Softening into the Sacred

People are scared of their own experience… its really fascinating how much time is spent not to experience what is truly here, not to feel. And of course we are trained like that in the Western world… “don’t be a cry baby”… But, sooner or later life will really help us to learn to experience.
Marlies Cocheret, My Biggest Love is Silence interview

As I typed out this quote once again I was reminded of the difficulty my dyslexic brain has in distinguishing between “scared” and “sacred.” It always brings me to a complete stop. Which word have I written? So I have to slowly sound them out.

I get scared a lot these days. And too, these days are so filled with the sacred. There is this yin yang dance between the two.

Two weeks ago Eve’s PET scan showed her lymphoma was progressing. She had delayed the 3 month follow up an extra month for several reasons. But, in the end she had to look. And once again, in the midst of all our efforts and confidence in our therapeutic choices, we got thrown back. The hot spots are getting larger around her heart and throat and lungs.

Throughout these past two years we’ve been getting these reports that seem to temporarily knock our knees out from under us. And each time, we’ve stood back up. Having reviewed all the data on all the therapeutic options we’ve picked a good one and have launched upon an new effort. What I am noticing this time is that the good options seemed to have run out. Though I still love and respect the modified Gerson regime! It’s just that is doesn’t seem to be quite enough.

What I have begun to notice in my searching is that external efforts (therapies, be they chemo or nutritional) carry one huge side benefit: you can tell yourself, “I am doing something!”
And when these options run their course, what are we left with then? Man, it stares you in the face and scares you stiff:

There’s nothing I can do.

Well, they say there are no atheists in fox holes. And the time Evie spent in a southern clinic offering alternative therapies introduced her to many Christians placing all their hopes in Jesus. It made her uncomfortable. But, choice of words can do that.

So here’s another way to say it. When external options drop off, we are left only with the internal.
And, when external doing all drops off you have almost by definition transcended and landed in the sacred.
Or, as Marlies Cocheret says:
My essential focus is Stillness; it permeates all my work. That is the only Reality there is. When we deeply know that, there is absolutely nothing we need to control anymore.

I like those words a lot. It locates the sacred within Stillness and complete relinquishing of control- in short, not doing . And yet, it is her work – her doing. Which, to translate back into the more traditional way to put it: God helps those who help themselves.

I looked up the word "surrender" yesterday. There are two flavors to the meaning. It can mean defeat, becoming a prison to oppression. But, it can also mean the giving of oneself to something greater. It is this later possibility that Marlies addresses. When there is no longer a need to control, transcendence can be invited into a new manner of expression.  Marlies and tradition calls this embodiment.

She describes a common experience of spiritual seekers: I found it and then I lost it. Yes, we can connect with Unboundedness. We can get a peek. But then we lose it. In fact, Evie has said that back in January she felt something inside her break and then for awhile everything was fine inside. “And then, I lost it.” I know exactly what she means, because it’s a lesson for me too.
It’s a lesson my entire family is being invited to take up.

And so, this morning I came across this Interview of Marlies. I’ve only had time to listened to the first half hour, but it was just too good to pass-up sharing.

Gerson Therapy Rationale: Part I

In my last post I included a video which has two doctors criticizing the Gerson Therapy for both lack of evidence of efficacy and of any rationale:
If you think of what’s in Gerson Therapy, you wouldn’t really expect it to cure cancer.
Skeptical Doctor in Dying to Have Known

Well, the rest of the film clip rebutted this opinion. But, I find the arrogance and ignorance behind such a statement to be really annoying, if not destructive, because I also have these words ringing in my memory:
The biggest thing we’re up against, when you hear that you have cancer, is that you walk into… “the morphic field” of cancer. There’s a force field that’s been created around the word cancer that’s so big, it’s like a locomotive. You step into this world where all the subconscious and collective unconscious definitions of cancer come hurtling at you. Of course it is synonymous with death in a lot of people’s minds.
Leigh Fortson, cancer survivor

And then there’s Dr. Candace Pert’s catchy little phrase:
Your body is your subconscious mind.

