The Gift of Cancer: A Miraculous Journey to Healing

Introduction

The Gift

At age twenty-six I was given an unusual gift: cancer. I don’t say this to make light of what appeared to be an early death sentence. Cancer devastated my life. My marriage was ripped apart and our meager finances were drained away faster than we could have imagined. Over the course of fourteen years, cancer claimed my entire reproductive system, both my breasts, and left me with a prognosis of one year to live. That was twenty-four years ago.

While cancer ushered in one of the most difficult periods of my life, it also ignited one of the most profound. Having cancer left me stranded in a place where no doctor had the capacity to save me. But it led me to the truth of who I am and the realization that only I possessed the power to save myself.

Forced to examine my life in new and challenging ways by the dramatic changes generated by my cancer diagnoses, I came to the understanding that if you are inclined to look for the silver lining amongst the dark clouds, you will find it. I learned that in the storm of crisis that is the healing process, there is enormous opportunity for growth and change. Those dark clouds of adversity have the power to strengthen, bring clarity, and reveal to us the miracles that lie beyond our limited beliefs. I now appreciate the importance of embracing that adversity as the gift it is. I finally know that those challenging experiences are a crucial piece of the puzzle that can serve our growth and transformation. Arriving at that knowing was not easy.

Life will consistently bring to light what is needed to nudge us toward the growth necessary for our highest good. And in perfect harmony with each life plan, every experience comes forth at the perfect moment to teach us something profound about ourselves. When we accept our challenges and move through the lessons inherent in them, we discover that healing energy is available to us, offering the hope of wholeness and an amazing future alive with possibility.

For me, the first step was to surrender to those lessons being called forth by my own being. To embrace what was in front of me so it could be transformed, thus fulfilling my deepest desire—for my life to be different.

As I moved toward that goal, a stark realization came into view. I had been living my life as a victim rather than a creator. And to be a victim, there must be a perceived persecutor. In my case, I believed my persecutors to be family, friends, and a husband cut from the same cloth as my father. With my belief in victimhood firmly in place, I felt powerless. Yet as much as I wanted to change this feeling, I couldn’t seem to step out of my victim role. That is until cancer entered my life for the third time and opened my eyes to a universal truth: I am responsible for my life circumstances and my reactions to those circumstances. To continue to turn away or hide from the stressful signals I had been getting for years was no longer an option.

This was a hard pill to swallow. Especially when taking responsibility included not only for my circumstances, but also for my decisions and even my illness. There are those who will argue they are genetically predisposed to disease and are therefore victims of their illness. Logically and emotionally, this can be justified. I certainly don’t debate that. I do, however, believe it is our inability to face stressful situations that fuel our problems and remove the possibility of transformation and healing.

When we ignore the signals that stressful events present, or believe we are helpless to change our circumstances, or fail to take responsibility for stress that is in our lives, we become victims to that situation. Once this happens, our ego-mind takes over and promises us solutions. But the ego-mind is not equipped to find solutions. Solutions can only be accessed through creative energy and an awareness of ourselves as spiritual beings.

The ego-mind loves to spin negative stories that offer countless band-aid solutions in support of our powerless victim mentality. Living in this limited capacity creates enormous stress on our bodies, which in turn triggers biological responses that can weaken our immune system’s ability to access its healing energy. Living this way takes us down the path of heartache, disappointment, and inevitably, illness.

It is a medically documented fact that prolonged, unaddressed stress can lead to chronic illness. If we don’t acknowledge this stress and ask what is needed of us in any given situation to alleviate it, we remain cut off from the wisdom of our hearts where all creative solutions are found.

When we are in reaction mode rather than response mode, we tend to do one of three things that exacerbate our situation: we either internalize the stress denying we are responsible for the circumstance; we avoid the situation altogether; or we numb ourselves so we don’t have to deal with our feelings. The key to solving this is to face the problem, embrace it, and surrender to the strong emotions the problem triggers. By doing this, we create a space for our creative spirit to offer long-term solutions that lead to healing.

Once I realized I was running from my problems, I began to question if this might be one of the reasons I had fallen into the abyss of cancer. Asking this question pushed me to look at myself honestly. What I saw was someone who felt powerless to change the stressful events passing through her life. During stressful times, I would either internalize my feelings, denying what was going on, or I would numb myself with alcohol and drugs to quell the fear and pain coursing through me.

Once this process was in motion, judgment about my inability to deal with my situation would kick in and feelings of shame, guilt, and anger would flood my system. Then I would systematically punish myself for being weak by sabotaging everything good that came into my life.

Does this pattern sound familiar? How often do we punish ourselves for not knowing better, for not making a smarter decision? How often do we heap guilt and shame on ourselves, destroying our lives because we feel powerless and ashamed? How often do we turn away from our problems instead of engaging in potential solutions?

