviour should be avoided at all costs. Any time you find yourself referring to an illness or injury in a possessive voice, gently redirect your thoughts and rephrase things to be more dissociative. Moreover, if your language uses pronouns that can imply distance from the disease, it can be a powerful tool to program your subconscious mind to remain idealistically separate from your experience.

An example of how to change your voicing might be:

Bad: My cancer is really causing me to lose weight quickly.
Better: Since experiencing that cancer, I’m losing weight quickly.

The rephrasing of the second example not only changes from my to that, it also redirects the power position. The first example gives all the power to the cancer by stating it to be the reason for weight loss. The second example merely states a correlation between experiencing cancer and experiencing weight loss. Such differentiations in outlook may seem to be trivial, but they are extremely powerful to the symbol-oriented subconscious mind.

Gratitude versus Negativity

When it comes to the quality of our thoughts, I can think of no stronger healing paradigm than that of gratitude. Although it can be challenging to remain in a state of gratitude when you’re facing a health setback, e.g., recovering from radiation treatments or chemotherapy, tapping into that place of inner joy and gratitude is essential to keeping your immune system functioning as well as possible. Gratitude is one of THE most powerful ways there is to help your immune system recover from cancer treatments, period.

Everything — and I really mean EVERYthing — is a potential point of gratitude. Everything from the taste of an apple to the shadows cast by the sun as it sets are open game for expressing joy and gratitude. It’s the perfect opportunity for you to be present and accountable for every moment of your life, expressing joy and thanks for being able to have the experiences available to you. The power of gratitude simply cannot be overstated. Take the time and opportunity to be grateful for everything in your life. Whether it be a cup of coffee or the purr of a cat, look for any possible excuse to feel joy. Any reason at all.

That includes the cancer itself.

Trials and tribulations in life are a gift. The challenges we face in life are those things that push us beyond our comfort zone and force us to dig deep. It is from challenges that we grow. It is the lessons that we choose to take from our experiences from which we grow and become something stronger. Something greater.

Before somebody decides to snipe me with “That’s easy for you to say,” understand that I’ve faced physical, emotional and sexual abuse at times in my life. I have struggled with addiction to alcohol, caffeine and sugar. I’ve lived through obesity, failing health and all manner of issues regarding lack of self-worth and self-esteem. The information I present here as solutions comes from empirical evidence. I share what I have learned works for me through working with my own personal demons.

Life-changing experiences such as cancer can be incredible opportunities for you to come to terms with your views. If you are used to being in a victim mentality, you’ll need to understand quickly that playing the victim card completely gives away your personal power to others. That includes your health and well-being. You must understand that you are in control of your destiny and that only you can heal you. Nobody has that power. Doctors and drugs merely facilitate your body’s capacity to heal itself. So, release yourself fully from the role of victim and take ownership of your life journey. You can heal yourself, but only if you make it so.

The victim role will defeat you. Just ask my mother. You’ll need a psychic to do so, though; mom died of cancer after a lifetime of telling the story of Life Is Hard. You live what you believe.

Thoughts Become Things

According to American physicist Fred Wolf, consciousness and intention inhabit the realm of the Higgs Field, which just happens to be the same field from which gravity interacts with the rest of the universe. The implications of intention dancing with gravity means that our thoughts have the power to directly interact with matter. And since cancer cells are made of matter, you can direct your thoughts to directly affect the cancerous tumours and cells themselves.

The first element here is to simply view yourself as being completely healthy. Picture / imagine / visualize (choose the verb that is best for you) yourself being as happy and as healthy as you possibly can be. Experience the joy through richly detailed daydreams and allow yourself to bask in that space of genuine happiness. You can do things such as anchoring the feeling to a particular physical reaction, such as clenching your fist, smiling and loudly saying, “Double it!” Each time you “double it”, imagine doubling your joy, health and well-being. The more you play with the image and anchoring, the more profound your joyful experience. It’s a mental trick that is absolutely incredible to use.

T-cell killing a cancer cell

Meditate, Meditate and Meditate Some More

When we’re facing huge trials in our life, our ego tends to run away with telling fear-filled stories of all that can possibly go wrong. Fear is a killer for those facing cancer. Fear can do more to stop our healing potential than the cancer itself! The most important aspect of understanding how ridding ourselves of fear is important is to consider what fear is in the first place:

FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real

The ego’s fearful chatter is a future-push of an old story. We transpose images and experiences from our past onto a possible future. Not THE future, but a possible future. Nothing that the ego warns about is a given. Although the ego means well — its job is to protect us from making mistakes that might cause us pain or even death — it tends to be the Boy Who Cried Wolf. It projects tales of doom and gloom into the future to keep us from making mistakes.

This ego behaviour is good in the moment, but is really only beneficial when we’re facing immediate and tangible threats, such as being bitten by a cobra or risking a traverse across loose shale on a very steep mountain slope. These threats are acute, meaning that they come up quickly and, generally speaking, dissipate just as quickly. A flight/fight response lasting minutes poses no health threat.

Unfortunately for us, our egos are so good at digging through memories and finding patterns that we are inundated with potential pitfalls throughout life. When we’re facing chronic health issues such as cancer, the ego showers us with everything that could go wrong, from loved ones who died to our own missteps and everything in between. If it was newsworthy enough for you to remember, your ego will find it and project that negativity into a possible future storyline.