My irritation with scientists who make uninformed statements about the Gerson Therapy is that they support and create a belief system that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to heal.
I’d like to spend some time here as a molecular geneticist to explain why I think there’s every reason to expect the Gerson Therapy to heal.
To my surprise, I haven’t found this rational explained anywhere by the Gerson camp itself. So, please consider this an update and information meant to be shared.

The National Cancer Institute posts this rationale for the Gerson Therapy straight from Gerson’s own work:
Central to the therapy is an abundance of potassium and the lack of sodium. Gerson had observed that as soon as his cancer patients started on the diet regimen, they released large amounts of sodium in their urine. He noticed that cells in the patients’ bodies that had been bloated with fluid started to shrink as the fluid was released. After studying the research in cancer cell biology available to him at the time and noting the ratio of potassium to sodium in cancer cells versus healthy cells, he deduced that the reason for this sodium excretion was that the diet regimen was correcting generalized tissue damage caused by excess sodium. Healthy cells had a high ratio of potassium to sodium; diseased cells had a low ratio of potassium to sodium or an abundance of sodium… This belief is the theoretical basis for Gerson’s choice of high-potassium, low-sodium fruits and vegetables in his prescribed diet: a high intake of potassium was needed to restore a normal ratio of potassium to sodium in the cell.

This is old biology. It feels like what I learned when I took a seminar in cancer as an undergrad in 1970. It does not explain a thing (to me) or lead to any hope.

So, I did a search of PubMed, the NIH National Library of Medicine.
My search words were “carrot juice” and “juice cancer”. I only had to look at papers from the past couple years to be blown away by the obvious: fresh juices contain small organic molecules that turn on and off hundreds of genes that regulate cellular metabolism.

Cancer is supported by several process each involving scores of gene products (enzymes, transcriptional regulators, micro RNAs). These processes include:
Oxidative damage
Chronic Inflammation
Angiogenesis (formation of new blood vessels to support tumor growth)
Cell adhesion and migration (causing metastasis)

There was so much basis for a rationale, I gave up trying to logically summarize it in a table. So, let me simply share some quotes and another video clip.
Traditional medicine and diet has served mankind through the ages for prevention and treatment of most chronic diseases. Mounting evidence suggests that chronic inflammation mediates most chronic diseases, including cancer. … nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-κB) and STAT3 have emerged as major regulators of inflammation, cellular transformation, and tumor cell survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis. Thus, agents that can inhibit NF-κB and STAT3 activation pathways have the potential to both prevent and treat cancer.
In this review, we examine the potential of one group of compounds called triterpenes, derived from traditional medicine and diet for their ability to suppress inflammatory pathways linked to tumorigenesis.
These triterpenes include avicins, betulinic acid, boswellic acid, celastrol, diosgenin, madecassic acid, maslinic acid, momordin, saikosaponins, platycodon, pristimerin, ursolic acid, and withanolide.
This review thus supports the famous adage of Hippocrates, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food".
Yadav VR, Prasad S, Sung B, Kannappan R, Aggarwal BB.
Cytokine Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Therapeutics, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston.

So much for inflammation and the thoughts of a leading Cancer Center.
Discovering the link between angiogenesis and cancer won Folkman the Nobel Prize. One of his students, William Li, gave this TED Talk entitled, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer ?:



Dr Li started the Angiogenisis Foundations which has a link to Eat to Defeat Cancer Initiative. This site lists foods and rationales with delicious facts like: the plant compound phenylethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC) found in watercress can block this process by interfering with and ‘turning off’ a protein called hypoxia inducible factor (HIF), a key stimulator of angiogenesis. HIF is produced in response to hypoxia, a lack of oxygen, which is usually the critical first step in tumor angiogenesis.

This is science I can believe. It’s current, it’s rational and it’s hopeful. And then it crossed my mind I ought to see if the original Gerson rationale had any modern basis. Here is one item that I found:
Voltage gated potassium channels have been extensively studied in relation to cancer. In this review, we will focus on the role of two potassium channels, Ether à-go-go (Eag), Human ether à-go-go related gene (HERG), in cancer and their potential therapeutic utility in the treatment of cancer. Eag and HERG are expressed in cancers of various organs and have been implicated in cell cycle progression and proliferation of cancer cells. Inhibition of these channels has been shown to reduce proliferation both in vitro and vivo studies identifying potassium channel modulators as putative inhibitors of tumour progression.