Once the awareness of these patterns took hold in me, I became passionate about finding out what drove them. I began to ask myself questions: What do I believe? How do I perceive the circumstances of my life? What are my dominant thought patterns? What began to emerge was a picture of a child that, like most children, took on her parents’ beliefs, perceptions, fears, and doubts. This is what we do as children. We develop attitudes, beliefs, ways of dealing with problems and challenges based on the beliefs, perspectives and coping mechanisms we observe in our parents. Then we carry these observed skills into adulthood.

Most people are unaware of the profundity of this process because the patterns we develop sit in our unconscious. It is imperative, if we are to have any hope of changing our lives for the better, that we become aware of the negative beliefs, fears, and perspectives we take on as children. When we awaken to these patterns, we can begin to transform them, thus creating the opportunity to live our lives as empowered beings rather than victims.

For me, it took being diagnosed with my third bout of cancer before I was willing to look beyond the physical reasons for my disease and discover the deeper beliefs, perceptions, and emotional issues at the core of my illness. Over time, these issues, left unattended, created fertile ground for cancer to thrive in my body. It took the stark realization that I could die in a year’s time for me to face the unacknowledged stresses contributing to my disease.

One of the first steps in healing anything in our lives is to accept right where we are. This is especially true if where we are is not where we want to be. We cannot heal what we deny or are unwilling to accept. By denying what begs our attention, we create resistance. We then give power to that resistance and, as we all know, what we resist persists!

For years, I resisted taking responsibility for my problems, my health, or my inability to stand in my own truth. Following the patterns established by my parents, I was afraid to confront the anger and fear that coursed through me. I had learned that problems are caused by something or someone outside myself. I used blame and criticism to point the finger in another direction. Others needed to change, not me.

To distract myself from taking responsibility for my actions, I kept busy. When that didn’t work, I drank, watched too much television, or ate too much sugar. That did work, for a while. But fixes that originate in the ego-mind cannot last. What I perceived as coping strategies only led to my feeling powerless. It began to dawn on me that I must stop denying my feelings and blaming others. It was time to start looking inside myself for the answers to my problems.

Making this important decision created an environment where growth could take place—an atmosphere where I could transform my experiences into gifts of peace, healing, and wellbeing. As my commitment to this work took hold, a part of me began to awaken, what I call a spiritual awakening. But make no mistake, it takes work, hard work, and a deep desire to heal your life as much as you desire to heal your cancer, or whatever illness your body may be expressing.

The fear we carry about most disease is born in our lack of understanding of the power we possess to transform our lives. This knowledge is obscured by our distorted belief that we are powerless human beings rather than powerful God beings with the ability to transform and change our circumstances. We push away our ability to love and be loved. We live fast-paced, stressed-out lives. We eat lousy diets. We live in an environment that has been poisoned. Yes, genetic makeup can be a factor, but it is not the deciding factor. We are the deciding factor.

When allowed the proper environment, the body will always gravitate towards health. It’s not only my responsibility to expose my body to the environment in which it can thrive, it is also a gift I can give myself each and every day.

My story is not only about healing the cancer that threatened my life, but also about the transformation I experienced beyond my physical condition. Whether it was relationship issues or financial devastation, coming to terms with my reality became the gifts that transformed my world and ultimately my health.

In the beginning stages of my diagnosis, I fought the cancer invading my body with a vengeance. Like most people, I wanted only one thing: to be rid of it. But over time, I realized this approach was not working. The cancer did go into remission for long periods of time, only to recur more severely. The third time I was diagnosed and told I wouldn’t survive much past a year without chemotherapy, I was devastated. But this time, instead of repeating the pattern of turning away from my problems and depending on doctors to cure me, the healer in me began to awaken. I needed to get real about what was happening in my life and set a course for wellness.

It was in the early stages of this third diagnosis that I made the decision to embrace my cancer and allow it to teach me what I needed to learn. I made a commitment to heal my body of this disease once and for all. My desire to not only get well, but to create a harmonious body, mind, spirit connection became my passion. Once that passion was ignited, an internal shift began to take place.

I learned there is a distinct difference between healing and curing. Healing denotes a movement toward harmony with the body, mind, and spirit. Curing, on the other hand, is a means to an end. Curing a disease implies the disease is gone. But it begs the question: gone forever, or gone temporarily?

