Cashing in the Chips

Grandma , a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

After Evie got the news about her PET scan, for about the next twenty-four hours I kept envisioning a cashing in of all the chips. I kept seeing this poker table in my head and hands pushing all the chips forward. We had finally arrived at that all or nothing bet.

All the chips were in, pushed into the center of the table which seemed awfully like the edge of all creation.
That image and the ensuing free fall into nothingness kept looping through my mind until I heard a quiet voice ask in wonderment: What is it that you throw it all into?
Immediately I realized the obvious: It was the Void and it was God.

Once you've put everything
on the table
once all of your currency is gone
and your pockets are full of air
all you've got left to gamble with
is yourself.


Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top
of the highest stakes table.
Place yourself as the bet.
Look God in the eyes
and finally
for once in your life
lose.
Adyashanti

So that is what I did and that is just what happened.

I have a friend who’s fond of saying that there are really only two prayers in the world:
Help me, help me, help me! and Thank you, thank you, thank you!
It seems to me there might also be a third and it’s called surrender:
You look into the Void of Unknowing and toss yourself into it.
It wasn’t even a “take me, take, take me!” It was just a reverential toss, like you’d drop a flower.
And there wasn’t any great swell of emotion, but rather the cradling gentleness and love inherent in deep trust.
And then… there were about three weeks that felt like wandering lost in darkness of the Void.
During this period I recalled Adya’s advice to not resist the freefall or try to orient yourself. And, for once, I found I could simply wait and trust that the way forward would eventually become clear.

I wondered if Evie understood this “cashing in” and decided that most probably she’d say that something deep inside, some tight constriction had been broken. She’d felt a jump into living in a new manner where some of the old rules no longer would apply. But, I don’t think she’d speak of Void or even God. Perhaps she’d mention sacredness and energy or maybe even archetypes.  People noticed she was strong. She mentioned she was scared. But, she did not hesitate to act.

Leigh Fortson, having traversed three rounds of going deeper and deeper into the healing of her own cancer, puts it this way:
I find it hard to call it a "will to live," because I think will is different from what I tapped into and what I think people tap into when they heal themselves. Will is the energy that you use to carry out what you learn to do, but the initial thrust was a combination of surrender to something that you don't understand, that you can't control, that you can't comprehend-which goes outside of the arena of will.
It's like, "Okay, there's a power in me, in all of us. There's something in me that I am asking to tap into, that I will surrender to, that I will give myself to in every way that I can."
…It's a combination of will and surrender and dedication and self love.

When I read stories about healing the impossible, be it via diet, or energy, or Shamanic journey I always find that the person gave themselves to the process entirely.
Entirely! Do you realize how very seldom we actually do that in life? Hardly ever. We always hedge our bets and hold something back. In fact, we call that being smart.
This plays right into the discussion I posted recently about the placebo effect – how there is now a theory that placebos work by simply giving ourselves permission to heal; that we are biologically programmed to hold back some of our healing resources for a later date and more dire straits and placebos relax that rule… well, finally- no more holding back.

There was nothing I could do. So I cashed in all my chips.
Only to discover, there was nothing I need do because deepest desires are not personal.
By that I mean that when you really feel the gut wrench of true desire -that desire transcends the personal.
I want to live is built into our cells. It arises from the species. It arises from Creation itself.
Once you know that, then you simply play your part (or work your butt off) as an agent of Let Thy will be done.

This is the first thing I have learned about true healing: Give yourself entirely.
Give yourself so fully that you see firsthand just how the personal becomes impersonal and infinite. And then, you work from there.
Or, as the Bhagavad Gita says:
Established in being, perform action.

Travels in a Stone Canoe

This new journey, if it was to be anything beyond mere spiritual windmill tilting, was to be a journey of respect, a journey honoring sacred metaphors, of others and ourselves…Steve and I had invested meaning in the feather and the claw, and they returned that meaning to us a thousand fold.  We chose to see them as sacred, and they became sacred… by accepting them as metaphors of our own we found ourselves infused with their metaphorical power.  They gave us a kind of directional fix in that seemingly directionless world we were entering.
Harvey Arden, Travels in a Stone Canoe

Metaphors and the Seemingly Directionless – in other words, how do we understand the spiritual and physical?  How to we even speak of it, let alone understand and act? 
What Really exists and how do we change?

On January 4^th, 2012 we expected that the oncologist wouldn’t call for at least a few days.  Instead, he phoned Evie within hours.  Her PET scan was lighting up.  All the ominous nodes that were seen three months ago were still there, plus a new one:  10/10 as a hot spot, 3 cm in diameter.

