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My Whole Life Shifted
I’ve encountered cancer in more and more ways as the years have gone on. In my thirties, a friend died. In my forties, I began spiritual counseling and Reiki energy healing for people with cancer. In my fifties, I had cancer. In all of these roles, cancer has affected me deeply.
My friend, a funny, intelligent and good woman with two small children, died of throat cancer. She didn’t die because it was a particularly aggressive cancer. She died because she had very limited insurance and almost no financial resources. Her other friends and I would have bankrupted ourselves to save her life, but she was immobilized by her fear and her kind heart would not let her accept our sacrifice. I cried for a long time when she died. I cried for all the years that she would not have to grow and learn, and to enjoy her children and her husband. I cried for those children. I cried for her friends and loved ones, who were many and heart-broken. I cried for myself, because I would never laugh with her again, and because I saw myself in her vulnerable position. You could say that her experience taught me fear - not fear of cancer, which can freeze us into fatal inaction, but the kind of fear that spurs us to protect ourselves. Never since have I been without good, comprehensive health insurance.
Her death also galvanized me to help others in her situation. I switched occupations, moving away from high-tech and dusting off an old MA in biology, so that now I teach Anatomy & Physiology p/t at local colleges. I also moved wholeheartedly into clinical practice: upped my education from a Reiki Level II healer all the way to Level III Master and Teacher. I had done a lot of work with energy healing both to help bolster the immune system of my friends with illnesses, but also to provide them with needed relief from fears and worry. While medical journals include clinical studies of Reiki’s effectiveness in the goal of getting rid of the disease (probably because of a strengthening immune response – the NK cells go after cancer), I keep telling people that cancer is a complex disease and every body is unique. No one treatment works for everyone – except stress relief, which benefits everyone. That is when I started dedicating a percentage of my healing time for pro-bono work with people who are affected by cancer – especially those who have limited financial resources. I include caregivers in my work. I’ve watched loving souls pour their life force into their sick friends, neighbors and family and I can feel, because Reiki means “life force wisdom”, how depleted they are, even from across the room. There are ways of offering help while having the recipient understand that they are conveying a gift to you. With full reciprocity emotionally taken care of, my healing recipients relax and just receive in peace.
Cancer does not just impact a person’s body. Even for the forms of cancer that rarely lead to death or disability, fear can be overwhelming. When I had several melanomas removed a couple of years ago, I did not expect the episodes of crippling fear that I had to ride out. [I teach people to deal with overwhelming emotions by not resisting them. Paradoxically, if you let go and let them just flow through your body unopposed, they will do so and be gone. When it happened to me, I started by instinctively resisting; then I realized what I was doing and it became a game to me, to visualize riding out the waves of fear.] Some of the waves I rode out concerned mortality, which was absurd if you consider it logically. A very early case of melanoma, removed by a competent surgeon, can’t possibly kill you. I didn’t have much of the “my life is out of control; how could this happen to me” emotion that my Reiki recipients were dealing with. What I think I was really afraid of was the outcome that did in fact transpire: my insurance premiums shot through the roof. And I’m not the only one. A great deal of the stress and worry that I have to use Reiki to dissolve for people centers around financial worry, not mere mortality. In Europe, with national health care, people can just focus on becoming cancer-free.
Another thing that has come out of my hands-on work with people who have cancer is my deep appreciation for the health benefits of connection. People who are not alone on any level have less anxiety and the energy can flow directly to combat the cancerous cells. Friends, family, pets, a connection to a higher power or a deeper meaning than mere survival – I know who has this support and who doesn’t the instant I step across the threshold. There is a palpable energy of love, or of loneliness and isolation. When the energy of love fills the room, the person may live for a hundred years or pass away tomorrow and you know that that love will always be present, resonating in the people and in the connection. The person is free to lovingly take care of themselves in every possible way and to let go and surrender the ultimate outcome. I have walked into rooms like that with people who haven’t a bean in the world and I know that they will either be well or they will pass to the next life with complete peace. One of the great benefits of the Reiki work I do is that energy healing can accompany talk. My new friends and I talk while the energy flows through my hands. After years of this, I am glad that 93% of Americans have some kind of higher power or larger vision for their lives beyond mere survival. Seeing present troubles as a blip in a larger tapestry and a longer journey provides a counterbalance to the fears that can become overwhelming – for finances, for family, for mortality itself. In my own case, I’ve been averaging three cancers or pre-cancers per year since the first diagnosis, not a good sign, and I sometimes have fears that I need to ride out.
I do what I teach my new friends to do. Batten down the hatches, set a sea anchor and ride it out. We pray, we meditate, we breathe, we love ourselves, we feel no shame for our emotions. Eventually, the dawn comes, the sea quiets and the warm breezes caress our faces. We are not alone. And that’s all that matters.