Super Important!!!
If you do not have cancer, but live a stressful life, please copy and paste my journal posts into an electronic format. Then using your ‘find and replace’ option, find “cancer” and replace it with your challenge…such as heart disease, depression, loneliness, job loss, etc., etc.
You may find that the insights and information here is applicable to any situation.
The removal of fear is the most lofty spiritual act.
Self-esteem is a person’s greatest wealth.
Please use all that I offer here to help you and yours.
Thank you very much, Blair
Preview of Coming Attractions in this Post:
- Miss Gee
- Note to Myself – Blair you’ve got to remember this
- It has to begin with a vision – your vision
- Being There and How to Get There
- Types of Support
- Book Review of The New Cancer Paradigm
1. Miss Gee (1937) – by W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
Let me tell you a little story
About Miss Edith Gee;
She lived in Clevedon Terrace
At number 83.
She bicycled down to the doctor,
And rang the surgery bell;
“O, doctor, I’ve a pain inside me,
And I don’t feel very well.”
Doctor Thomas looked her over,
And then he looked some more;
Walked over to his wash-basin,
Said, “Why didn’t you come before?”
Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner,
Though his wife was waiting to ring,
Rolling his bread into pellets;
Said, “Cancer’s a funny thing.
“Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
It’s like some hidden assassin
Waiting to strike at you.
“Childless women get it.
And men when they retire;
It’s as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire.”
2. Note to Myself – Blair you’ve got to remember this:
Everything I write in this journal is new. New to me. I am listing the guidelines that I have proposed to myself as a starting point to manage my current situation. Some of it is reflective because I am 25 months into the cancer experience and some of it are just hunches about what to do to endure the present challenges.
My current chemotherapy reactions – to the very same medicines for the last 9 weeks – has been different each week. Just when I think I know what to expect based on the previous week or weeks, I am wrong once again. Ugh!
Thus, everything expressed here will need to be adjusted based on my experience.
3. It has to begin with a vision – your vision
Shortly after our initial reaction, we have to get control and start to write the script for our future.
You will soon read some very practical and definitely incomplete guidelines on things that need to be managed soon and many things to be managed later once we have learned that we are with cancer.
But I must stress the importance that without a vision, people parish. And the vision that most of us have about cancer is not inspiring, and not full of hope and cure.
We have to create our future for ourselves, regardless of what the statistics and people in white coats say to us.
Our thoughts do create our world, and in the beginning, such a comment seems cruel, inappropriate, and utterly ridiculous. My apologies for this temporary rudeness.
But when the time is right, we must get back to creating, and then remembering our future — holding it in our mind and heart in the present moment at all times possible.
As I wrote in Part One, you’re not going to hear a lot of positive things from the medical establishment, and you will not hear them say the word “cure” and cancer in the same sentence. And from my experience with more than three different oncologists, they will not mention the word “cure” as a possibility at all.
• It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a cure.
• It doesn’t mean that we don’t have friends and relatives who have been cured of cancer.
• It just means that the outcome is up to us, and to those who we surround ourselves with to support us in this lifesaving quest.
As we go through this incomplete checklist of things to be aware of during the initial realization that you are now living with cancer, we must remember that we must create our future and no one else’s.
4. Being There and How to Get There
In the previous post (The Mindset of Cancer Part 1), I wrote about how hard it is for a cancer patient to express their needs and wants; and how equally difficult it is for the family members and caregivers to understand their issues.
This Part Two is an introduction to the management list that Terri and I created for us over the past 2 years as we have learned to live with my cancer. The following is incomplete and actively changing as we live and learn.
You have just learned that you are with cancer.
React however you react. Confusion, fear, terror, numbness and zone-out type reactions are super common.
Let all that happen, whatever it may be. Try not to go through this alone.
When you are ready to take action:
Tell someone. Please know that they may be completely shocked and devastated to hear that you have cancer. To all of us, my cancer diagnosis seemed unbelievable.
Tell people that can help support you.
Wait on talking to people that will be looking to you for your support.
5. Types of Support
A. Family and True Friends
• Your medical appointment companion – someone to hear all that you may miss when you zone out on during every medical meeting. Note pads and voice recorders could also help you a lot with accurate recall of what your medical team actually told you.
• The Kleenex, Holding/hugging folks or pets
Please don’t run away and please don’t smother me.
• Find the ones that will listen to your needs:
Right now I just need to babble and express myself. When I do this I need your silent support and/or your very kind accepting response. Do not try to stop me from expressing myself unless I seem way out of control.
Just be with me. I may want eye contact. I may just want you to hold my hand. I will do my best to tell you what I need and what I need may change constantly minute by minute.
• Avoid folks who use phrases like:
“I know how you feel.”
“It will be alright.”
“This really scares me.”
• Child and Parent care
While we are processing our situation, we will need help with care for family members for which we normally have to care for. We need baby-sitters, car-pool drivers, after-school homework and extra-curricular activity managers, and if we do elder-care with our parents we will need others to step in according to our situation. This list can be short or very long.