First, there had been the diagnosis over 2 years ago: Hodgkin’s lymphoma, “the good cancer that is easy to cure.”
Then, there was the early relapse after the chemo. … not so easy after all, they called it “aggressive.”
Now, there is the apparent relapse after high dose chemo and a stem cell transplant.  The doctors want to do a biopsy, re-state the diagnosis, and prepare for a second transplant.
In essence, they suggest we confirm that cancer has returned and they offer the very slim chance that a second transplant, more dangerous than the first, and reducing an asymptomatic Eve into a someone resembling a concentration camp survivor, will actually provide a cure.

Eve has politely declined the offer.
Within a day she had quit her job, she and Michael had decided to sell their house and move up to the mountains where they can build a healing center.
She told me, “Something physical inside broke,” and I knew exactly what she meant.
These turning points feel physical.  It can be a breaking, a letting go, a wrenching loose, or simply a dissolving – but you feel it. 
It’s the end of clutching onto beliefs that simply do not serve – not if you want to live.  And mostly, it occurs so deeply that just exactly what is going can be hard to say.
None the less, something physical inside brakes as you finally throw yourself into the unknown, out beyond the rules you knew.

To the nonbeliever, which we all are when it comes to systems we don’t “believe” in, the belief systems of others tend to be quaint, bizarre, even silly.  The more we’re stuck on the truth of our own metaphors, the more the metaphors of others seem false… and yet…If this was quackery, it was apparently successful quackery.  Does it matter how we’re healed as long as we are healed?
Harvey Arden, Travels in a Stone Canoe

At each critical junction of Eve’s journey with cancer, we have tried to read all the science.  Curiously, we are suited to this task.  Eve, her dad (my brother), and I all have PHDs in biology.  We have followed the traditional Hodgkin’s treatments, and we have supplemented with the best complementary therapies we could find including nutrition, qigong, and meditation. And again, curiously, we are well suited to this as her dad is founder of a lab to do this.
At each turn we’ve felt we’ve taken the best path and followed that.
And still – there is that PET scan lighting up.

So, we’ve had to fashion yet another best plan. And it now looks like this:

1)       Therapeutic Nutrition:  The Gerson Diet – with modifications Evie feels make sense to her.  My dad became fixated with this during the 1970s – not that he had cancer or even knew anyone.  He just got interested and really studied it, eventually meeting Charlotte Gerson herself.  Jaquie Davison’s book Cancer Winner describing the power of the diet to heal and has stayed in with me for over thirty years.  I tried the diet myself back then and became convinced that while it supplies nutrition and physical substance, its actual power lay in the prana or Qi that it supplies.

2)      Medical Qigong: Early on we found the story of a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor relapsing three times and finally curing himself with Qigong. We also found the work of Guo Lin, a Chinese woman who used her family's Qigong to cure herself and many others.  So, what the diet stirs in Qi – here we add trained professional support.  Our practice of Taoist guided movements also works upon this level.

3)      Archetypal or Shamanic healing:  I made up this term.  It stems from what’s growing within my own practice of Taoist meditation.  Working with Eve the past 18 months, spontaneously I started channeling .  I’m sorry now I never wrote up our experience with a rather Samurai-like character who helped release the stems cells Evie need for her transplant.  I’m not sure whether one would categorize this energy as subtler than the level of Qi – it is certainly more personified and thus seems to suggest a different yet complementary approach.

4)      Meditation:  We have been practicing a Taoist breath meditation for some time.  Eve also learned TM over Christmas.  We also decided to try the Holosyn binaural beat assuming that a physical way of entraining coherence into the brain may help at times when too many others things in mind and body seem to swamp the system. 

So, there’s the plan.  It still feels like we’ve assembled a lot of band instruments and they are strewn around the floor, yet to be picked up and played in anything resembling a concert or even a simple tune.

But, I feel compelled to understand healing – physical, practical, healing of the tissues.
Curiously, this seems to require understanding metaphysical: the nature of reality and what is true.

“Something physically broke inside” and with that thought, that metaphor, Evie jumped into a new way of being.  It feels like something breaks, but actually what breaks is merely a construct of consciousness, something that we’ve held inside and can only express in words and metaphors. 

And while such beliefs or metaphors can hurt us, they can also heal.

I was beginning to see the value of such notions... It’s a real power, a palpable power, such notions, such metaphors, aren’t soft headed mysticism.  They’re entirely practical even essential…all conceptual worlds- yes, even America… are in the final analysis metaphors.

