CANCER

  
I spent some time with a cancer patient who had worked with one of the currently popular holistic healing methods that encourage the patient to marshal aggressive visualizations to stimulate the immune system to gobble up the cancer. The philosophy behind the method is
that cancer is a result of the denial of certain events and experiences that have been repressed that one must take responsibility for. The cancer represents a solidification of long-held resentments, fears, and doubts. But she said because the method didn't show her how to "empty" anger, to investigate it so that its energy might be harnessed as a skillful means, it was geared to "get rid of the cancer, " for her to "beat it, " which made her feel that in some ironic way she wasn't taking responsibility for the cancer. That this aggression intensified exactly the process of negation that may have caused her cancer in the first place. "It's just more pushing away of some part of myself." Or as another cancer patient put it, after opening to her cancer and long outliving the prognosis for her disease, "1 know what my cancer is made of. It is made of the paintings I didn't paint, the sculptures I didn't sculpt, the lovers I didn't love. My cancer is beautiful. It is simply misdirected creative force, energy turned inward and impacted in a cramped space instead of flowing outward into the world."

Another woman opening deeply to her healing said, "How am I to attack my cancer while attempting at the same time to open to all the things in my life which seem so unresolved and embodied in this tumor. It seems to me that what I need to develop is not more aggression but love to dissolve this tumor. "

Another patient told us that while meditating one day on the qualities of aggression that would perhaps enable her to destroy her cancer, sending fiery energy to burn away her tumors, she heard a voice within her heart say, "Why are you killing cancer cells, why are you
killing anything?" And she saw that what she needed to do was to bring love and harmony to that area, to go to the root instead of treating the symptoms, the tumors, as though they were the problem. And from that point on she generated feelings of loving-kindness, golden light, to wash the cancer, to bring it back into the flow, where nothing is held and nothing obstructs healing in whatever form it might take.

Many are encouraged to "take responsibility" for their illness but are seldom taught the difference between responsibility and blame. Many, when taking responsibility for their illness but finding themselves unable to change its course, feel guilty for not being responsible. "I am deserting my family after all, I never was very together. " But responsibility is not blame; it is the ability to respond, which comes out of being present in the moment. As with people in pain who attempt to get rid of their suffering before they directly understand
its cause, those who attempt to heal themselves without some understanding of who or what is out of balance only intensify the discomfort. Those who undertake healing with some idea of "body survival" as the only alternative often approach death in deep depression and self-loathing. "Only if I succeed in healing myself am I of value. " The self-doubt, the hope born of fear, the aggression cultivated to overcome illness, may be turned against oneself.

During presentations at various hospitals we have on occasion been asked if we would help set up healing and pain clinics. When asked, we suggest that if such a clinic were organized it should be based on cultivating and directing love to illness or pain. Love is the optimum strategy for healing. Nothing is captured and there are no "victims." In love there is the potential to go beyond the holdings manifest as disease. Nothing is held back from the spaciousness of the heart where all opposites coincide in the One. In such openness we melt
the dammed-up emotions and come to a state of well-being in which health is a by-product of openheartedness. It seems that some of the methods for healing, including even some called "holistic," do not encourage wholeness but at times cultivate qualities to oppose illness which seem capable of disharmonizing the individual.

One of the therapists who is most successful in the use of aggressive imagery, who has helped many to come from fourth-stage cancer, where all traditional therapies have been abandoned, to a relatively healthy body, calls his most remarkable recoveries his "superstars." He says that some, as they become more and more successful fighting their cancer, seem to develop qualities of separatism and a kind of individualistic ferocity that make them difficult to be around. He says that, indeed, if two of his superstars are in the same room together you can feel the contention between them, their individuality has
become so intense, their aggression so finely cultivated.

Though a few using such methods have told me how their heart spontaneously opened and how, instead of aggression, they found themselves trusting their love to cure them.

Which brings us to a question of priorities. What is more important, the saving of the body by the cultivation of aggressive qualities that may indeed go on for incarnations, causing pain and discouraging deeper access to our original nature, or a letting go with love in which
the transient body is not the only priority but rather an openness to being that goes beyond death?

Could this be what Jesus meant when he said, "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it"? In cultivating aggression, if we do not heal, "all is lost. " But in the cultivation of love, if indeed what we usually think of
as healing does not occur, one has not traded off any part of oneself but rather entered into a greater wholeness. In a sense the cultivation of love is "a no-lose proposition." For if love does not heal the body, its openness and wisdom accompany one into the next perfect moment.

I have no statistics on the power of love to heal but only an intuitive sense of its appropriateness. Love is greater than any emotion: fear dissolves in it, anger disintegrates, pain floats free.

-- Stephen Levine, Who Dies?