• Employers and Co-Workers
Who needs to know and what do they need to know? I let my family help me with such matters
B. Care Givers
• Start to figure out your medical team. You may have friends and family members who have experience with this. When I discovered that I was with cancer, I did not have any formal relation with the medical community. I had to immediately find a primary care provider and get them to refer me to a host of specialists. I was clueless about how and who to choose. I had to find a cardiologist, pulmonologist, oncologist, and radiation oncologist immediately – so they said.
I started with whatever the emergency room staff mentioned and then amended these options by how folks sounded over the phone. The attitude and inner feeling I got from the office receptionist or simply the name of the doctor were my guiding lights. Intuition was all we really had. It worked out but was terribly challenging.
• Home or work-based caregivers – this will vary based upon your physical abilities to move, eat, and/or express yourself. None of which may apply now and maybe never.
C. Inspiration – philosophical, theological and spiritual support
Cancer is laden with fear and confusion, and an overwhelming load of death and dying issues and commentaries.
• Clergy and spiritual teachers
• Creating an emotional support team
• Books and media that have been vetted by others to help us with attitudinal help and healing.
D. Protectors
• Do you need help with handling phone calls, doorbells, emails?
• Do you need help with managing those who get scared and temporarily disappear when you reach out to them? Sometimes our loved ones are more frightened of our cancer than we are and they run for cover to get time to process.
• Medical, legal, financial, property professionals – it was months later when I really felt this was necessary or the hospital formally requested such documents.
E. Preparing for Solitude
For most of us at some point and time in the cancer experience, cancer becomes our first entry point to living in a land of solitude. Home bound and occasionally bedridden with everyone else off to school or work, the house became my classroom for learning about self-soothing techniques and confronting the worries of my own mind. It was all plopped down right in front of me.
Others would later tell me that as the cancer experience and care consumed more of the day, it becomes the first time where we are spending hours learning to manage the stories and opinions that our mind spouts off.
It is a new world. A life-changing world. Meanwhile, the external world continues with some added degree of chaos and duties.
Every few months, as I became much more limited in my ability to fulfill work duties and household chores, a sense of fragility would occasionally descend upon me. It frightened me and came wrapped in a sadness with a sense of undeserved alienation and feeling left out. It is a huge learning curve for all of us about how to avoid feeling abandoned (ghosted) when our loved ones are just clueless (bewildered) about what to say to us and how they must continue to live their lives too.
It was hard for me to find others who could help me process these feelings. My own mind would wonder as I searched for those who knew this path of solitude, “How can you be with me if you don’t know how to be with yourself?”
5. Introduction and Book Review of
The New Cancer Paradigm: Mobilizing the Mind to Heal the Body.
Written in 2012 by Avinoam Lerner. Available in print and in Kindle formats
All errors and misconceptions in this review are mine. — Blair
Full disclosure: for the past year, I have met and studied with Mr. Lerner in person at his office and online with Zoom as part of my own personal and urgent quest to use my mind as a healing force to overcome my cancer. Working with him has been life changing.
I have found his online course, Mindful Remission, which includes weekly private appointments with him, to be extremely valuable. Life-long access to this 8-week online course allows me to continue to grow and heal.
I may write and release a full review of his book on my website in the future.
My Review: His book has introduced me to a whole new way to language and understand the subtle functions of the mind and emotions in the healing process.
I will let him tell it best by sharing some of his quotes and concepts. Sharing partial truths is a slippery slope. To share the entire truth expressed in his book would require reading and digesting the entire book. So, I will only be able to provide you with a glimpse of what I have learned.
Mr. Lerner begins by introducing us to the current paradigm of cancer care in western medicine, giving us some information about himself, and then jumping right into the thick of a new and fascinating paradigm of how to view and heal cancer.
Beginning with the difference between recovery and healing:
Recovery means to get something back.
My patients told me that they wanted to get their old self back. They want to get back to how they used to be. To which I would say that I will not offer that option because how they used to be is what caused them to become ill.
Healing means to restore to health, to cure, to set right and repair, and to restore a person to spiritual wholeness, according to Mr. Lerner:
“…true healing cannot be achieved by treating only the physical aspects of the illness or condition. We must also treat and heal the mind patterns that rendered the body vulnerable to disease agents and carcinogens.”
Healing the source of cancer requires us to heal the mind. Now the real excitement begins as he describes his new methodology called Immersive Healing — a method of treating the whole person.
“Immersive healing is an intensive, goal-oriented, result-driven, and systematic method that utilizes an advanced form of hypnosis as its therapeutic vehicle. Its goal is to identify and resolve the mind patterns… inhibiting the functioning of the immune system.”
Then a new phrase is introduced that I find psychologically and practically perfect and kind. “If you are with cancer.”
Throughout the rest of the book, this simple, gentle phrase surfaces as a way to connect this truthful fact with various therapies. It implies that cancer is with us but does not have dominant control over us.
“If you are with cancer, it does not mean that your subconscious programming is corrupt or bad. It is nothing like that not at all! It does not mean that your subconscious program is unusual or that it is any worse than anyone else’s.”