Travels in a Stone Canoe.

Chemo: One Way to Do It

I learned to really hate IVs. And get annoyed with anything going through it. Especially chemo.
I hate chemo. I really hate chemo.
My Cytoxan was a 24 hour drip. The first 6 hours were fine, after that I felt horrible.
I felt like I was dying inside.
And eventually it was over, I counted the hours…

I got the VP-16. Awful stuff too. Really awful.
I felt so very very dead.
I had to remember that if I felt really shitty I still had to be alive.
And I was.
Every time I puked I remembered I was alive. I was alive, and I was going to beat this little booger…and I hated every minute of it…

When I got home I could barely move.
For days I could barely move. I could drink, but barely eat. I could breathe, but barely walk.
But I felt pain, and I was alive…
I realized, as long as I maintain homeostasis -- I'm not going anywhere.
So I made a checklist in my head:
• Am I breathing
• Is my heart beating
• Do I feel any real pain, or do I just feel like shit
• Am I capable of telling someone I feel like shit
If those are true, I am alive. And I'm fighting. And I knew I was going to make it.
Dave’s Happy Little Hodgkin’s Website

From the first with Evie, I have tried to read up on the literature for a broader view of what to expect and what to do. Sometimes, I found such disturbing information that I’d pass it along to my brother and just wait a bit before telling Eve.
When I Googled “Hodgkins, mobilization, stem cell transplant” I found both literature and Dave.
I didn’t tell anyone about him. It felt better not to know.

This week, Monday through Thursday Eve gets the VP-16.
She told me last night it’d be fine if I shared our experience so far.
It may help someone else some day.
So here we go:

When Evie, Mary and I began meditating together last August our intention was to give Eve the skills she needed to deal with her cancer in a spiritually grounded manner.
Having relapsed from conventional treatment, having supplemented that therapy with the best complementary medicine we could, we found that wasn’t enough.
Eve wanted to dig deeper.

Mary and I wanted to pass on our Taoist teachings which consisted of three parts:
1) Meditation: to cultivate the ability to “allow everything to be as it is.”
2) Guided Movements: a form of spontaneous qigong helps unblock energetic imbalances.
3) Intuitive Reading: a way to develop ones natural ability to gain insight into a situation via intuition.

When we began, we hoped Eve would simply learn to not let her anxious mind run away with her.
A freaking mind only adds an additional layer of stress to the heavy rounds of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant.
None of us imagined Evie would have such a capacity to go so deep so quickly…
Or how shamanic a path we were on.

The World is Brahman, So is Chemo

The night before Evie was to begin the high dose chemo, the prelude to her stem cell transplant, we met for our usual meditation. We did a couple rounds and then fell into talking about the fear she felt about the chemo.

We’d talked before about having the attitude that these powerful drugs were being used to heal; how we could drop the image of their being toxic poisons. And yes, that was the attitude she had adopted.
But, it’s one thing to try to have a belief in your head.
It’s something else entirely, to see.

So I asked, “Would you like to do a reading on etoposide?”
This drug, also known as VP-16, was what she would start on Monday.
I explained, “Every form in Nature has a corresponding intelligence and consciousness; a deva. You can meet them with an intuitive reading.”

A momentary wave of fear passed through Evie’s eyes.
I felt a similar jump inside my belly.
Did I really want to have a face to face with some drug that can kill you?
We stared at each other for a moment wondering.
Then Evie smiled and nodded. Let’s do it.
So we sat and faced each other, took a bow, and closed our eyes.

I was about to mentally request a reading, when another thought jumped in, “You know the request has already been made. It’s out there. It’s started….” Yah yad, yah yad!
My mind was in a jumble, when suddenly this deep base voice boomed out of the darkness,
“Patty! What are you doing?”

Like a bunny in the headlights, I froze.
In front of me there was a shining, flat, large, metallic slice of something for lack of better words looked like a piece of Swiss cheese:  holes and squiggled lines running between the holes.  Only there was nothing organic tastey here.
It was planar, crystal, shiney.
It was the deva of etoposide, and apparently I’d pissed it off.
I was a scared.
Then, immediately to the right a small, exact replica asked again, this time in a higher, less intimidating voice, “Patty, what are you doing?”

I was flooded with recrimination and embarrassment.
Who was I to ask Eve, “Do you want to meet the Deva?”
I was ashamed of my arrogance.
And then another and another, smaller, higher voices took up a cacophony of,
“Patty, what are you doing?”
I lower my head, almost in tears, offering the only explanation I could give.
“I only want to help Evie.”