Healing involves the exploration and transformation of core issues that lead to illness. This exploration is done to move the physical disease-causing factors out of the body, transforming the consciousness that allowed the manifestation of disease in the first place. We must heal the negative thoughts and beliefs that threaten to contaminate our bodies. We must change the diets that poison and weaken our immune system. And we must eliminate the chemical toxins and other ecological factors that destroy our environment and our bodies.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, healing was not part of my consciousness. I wanted only one thing—to be cured. I was scared, confused, and angry at my body’s betrayal. I searched for a doctor who would give me answers and not only fix me, but also take responsibility for making me well. But after a long, exhaustive search with no lasting results, it dawned on me that the surgical procedures and recommended drugs were methods meant to treat my symptoms only. They were not meant to stop the cancer for good. The fixes being offered were temporary at best, aimed at curing the cancer rather than healing the whole of me. These methods were not targeted at the underlying issues that helped create the imbalance and the opportunity for disease to appear in the first place. In this realization was born a deep foreboding that I was unable to shake—this model of treating disease would not be enough to stop the assault on my body.

I realized the choices and decisions I’d made throughout my life had led to this moment. Perhaps, I thought, my past experience might hold the key to my present circumstance. Maybe by looking more closely at my life history, I might be able to better understand the beliefs that had determined my choices. If I could understand the how and why of my decisions, why I believed certain things about myself and my world, why my system felt so overwhelmed all the time, it might give me a foundation from which to work. I knew diving into my past would not be a pleasant journey. Nevertheless, it was the journey I had to take if I was going to heal my cancer and reclaim my life. For me, it was now or never.

Part One

Living in the Dark

1

Journey to the Past

Looking honestly at my life to the point where healing my cancer became my passion, I realized pain and struggle had been central themes. Once confronted with an unpleasant problem or situation, I would go into fight or flight mode. For days on end I would ruminate about how life was unfair and no one understood me. So convinced that life was against me, I created more and more problems to support my theory.

Lacking any insight into what I was doing or why I processed things the way I did, I had no hope of transcending this pattern. After years of living this way, I was exhausted. I started to believe life wasn’t worth living. Then, without warning, came my third diagnosis of cancer, and immediately the words careful what you wish for flashed through my mind.

Although I had been contemplating the idea of ending the struggle once and for all, when it came right down to it, I wanted to live. Now, I actually had to do something about it. I started to ask myself questions I had never asked before: Why do I struggle every day with the simplest of problems? Why am I afraid to face my life? Why can’t I be happy? Why am I bent on destroying myself? Granted, these were tough questions, but in retrospect, I realize that because of my willingness to face my fears, I was beginning to open to the possibility that this journey might lead me to the heart of my disease.

I somehow knew the only way to uncover the answers to these questions was to look into my past. The first image that came to mind was me, at age seven. That’s when I realized I was different from other people, especially my family. Two brothers—one older, one younger—and a controlling father didn’t leave much room for a sensitive intuit.

I was the child who challenged my parents, seeing and feeling things that others in my family didn’t even acknowledge. My life was a series of stifled emotions and unexpressed feelings that caused me to act out. My behavior was confusing and seemed irrational to my frustrated parents, leading them to dub me the troublemaker. With this label continually affirmed, I began to believe it. I also believed the companion thought, that there must be something wrong with me. These concepts took hold, shaping my behavior, and I came to accept that I was a bad person.

A large part of my childhood was spent trying to protect myself from my angry, controlling, volatile father whose use of a belt was his way of communicating. At the same time, I tried to get my emotionally detached mother to respond to my needs. It wasn’t until after my father’s death that I learned my mother was as lonely and scared as I was. This was the main reason she wasn’t emotionally available when I needed her. She couldn’t be there for herself, let alone for me. My father’s passing gave us the opportunity to discuss many issues between us that had been dismissed. Thankfully, this brought with it the healing I craved, and now we have a healthy, loving relationship rooted in emotional honesty and compassion.

But I had grown up with fear as a constant predator in our house–fear of not having enough, fear of not being good enough, of failing, of never doing anything right, of losing our home. I came to learn it was these un-confronted fears that motivated all the decisions my parents made. We were taught that life was hard and struggle was a given.

It wasn’t until I entered high school that I discovered my father had grown up in a poor family with an alcoholic, abusive father and a mother who was withdrawn and angry. Although my father rarely spoke about his childhood, whenever he did, it was painfully obvious he was ashamed of his upbringing and what he had become. While this was no excuse for his fits of anger and violent behavior, knowing this about him helped me understand why he was enraged with the world. It also helped me forgive him before he died.

My mother also came from a poor and abusive family. However, her abuse was more emotional than physical. Her father ruled his family very much like my father ruled ours. When Mom was young, she was taught that a woman’s place was behind her husband, and if she questioned that position, she would be exposed to various forms of punishment. Thus, she took on the belief that women are second-class citizens to be seen and not heard. No surprise that this is what she taught me as well.

Due to my father’s demanding nature and need to control everything, he had a tremendous impact on me as a child. Watching him struggle with the circumstances and events in his life continually affirmed for me that life demanded more than anyone was capable of giving. He reinforced that people are basically powerless to change their circumstances. He also taught me that he was always right.

And although there were a number of good things he taught me, especially when it came to extending kindness to others, it was the things