A Required Course



Jump, by P Bralley

 For some time now, I have been uninterested in posting anything here. Something seems to have broken inside, which I actually take as a good sign. However, I find I really want to share these words:
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
ACIM

My nephew, when he was little, one day suddenly realized, “Life’s a lot of work! Why do people do it?” To this day, his words are something of a family joke.
But, isn’t this what A Course in Miracles is saying? It is required.
Your only choice is if you want to accept the challenge now or later.

When will I remove the blocks to love’s presence?
And how - How to let love in?
I find I can only aim at discovering what deeply moves me. And then, resist nothing.
Today, it was these words.
“Read ‘em and weep” … because then, I open up to Love.

Love will immediately enter into any mind that truly wants it.
Truly? Why not go with that?

You are free to believe what you choose, and what you do attests to what you believe.
A Course in Miracles

And less you think this is simply airy-fairy and not for the practical, gritty challenges of life, let me introduce you to two remarkable women:

Helena – who should by now be dead from rectal cancer.
And
Corinna Borden– who has refractory Hodgkins lymphoma.

Mistletoe and Healing

It was not until I had spent some time in Järna that I began to understand that it is possible for buildings to have a nurturing or healing quality. This understanding occurred through my experiencing calmness in this place, through my sense of ease.

Gary J. Coates,architect

And it was not until I came across this video on mistletoe, that I was brought back to something I’d noticed long ago: that simply sitting and being with a homeopathic medicine can nurture and calm my soul.
I realize now, this is a version of Adyashanti’s teaching and admonition: If you want to become enlightened, hang out with enlightened people, or enlightened mountains and trees and lakes.

The past few weeks I have been like a woman possessed to find a cure for cancer.  Not for the entire world, but simply for dear Evie.  I have come to believe that just as every individual awakens in their own particular manner, each cancer survivor, each person who makes it after Statistics and Medicine have said there is no hope – each person who heals finds a way forward uniquely for themselves.  It may be Qigong, it may be some other renegade molecularly based therapy… but in each case, it becomes their own revelation.  And yet, this unique path is based upon a universal.
Something moves from deep inside.
Something moves from Silence.
This is a beautiful video about mistletoe and the love and attention people put into transforming this plant into a medicine called Isacador.  I never knew such care is taken.  This video stopped my frazzled searching cold.  It returned me to a centered silence.  And so, I want to share it.
But don’t click on it grabbing for transcendence.
Simply rest a moment in the feel, the images, the yin and yang and weave of plant and sky and people.
Take it as a work of art – not as medicine.

And if you still want more (as I did) continue on along to visit the medical clinic at Jarna.  A community now comprised of 3000 people living lives centered on the philosophy of scientist and mystic, Rudolph Steiner.


Architects  Gary and Susanne Coates  provide this description on Jarma in Journal of Healthcare Design, vol. 8, 1998: (I’ve edited it for brevity)
What if we had an architecture whose forms, surfaces, materials, character, moods, and so on, were derived from the same principles that underlie the forms and processes that we respond to so positively in nature itself? What if we had an organic architecture that was truly functional and spoke to the needs of the whole human being? This is what the architect Asmussen offers us Jarna.

Asmussen is now an extraordinary 82-year-old man. He rides his bicycle from the apartment in which he lives through a beautiful garden landscape to the office in which he works. I have seen him turn compost heaps eight hours a day, on a Sunday, just to relax. He's Danish by birth, was educated in Denmark, moved in 1939 to Stockholm just before World War II began. He met his wife there and he has lived in Sweden ever since.

I should have mentioned before that Asmussen has followed the impulses of the Austrian scholar, scientist, artist, clairvoyant, and spiritual researcher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who founded anthroposophy, which is both a body of knowledge covering the whole of life and a spiritual path for the direct attainment of such knowledge. The entire community of which Asmussen is a part and for which he has designed comprises people, organizations, and initiatives that have been inspired by the ideas, writings, and research of Steiner.

I noticed an attentiveness to all different kinds of details at the clinic.

The sewage treatment garden is one of the most beautiful aquatic gardens I have ever seen. It comprises seven ponds in which communities of plants and other organisms digest the human wastes of the college.

The care that is lavished on the chickens, who live in beautifully designed wooden houses surrounded by sculptures created by students, gives some sense of the care with which Vidarkliniken itself is designed. Even the plants are thought about and cared for in a way that is most uncommon. Once we saw one of the gardeners planting flowers around a manhole in one of the vegetable fields and asked him why he was doing this, and he said, "Well, I got to thinking about the carrots and the cabbages and how they put so much energy into making food for us that they don't have enough energy left to make flowers, so I thought I should plant flowers for the cabbages and carrots to enjoy."

When this kind of attention is given to all the beings and processes in a landscape, it becomes a living environment that quite literally radiates those same qualities back to people.

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.

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.

Starlings Over the Moor

Yesterday, before everything broke loose* I was watching this video.
It’s kind of old news, but yesterday I met it with new wonder, as I’ve been thinking about the phrase “connecting the dots.”
By that I mean, how do we put together the story of our life?
How do we connect the dots?
There’s actually a multitude of ways as independent life events simply arise and then dissolve.

I feel like my family is struggling on how to connect the dots. I know I am.
We’re being invited, herded, even forced into breaking old connections (that is to say, beliefs) and realizing new ways of being.

And then to see that nature just stirs wide swaths of this “connect the dots” energy through the air for the sheer joy of physical expression… it’s very beautiful and mysterious to me.