Immersive Healing also empowers the patient to better cope with the side effects of medical treatments and other stresses that arise in everyday life. This treatment program is completely safe and is obviously drug free.
Goals of Immersive Healing
The three main goals of Immersive Healing are:
· To identify and resolve the underlying subconscious mind patterns and programming that have promoted illness from within.
· To restore, revive, and optimize the functioning of the immune system
· To facilitate a continuing state of healing with the purpose of preventing secondary cancer.
Nothing is really healed until the mind is healed. I introduced this fact in sharing the story of the patient called Mr. Wright in Part One of this essay.
“Mind wounds” is another new term. A wounded mind cannot be identified by looking at a chart, a scanner, or a picture. There is no x-ray to detect a wounded mind. Mind wounds are not visible, but they are very real within us.
“A mind wound is the intangible cause and cancer is its tangible effect. Healing the cause heals its effect.”
In Louise Hayes’ book, Heal Your Body, the source of cancer is described as coming from “a deep hurt; long-standing resentment; or deep secret of grief eating away at the self.” My own spiritual teacher stated decades ago that agony is one of the deep-seated causes of cancer. If the mind is not in harmony, nothing is in harmony.
“The Subconscious Mind is a powerful and omnipotent agency, but it is unable to bear judgment on the information it harbors. It is completely literal, rendering no opinion or judgment as to the type or quality of that information, negative or positive beliefs, false or real perceptions. The Subconscious Mind believes exactly what it is told. All programmed beliefs, whether harmful, negative, and false, or healthy and positive, become the literal truth.
This part of our Mind does not have the ability to judge or reason about anything; it cannot determine which messages are good and which are bad. The Subconscious Mind is vulnerable and needs protection.”
How do we rewrite programs in our Subconscious Mind?
Immersive Healing provides a method to override our existing Subconscious programs. This approach recognizes the Dual Mind system and heals the rift between the two minds.
Thoughts and emotions by themselves cannot cause or cure cancer, but they do affect our body’s chemistry. Biochemistry affects the environment in which cancer can develop.
Our beliefs create our reality, and in the case of cancer, the belief in the form of an Illness Paradigm shifts our body’s biochemistry into dysregulation, and illness manifests.
The conditioning and repetition of specific beliefs, perceptions, and ‘truths’ create a new paradigm. We start to rely on the meaning we give to events. Leading to self-fulfilling prophecies. We no longer doubt our doubts and unexamined conclusions, instead we believe our beliefs.
The Sound of “the wounded mind”
Each feeling, thought, and emotion has its own unique vibration and wavelength, similar to the way each musical instrument vibrates to create its own unique sound.
Imagine your brain as an orchestra, and your beliefs, perceptions, emotions, and attitudes as musical instruments. If you could listen to the soundtrack of your subconscious mind, what would it sound like? Would you hear harmonious or disharmonious sounds in your orchestra?
Immersive Healing is a method for changing disharmonious mind patterns into harmonious ones. We know that to every effect there is a cause. Planting seeds in the ground does not ensure that a tree will grow from each seed. For them to germinate and grow, water and nourishment is needed.
The Immunotherapeutic Method – 3 Basic Premises
1. The body’s natural immune system is designed to defend against all illnesses, cancer included.
2. Harmful States of Mind (stress, hopelessness, etc.) and negative Subconscious Programming suppress the proper functioning of the body’s natural immune system.
3. If these harmful states of Mind can be healed, the immune system can be revived and cancer can be prevented or healed. The power of the immune system to defend and sustain the body is enormous.
By restoring the mental state to one of harmony and balance, we also restore balance to the physical body.
People touched by cancer agree that there is more to their illness than just the tumor itself. Cancer is not an overnight event, but rather an outcome of the blossoming of seeds planted in the fertile ground of the Mind long ago.
Healing takes place naturally within the body only after the internal unresolved emotional and mental programming that promoted illness from within are healed. “Faulty programming” is the mental blueprint of illness.
Doctors can see cancer cells, but they cannot see the hidden factors in the subconscious mind that contribute to the illness. The hidden factors can be addressed by Immersive Healing.
“Regression to Cause” Hypnosis
With advancements in the field of hypnosis such as the development of “Regression to Cause,” we are now able to intervene and support the immune system as it defends against illness. We can:
· Identify and resolve the subconscious programming which promoted illness from within.
· Revive the body’s innate immune response and strengthen one’s resolve to heal.
The book fills in all the gaps that my commentary may have created. There is a perfect balance between the philosophy, the history and the science of the Immersive Healing that Avi Lerner has brought to us in The New Cancer Paradigm: Mobilizing the Mind to Heal the Body.
The rest is up to us. To read, to study, to practice, to share, and select our way of healing.
– Blair
The New Cancer Paradigm: Mobilizing the Mind to Heal the Body. Written in 2012 by Avinoam Lerner. Available in print and in Kindle formats.
With Love and Gratitude,
Terri and Blair
To read previous posts, click here!
Here is the link to share with others who would like to sign up.Fear is selfish.
Courage is selfless.