What is Healing?

I firmly believe that there is a psycho-emotional and psycho-spiritual element underlying the development of disease. For me, cancer is no different. This does not at all negate environmental and hereditary factors, and by no means implies blame on people who are sick for being ill; I would never imply this, and I would never advocate for abandoning Western medicine for anyone, but I am an advocate for doing some internal work in order to understand and hopefully eliminate why our bodies develop disease in the first place. Which anyone can do, even while they are in conventional treatment like myself. Along with my prescribed treatments, I integrate alternative and holistic therapies and treatments, and I regularly engage in psycho-emotional-spiritual work.

For many spiritual seekers, the superficial “self-love” medicine seems at first an attractive route to take, but for those on an unrelenting quest, this “pink spirituality” is only the entrance into the subconscious. One starts out curious and wanting to heal in some way and maybe ends up with some results and stops there, but if they traversed just slightly too deep, they ultimately ended up with more questions than answers. While reveling in some early relief from whatever was previously plaguing them, they contemplate this curious state of partial healing and become intrigued by the quest to have more. They come again to their psyche and enter depths previously unknown to them, seeking something that feels good, that feels like progress, something that feels “enlightened,” only to be sideswiped by the dreaded realization that what they believed to be true about themselves, life, meaning-making, or existence was an illusion and that healing meant NOTHING like what they thought it did. For most people, this is usually where a crisis emerges. You’ve peered past the veil and you can’t un-know what you now know. You want to go back, and you might for a time, but inevitably you are changed. Nothing is the same or ever will be. The path now whispers an intoxicating call to you on a loop. What will you do?

You are now an Initiate. The only way out is through…

We have to go deeper into the subverted, hidden, and unknown parts of us; where our unconscious patterns exist; where that which remains unknown drives and dictates our thinking and subsequently our experiences. We have to go digging with a tremendous amount of courage to really see ourselves. This often does not feel good, and we need resolve to do it honestly. There may be some who can simply say to themselves, “I love myself now”, and thats all they need, but for me… and for dealing with a illness that has become so strong that it qualifies as “its gonna kill you”, I had to dive DEEP and work hard at uncovering the depths and extent of what could be happening inside of me and it turned out to be more insidious and infiltrating than I thought.

Healing in its essence is a return to Love, but you’d be surprised to find what is blocking you from it. If you could face it in your day-to-day life, you of course would. But what keeps us from Love is, simply put, an ignorance that we fall asleep to inside of our own mind that affects our bodies. Blocked by Pride, Anger, Insecurity, Fear, and any other Ego you can think of, our minds are hypnotized by maladaptive coping mechanisms, fear-based thinking, a desperate need to protect ourselves from everything, and a deep Machiavellian drive for some sense of personal power, righteousness, or reassurance. I could write an epic novel just listing the ways in which we block ourselves from love.

Even as I sit here writing this, I am no different than any other human, and I struggle as we all do. I’ve been a seeker my entire life, and I have been trying to heal for just as long. Which may in fact have been one of my problems, ironically (trying to fix yourself is an issue all its own, but that's for another blog). I have sat with Shamans, Healers, and Readers. I've taken a lot of ayahuasca, done years of therapy, and can meditate for an hour and often do. I practice regular breathwork, studied with the Learning Light Foundation and the Pneuma Institute. I do consistent and regular work on myself, and I have not cured myself of cancer or anything else, really. Very rarely is it that simple, but in the midst of my journey, I have come to be able to tolerate being me, and more pressingly, I’ve managed to not die. Miracle? Maybe. Mistake? Possibly. Luck? Also possible. I have accepted in humility that the more I know, the more I realize I know absolutely nothing, and I’ve gotten more comfortable with that fact. But in my heart of hearts, I believe that there is something to doing deep internal exploration and excavation, and there is a tremendous healing in coming to accept yourself, flaws and all, even if it takes you 50 years and a lot of searching, sacrifice, and cancer to do it; Even if I die from this, I will not regret having taken up this path.

Some days, of course, this type of psychotherapeutic excavation will be superficial. Who has the stomach for it or the time, honestly? It’s work, and life has a way of occupying all of us. But we all have a depth that is untouched by our day-to-day awareness, and in my experience, cancer lives there… below the roots, in the primordial formation of the soil from which we exist and plant our lives, and to get to it, you need to be willing to go through the internal hell of your own making. Figuratively and literally, go through that hell, more than once, and along the way, build up your resilience to seeing the truth about yourself, your internal world, and your unconscious alignments which dictate your external experience, and in my opinion, the state of your body. I firmly believe that engaging in this type of work has supported my longevity even though I’m still living with terminal cancer. There are stories out there of people who have cured themselves this way. While I haven’t been graced with that type of recovery (YET!). As evidenced by the fact that I’m not yet dead, I do believe it’s possible.