The risk in this ego behaviour is that the subconscious mind really doesn’t differentiate between fantasy and reality. When the ego projects its fear-filled story into your future and you imagine that scenario, your body reacts physically to the fear and induces its fight/flight response! This reaction suppresses your immune function, which means Happy Days for your cancer cells! The more you fret and worry, the more successful your cancer will be in growing and spreading. To stop this from happening, you must silence the ego and silence its stories.

That silence comes during meditation. The ego cannot exist in the present. The ego only knows the past and imagined futures. As we become accustomed to practicing meditation, we experience longer and longer periods of being in the gap between our thoughts. That silence is golden. Within that space, that silence, we can find our true essence. We can tap into the innate joy that is God Consciousness. We can experience the very fabric of love and intention in the first person. In the silence of the breath, we can find healing.

There are a number of meditation styles out there and it is beyond the scope of this article to try to describe them. If you’re unaccustomed to meditating, I would encourage you to find something and just try it. It’s okay if you’re unsure. Just go for it. At a bare minimum, sitting with good posture and focusing on your breath is enough. As your thoughts come, acknowledge them and let them go.

A mistake new meditators often make is to try to suppress their thoughts. This is akin to holding your ego’s nose so it cannot breathe. As you attempt to suppress your thoughts, you’ll experience more and more fear from the ego itself. It is better to just relax and allow, knowing that thoughts naturally come and go. If you acknowledge your thoughts yet do not entertain your ego, you will find that your thoughts come more slowly. The space you seek will present itself naturally, without struggle.

Be Active and Exercise!

We live in a universe of motion. From the tiniest vibrating string in the quantum world through to accretion discs rotating around black holes, this is a universe that is always in motion. Absolute Zero is the temperature that we note in which atoms no longer vibrate. That said, nothing IN the universe exists at absolute zero and so everything is in motion.

We should take that as a parable for our life and strive to be in motion as much as possible. It need not be that we all become marathon runners; we all have our own strengths, weaknesses, preferences and pace. That said, it is dangerous to the human condition to be sedentary. We evolved over millions of years to constantly be moving in the quest for food, water and safe shelter. Although these concerns are easily addressed in many of our modern-day lives, our bodily requirements to be in motion have not gone away!

Cancer researchers have found that exercise has a strong positive impact on a body healing from cancer. Exercise generates Human Growth Hormone and other beneficial hormones that cause cancer cells to falter. If we exercise regularly, even if that means only walking, stretching and holding a few yoga poses, we empower our body in profound ways.

I have a regular meditation, qigong, asana and core-muscle exercise regimen that I use to maintain my physical, emotional and mental fitness. I love working with QiGong and Sahaja Yoga as means of ensuring my chakras are balanced and my meridians/nadi are clear for good energy flow. Japa meditation is a profound adjunct to that and can be combined with moving meditation practices such as T’ai Chi. I walk regularly and meditate during walking. Running and other exercises feature regularly during my week.

Visual Motor Rehearsal

For those of you who face serious physical disability and are not physically mobile, take heart! There is a technique developed for NASA in the 1970s that you can use to exercise mentally and derive huge benefits! It’s called Visual Motor Rehearsal and you can use it easily to enhance your physical performance and healing.

VMR is a fancy way of describing detailed imagination or daydreaming. It’s a focused way of imagining that causes you to live an experience completely in your head. Back in the ’70s when this technology was being developed, they tested athletes by telling the athletes to imagine running a race. The athletes imagined everything from standing at the starting blocks, hearing the starter pistol, running the race and then winning.

What the researchers found was astounding! They discovered that these athletes’ bodies were undergoing physical changes in exact accordance with the activity being imagined. When they ran a race, their leg muscles were firing according to the instructions that their brains were sending in exactly the same way that would happen in a real activity.

What this means for somebody healing is that you can be bed-ridden and still exercise. Even if you’re paralyzed, you can imagine doing all those activities you want to do. In your mind, go hiking. Go running. Climb mountains. Swim! Do ALL those things that you want to do again. And then go further and experience the joy of being able to do those things. Experience it NOW as being NOW.

Because the brain cannot differentiate between fantasy and reality, we now bring the realm of fight/flight and turn it into something incredibly powerful. When you begin exercising your body in your mind and experiencing these physical changes, your mind will send out signals to the rest of your body that THIS IS HAPPENING. Nerves that are damaged will begin to be repaired. Communication pathways will be restored. Hormone signalling will be recovered. Muscles will begin to reverse their atrophy and grow once again.

Visual Motor Rehearsal is also a powerful mechanism for you to restore healthful organs and reduce/destroy cancer tumours. If you have, for example, Stage IV ovarian cancer, you can meditate and richly imagine cancer cells being destroyed by your immune system. You can imagine your ovaries returning to their natural perfection. You can play out your complete recovery over and over again.

This is the mechanism of the Law of Attraction. This is the very nature of how our thoughts interact with our world to create our reality. This is one of our universe’s greatest truths. And perhaps its greatest gift.

By the power of your thoughts, you can become anything. You can make yourself ill or you can make yourself well. The choice is yours.