Immeditaely, all the shining dancing voices of etoposide erupted in tinkles of laughter,
“That’s all we want too!”

Something in my heart broke open. I felt a wash of complete letting go of the fear and worry I'd been carrying in my heart for days.
And as tears streamed down my face,
I saw that there was absolutely no differentiation between my love and desire and etoposide’s.
This was not a poison. It had been conceived and created simply from the desire to help.
I put my hands together and gave thanks for the reading.

Eve and I then shared our experiences.

Eve described that as she’d taken her beginning bow, she felt a drop of water roll down her nose.
That single drop fell silently onto a sheet of glass-like water sending out a ripple.
There was peace and beauty and she basked in that.
Then, the water began to churn into a steam.
There was a roar. A steam locomotive drove across the water. Power and commotion erupted:
Sometimes, it takes a most powerful force to do the work that needs doing.
This is etoposide.

As we talked, I realized that the different sizes of the voices I had heard were the etoposide crystals, identical in structure but of many sizes.
What shocked me about Eve’s water image was that she’d obviously picked it from my mind.
The day before I’d written a blog post about Brahman.
In working on that I’d found a Wikipedia picture with the caption,
“Impact of a drop of water in water: a common analogy for Brahman and the Ātman.”

Wikipedia explains further that,
“Brahman is the universal Spirit ... the origin and support of the phenomenal universe.”
What I had been blogging about was the non-dual teaching: “The world is Brahman.”
And this was the essence of what I'd seen with all the etoposide voices:
There is a seamless identity between my love and desire for Evie and the Universe’s.

Next day, I went online to dig up that Wiki image for Eve. So here it is.
I also checked out the Wiki entry for etoposide.
Well, guess what looks like a slice of Swiss cheese :

                                                        Etoposide molecular structure.

Sailing Off The Edge

Bath Tub Truth
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

There’s a phenomenon happening in the world today.
More and more people are waking up – having real, authentic glimpses of reality.
By this I mean that people seem to be having moments where they awaken out of their familiar senses of self, and out of their familiar senses of what the world is, into a much greater reality…
Adyashanti, The End of Your World

They (the doctors) will tell you, they will practically shout: “There is a cure. Do this!”
But, if I read the data carefully I cannot find this “fact.”

Instead, I find right in black and white and I am practically quoting here:
Doctors treating Hodgkins make assumptions the greatest being that chemo followed by stem cell transplant is better than chemo alone.
Read on down and they also put it bluntly: there is no modern study that proves this.
And then, they try to explain why overall survival is not improved… 40-50% of transplants relapse; regular chemo can produce multiple remissions, but they do not hold.
The statistics become a mess. The news is not that good.

But, Eve has to make a choice and so we continue reading.
I am used to reading “the literature.”
I am used to the tedious flipping back and forth between the first page and the fourth or third and double checking references.
Science literature is not read in a relaxing armchair. It is attacked at your desk with a pen and calipers and an intellect that would vivisect a kitten.
But, I am totally surprised that in cancer new articles appear daily.

So now, I can get pissed when a doctor says he’ll give oral busulfan when intravenous is proven better.
All the facts keep changing, ever changing.

I am not used to knowing the latest before the doctors can switch their routines – not when a loved one’s life may depend upon what’s new.
At times it feels like we’ve sailed off the edge of the world
Into this Void of No One Knows.

If you read back through this blog you’ll find a trail of rants as to “reality” and “knowing” or “not knowing.”
But, these past few weeks Eve and her Hodgkins seem to have transposed that spiritual lesson into such a nitty-gritty reality that previous struggles seem like pie in the sky indulgence.

Or, maybe they were just a prelude.

We (the world) know so much.
The world is truly linking up to form a new collective consciousness that can tackle problems. No one person can think it through. Not with cancer.
The factoids float. They swarm. They flood and overwhelm.

All these facts somehow have to come together or at least get waded through.
How do we part the waters?

We (the world) know so much…and I am only led to realize: No one knows!
Not really.
All we can do is slip a foot forward through the muddy waters and test to see if slippery rocks beneath feel steady enough to bear our weight.
One step forward, does it feel all right?

It has to be a feeling, not a certainty or fact.
Cause no one really knows.

Get used to it.
Get used to it and where that leaves you.

We have sailed off the edge.
The bottom has dropped out.
And where are we now?

Sit quietly (I know that is not easy)
But, sit quietly.