Seems to me Gerson was onto something all along. But then, so was Hippocrates. We just needed science to catch up. And now, we need to pay better attention to what the research literature is saying:
Small organic molecules derived from higher plants have been one of the mainstays of cancer chemotherapy for approximately the past half a century.
Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy, College of Pharmacy, The Ohio State University

On Healing & Beliefs

Art by Joseph Rael

Last summer a woman came to me whose mother was going to have surgery on her hip. I said I was willing to dedicate a dance that we’d be doing in Australia in October for her mother’s healing, and, since I wouldn’t be going to Australia for another three months, her healing would be retroactive. Her mother went to the doctor two days later. They didn’t have to operate because, apparently, the hip was healing… I said her healing would be retroactive because Spirit told me to say it, though it didn’t make much sense at the time.
Joseph Rael, House of Shattering Light.

I have been poking around trying to better understand the role of consciousness in healing.
Consciousness includes many levels: Spirit, emotions, beliefs. So, in this regard I came across an interesting article not so long ago. It was scientifically tight enough to have been listed in the NIH’s National Library of Medicine archives (Pubmed). The article is looking at the results of a study out of Harvard on the effects of prayer. It is discussing experimental design – how we need to think differently when studying consciousness with proper scientific controls.

Here is the passage that has stuck in my head the past few weeks. Let me also point out that the healing Joseph Rael describes occurred not only retroactively in time, but also at a distance, i.e. “non-locally.” The article describes an experiment designed to test just such a possibility:
Israeli immunologist Leonard Leibovici highly skeptical of claims of intention/prayer studies designed an experiment that only some kind of nonlocal linkage could explain… in 2000, Leibovici identified 3,393 adult patients each of whom suffered from a bloodstream infection while in the Rabin Medical Center between 1990 and 1996 – that is to say four to ten years earlier. All of these patients were long out of the hospital. These patients were randomized into two populations; 1, 691 were assigned to the intervention group and 1,702 to the control group. The treatment group was the focus of therapeutic intention in the form of prayer… the study discovered that “length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control (P=.01 and P=.04 respectively).” …For this study to have worked, it seems that therapeutic intention from the “future” must have affected the “past” when it was the present to produce a biased outcome – not to have changed the past, but to have produced the original effect in the first instance.
Nonlocality, Intention, and Observer Effects in Healing Studies: Laying a Foundation for the Future

This is all very curious to me. Time is trickier than you think. Meditators learn this, as do physicists:
People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein

I think about my father. I have come to think of him as “a man ahead of his time” as it seems like every major discovery that I’ve made, Pop was already there. When I called home from college in 1969, wanting to learn TM but a bit scared to take the step, Pop knew all about it and encouraged me. When I discovered homeopathy, Pop knew about that too and shared his books with me. When I crashed badly after an awakening, Pop was the one who said “You have kundalini burnout.” I had never heard the term. And so it was with this precedence that in the early ‘80s Pop explored the Gerson Therapy. He met Charlotte Gerson. He attended seminars and talked with cancer patients who had survived the supposedly incurable. He bought all the books and tried to spread the word.

At the time, Pop’s deep interest in a cancer therapy, when no one in the family was affected, struck my sister as more than a little morbid. She fussed to me that she was afraid that this strange preoccupation would perhaps make Pop himself sick.
Now, I wonder if he was merely being true to something in his nature: he was a scientist open to the evidence. He was ahead of his time - at least in regards to his children’s interest. And he had an unwavering intention to always help and be there for us.
Thus, it was very natural this January when Evie needed to try yet another approach to cure her cancer, for us to turn to Gerson. Pop had done the due diligence research for us years ago.

My father died in 1996, but his prayer for us is clear and I am not so worried anymore about locality and time.
I am more concerned with being open to the gift. I’m discovering that with cancer being open means not only dealing with the body but dealing with our very understanding of reality. And the scientific moorings of our culture can make that very difficult. So, I’ll continue to look at beliefs both scientific and mystical as Evie walks her path of healing.

Dying to Have Known: A ten minute clip from a film about the Gerson Therapy that illustrates the solidity of the cultural beliefs that surround us as supposed truths.