*(Evie “failed” her PET scan and once again they must do a biopsy involving a hard and painful surgery to get behind her breast bone.)

Sometimes We Need a Story

Jumping into the bathwater
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Medical journals educate physicians with statistical information and are not interested in stories about unexpected remissions and recovery.
Yet stories can change beliefs and beliefs affect us at the cellular level.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, Close to the Bone, chapter 7: sometimes we need a story.

Emotions are not in the head. There’s a cellular consciousness. There’s a wisdom in every cell. Every single cell has receptors on it. The emotional energy comes first, and then peptides are released all over…. Consciousness precedes matter. It’s not like a peptide creates the feeling. The feeling creates the peptide, on some level.
Candace Pert, in Close to the Bone

There is no such thing as false hope.
Michael Lerner, in Close to the Bone

Mary and I met with Evie the evening before she was to start her next go round of chemo. It was our prelude to what Evie had called the atomic bomb of chemo and the stem cell transplant.

The day before I had sent around a story I’d found about a fellow, Bob Ellal, who had undergone two stem cell transplants and been given by his doctor one chance in 20,000 of it working. Well, he’s been cancer free for more than 12 years now. And he has a nice concise list of what to do. We’ve been doing most of this, but it was good to just see it written out so plainly, and he included one point we haven’t articulated real clearly:

Find someone in your life—besides yourself—to live for. This may seem like a strange statement—isn’t it enough to want to survive? You will find that after large doses of chemotherapy and/or radiation you will sometimes be so sick that you will feel like quitting. That’s the time to remember that other people need you to survive.

I liked this particularly.
As it turned out, many of us had gotten a boost from Bob Ellal’s story, and so we were gathering to meditate already feeling some momentum of “being ready.”  Still, Evie spoke of how she'd turned inside.  She didn't know if it was hiding like retreating to a cave, but she knew it brought a piece.
It seemed to me she was giving her own words for going into her soul, her higher self.
As a closing exercise we decided that Eve would try getting in touch with an animal form or what my Taoist teacher calls “the lower higher self.”
Eve thought for a moment, saying she wasn’t sure what that animal would be. She liked the butterfly. The turtle had come up with the tumor they’d removed, but more recently she was coming across the bear as healing energy.

“Oh,” I said. “You don’t choose the animal. They come to you and take ahold.”
With that we did bows and began.

Afterwards, I asked, “Who came?” She said – the snake.
We had a good laugh over that.
I had really hoped for a mammal of some sort, something strong and furry. Or a power-bird with warrior feathers – that would be just fine.
But a snake? Eewww!

Then, I recalled Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddess in Everywoman, a book I had loved back in the ‘80s. It was there I first learned of women and snakes. When women come into their power they tend to have a lot of dreams about snakes:
The image of the snake is one of the major symbols that you might be drawn to. It may show up in a dream about transformation and transition.

The next day I went on a search to see what exactly Dr. Bolen said about snakes. I discovered she had written a new book, Close to the Bone: Life Threatening Illness as a Journey of the Soul.
I have ordered it from Amazon, but wanted to share some of her words today:

Whenever or however that line from health to illness is crossed, we enter the realm of soul...
We lose an innocence, we know vulnerability, we are no longer who we were before this event, and we will never be the same.

A life threatening illness calls to the soul, taps into spiritual resources, and can be an initiation into the soul realm for the patient and for anyone else who is touched by the mystery that accompanies the possibility of death.

Once we take soul seriously, a whole different premise opens up.
If we have a soul--and this is one of the innate beliefs that human beings do have--then we are spiritual beings on a human path rather than human beings who may or may not be on a spiritual path.

The journey of spiritual beings on a human path holds major questions that have to do with the big picture at each major transition fork in the road.
What did I come to do? …
What did I come to learn?
Who did I come to love?

… and How long do they need me to love them?
These are good questions for all of us.
The answers will be the stories we need.
The answers will reveal how truly blessed we are.

Even The Terrible

Can you imagine a world without certainty?
The wind rises the wind falls...

Are you afraid?
Somewhere a thousand swans are flying
through the winter's worst storm.
They are white and shining, their black beaks
open a little, the red tongues flash.
Now, and now, and now, and now their heavy wings
rise and fall as they slide across the sky...

It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else...

This the poem of goodbye.
And this is the poem of don't know.
Mary Oliver, Gravel

A couple days ago I read one of those Thanksgiving articles entitled Even the Terrible Seems Beautiful to Me Now. The writer, Mary Schmich, was reflecting upon a statement her elderly mother made a few months before she died.

That phrase has stuck in my mind ever since.
Even the terrible seems beautiful…
I knew it could be true, but I didn’t really get it.

Then, Evie phoned with the news. Her cancer has come back.
The last time she’d called with such news my immediate response had been such anger.
This time I wanted to throw up.

Even the terrible seems beautiful…

I don’t know.
I had trouble sleeping last night. I wish I could really get it.
The terrible… beautiful?

I am suppose to be part of Evie’s support system, the philosophical old aunt…
well, not always.
This morning dear Evie gave that gift to all of us.
She was right there sharing her strength. She sent along this song that made me see.

Hidden inside the terrible – is LOVE.
And that’s what makes it beautiful.
And that’s what makes it Life and wondrous… if only our hearts can stand it.
Now, and now, and now, and now... this is the poem of don't know.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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.