Sail off the edge…
into the lap of God.

…what is experienced, if it is a true awakening, is the same: all is one; we are not a particular thing or a particular someone that can be located in a particular space;
what we are is both nothing and everything, simultaneously.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World

When N = 1

blue egg & wisteria
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

An uncomfortable feeling is not an enemy.
It’s a gift that says, "Get honest; inquire.”

The world is nothing but my perception of it.
I see only through myself.
I hear only through the filter of my story.
Byron Katie.

Katie gives us lessons that we all can use, but today I want to approach them through the lens of cancer… and statistics.

When I revived after surgery, I asked my first question of my doctor and chemotherapist: "What is the best technical literature about mesothelioma?"
She replied, with a touch of diplomacy… that the medical literature contained nothing really worth reading…

The literature couldn't have been more brutally clear: mesothelioma is incurable, with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery.
I sat stunned for about fifteen minutes, then smiled and said to myself: so that's why they didn't give me anything to read.
Then my mind started to work …
Stephen Jay Gould, The Median Isn’t the Message

My niece, Eve, has had a recurrence of her cancer.
Since we got the news several weeks ago, all my spiritual learning seems to arise from that reality.
I have been questioning many of my beliefs with new urgency.

I have been reading the latest literature on Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stem cell transplants, curcumin, inflammation, macrophages, CD68...
I have been pushed to look deeper until there seems no difference between the spiritual and the totally pragmatic, nitty-gritty of “you bet your life.”

So much is shifting, I have been struggling to process all of it into a useful form.
I can only imagine how it’s been for Evie.
It doesn’t feel like I have been all that successful in my efforts to organize my thoughts and now, the easiest way of sharing seems to simply tell a story.

Ah stories, I love them. What else is there?
Byron Katie

So, here is one regarding N = 1:

My internist and I spent at least two years trying different medications for lowering my blood pressure. Then, I happened to get laid up in bed unable to eat. That got me off drinking coffee without even trying.
After that, I noticed that my blood pressure finally normalized.

I took a month’s worth of the numbers to my doctor.
Yes. Caffeine seemed to be the culprit.
We were happy for a moment, and then he said, (I guess because he knows I do research)
“N equals one.” … in short, my experience didn’t prove a thing to him.
It took a few hours before the stupidity of his comment really began to sink in.

Well, Hell!
N did equal 1, but when that One refers to me, that’s all I need to know!

Suddenly, I realized that my doctor and I had different interests, maybe even conflicting interests.
He wants to know what will work in general for the whole panoply of patients that cross his threshold.
Meanwhile, I want to know what will work for me.
And now I see, the same holds true for cancer patients.

What does "median mortality of eight months" signify in our vernacular?
I suspect that most people…would read such a statement as "I will probably be dead in eight months" - the very conclusion that must be avoided, since it isn't so, and since attitude matters so much.
Stephen Jay Gould

In his essay Dr. Gould explains his rationale as a scientist who knows statistics.
And I wish all cancer patients could know his story.
He didn’t swallow the statistics naively.
He interpreted them with an eye to N = 1 and in a scientific manner.
He lived for twenty years after his diagnosis with his mind clear, at least on this point.

He lived to tell his story.

Which kind of brings me back to Byron Katie.
She likes to begin spiritual inquiry with two questions regarding the thoughts we think:
Is it true?
Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

Ask yourself these questions and you’ll soon discover that usually the answer is either “No” or “I don’t know.”

For instance with Hodgkin’s statistics, by the time my head allows for four different forms of the disease, four stages, two sexes, a bimodal distribution in age, bulky or non-bulky, treated with these drug or those drugs, that number of cycles, radiation or no radiation, I have no idea how many in the study are actually closely matched to Eve.

So, what do these statistics really say to me, the N = 1 that really matters?
I don’t know.
The doctors don’t know.
NO one really knows.

The door to God is the insecurity of Not Knowing anything,
Bear the grace of that insecurity, and all wisdom will be yours…
Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

Not knowing isn’t an easy place to be. It can be quite uncomfortable.
But it is an honest place.
And it is as good a place as any to rest and to take the next step forward.

How do you get back to heaven?
To begin with, just notice the thoughts that take you away from it.
You don't have to believe everything your thoughts tell you.
Just become familiar with the particular thoughts you use
to deprive yourself of happiness.
It may seem strange at first to get to know yourself in this way,
but becoming familiar with your stressful thoughts
will show you the way home to everything you need
Byron Katie

Enjoy Gould’s essay and grow strong.