Never Say Never

This blog was meant to tell a story—a tale of my journey into the unexplored spaces of myself in search of healing and resolution. Ultimately, the story of how I slay the demons dwelling within, the ones that 2 years ago doctors decided to call “cancer.” But this story has taken a turn that I did not anticipate… and it has brought me to my knees. Honestly, I didn’t want to continue telling the story, and even considered deleting my blog page and crawling into the safe refuge of solitude. But it wouldn’t be very courteous of me to just stop right in the middle of the story without letting you know how it ends, now would it? So here is what happened next…

When I returned home from Bali I felt amazing—light, clean, happy, healthy and changed. Like I was breathing new air. The amount of healing and transformation that happened in the 7½ months that I lived in the ashram was more than could be comprehended. But while I was so acutely aware of all that had changed, I also knew that the transformation was not nearly finished. I still felt an icy spot deep within that had yet to be thawed in order to complete the healing process with the cancer. I knew the fight was not over, but it was extremely difficult to admit to myself and others because I had worked so hard and wanted that freedom more than anything. I denied that ominous feeling week after week until I could no longer. My neck started visibly swelling like never before and I reluctantly dragged myself to a doctor. After several tests, the results came back showing Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Once again I was diagnosed with cancer, this time a little more critical. I was distressed, but not surprised. And I knew I had a choice to make…

Something strange happened at this point. That same intuitive sensation that so strongly rejected allopathic treatments in the first place reared its head once more, but this time asserting something entirely different. Before the doctors told me anything, I knew that if I didn’t do conventional treatment now, I would die. This didn’t at all change my adverse views on western internal medicine, but the feeling was something could I not ignore. This left me with a very difficult question:

Am I willing to die to stand up for my beliefs?

While I still have faith in the healing methods I have discovered, something immediate and drastic needs to be done to stop the rapidly progressing abnormal cell growth in my body. What I purposefully did not mention throughout this entire blog is the ironic fact that Hodgkin’s is one of the most curable cancers with conventional therapies (over 90% cure rate in early stages). This is something I was forced to consider. While I don’t fear death, it seems foolish, and even selfish, to give up this life so early when I am given another option that has been proven to work. While I may not agree with how it works, it seems to be the drastic decision needed to kick this cancer out of my body. So I guess it’s time to break out the big guns.

This week I start chemotherapy. I don’t know why, but it does not feel wrong like it did before. It feels like I am making the choice to live.

Now the greatest challenge is battling the feeling of defeat that dwells and swells within me. I wanted to prove that we can heal ourselves without doctors and pharmaceuticals; that nature can put our dis-ease at ease; that love heals all. While I still believe all of those things, I am also opening my eyes to the powerful forces of healing that western medicine provides for our current time and culture. Fatefully, these options are readily available to me. So I take the blow to my pride, letting it rip through my ego, shredding the once-concrete notions I had of myself and the world. I have discovered, however, that the breaking of the ego is the greatest step humans must take in their healing journeys. For it is the best way to get closer to our true selves hidden beneath.

So the story continues…

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Since the moment I embarked on this spiritual journey, my faith in my healing has been greater than my fear of death. This was not always the case for my mom and many other people that have heard my story. But after watching my mom laugh uncontrollably as the Energy worked through her, moving and contorting her body in ways she never knew possible, I saw that she finally felt the power of this medicine that is healing me. It is this energy medicine that has cemented me to my faith in the deep healing that can happen outside the confines of conventional western medicine. I now see that this faith has been instilled in my mom, the person I most needed to believe in what I am doing. Without realizing it, I needed her blessing to complete the last leg of my healing, and with that I was able to release the guilt I have felt for following my own beliefs and rejecting those of a person I love so deeply. After she witnessed me living so freely and blissfully, laughing more than I ever have and looking happier and healthier than ever before, I knew she understood why my soul had lead me to this practice. What’s more, she now understands that with this medicine, I am healing myself.

As I reflect back to over a year ago, when my battle to heal myself first began, I felt like I was crawling through a dark cave, unable to see where I was going and struggling to find an out. I knew my mom wanted to help me, but we couldn’t see each other in the darkness and I felt lost and separated from her. What I didn’t see was that this cave is lined with precious sparkling gemstones to remind me of the beauty of this journey. And now that I have come to an opening, the light has seeped in, illuminating my path to freedom and engulfing me in the luminous splendor of the miraculous crystals that have been there all along. In this light I also see that my mom is right next to me fighting, and has been there the whole time.

The Battle of our Lifetimes

Since the day I was diagnosed with cancer, I was tossed into battle against some of the strongest forces known to present day man. I stood by myself against the most powerful institution in America—the medical industry; I fought uphill against pharmaceutical companies and doctors. What´s more, I went head first into war with my own demons, which, in a lot of ways, is harder than fighting the demons of the western medical world. But of all the battles I have fought, one of the most challenging has been the one against my own mother.

My mom is an oncology nurse, and works in the very field that I rejected entirely in order to seek a deeper healing on the soul level. I have little faith in the type of medicine that she practices, and she has a hard time fully agreeing with the type that I practice, consequently dividing us over a matter that we, as a mother and daughter, should never have to argue about: my life.

This clash in beliefs has continued since the day that we sat in that sterile doctor´s office together as a bald, stiff-necked man in a white lab coat told me in a monotone voice and emotionless face that the lump in my throat was not, in fact, benign. I didn´t hear anything after he said the word “cancer.” But my mom held on to the details and numbers as if the syllables themselves could save me. I spent the following week in a tumultuous internal battle between following the strongly recommended advice of my mother and doctor, or listening to the voice that was screaming from within myself to find another way. When I told her I had made the decision to decline chemotherapy and follow my soul, it felt like the world crumbled around us as we began the battle of our lifetime with tears in our eyes and weight on our hearts.

However, since I have been practicing this medicine of love day in and day out for several months now, I have come to see that this is not actually a battle that we are engaging in, but a dance—a waltz in which both of us want to lead, but neither of us know the steps. This is a dance that we have done for many lifetimes and I believe that this is our opportunity to finally clean ourselves of this karmic pattern. Perhaps for now we dance separately, until the time comes when our steps harmonize, allowing fluidity and peace to replace the once unsynchronized movement of our moral disagreement.

That day is coming soon. Against the probabilities, my mother is coming to Bali to visit me in the ashram not only see, but participate in the healing practice that has saved my life. She will experience the profound transformational therapy that I have lived and breathed for that last four months of my life. This is tearing down the wall that I tried to demolish since the beginning, helping her to see that my healing looks different than the way she saw it happening. But this outcome will be most fruitful since I have listened to the guidance of the only doctor that knows how to heal me best: my soul. I don’t expect this to change her medical beliefs, but I know that once she experiences the magic of this practice she will be able to believe in the miracles that happen here everyday. I am one of them.

The Rebirth

When we are born into this world, we come out head first screaming and crying. For we know that to be incarnated into a human body is a difficult task and to live this life is no easy mission. But in our lives we are given the remarkable opportunity to be reborn over and over again; we just have to become aware of these opportunities and take them. Ratu talks a lot about our rebirth as human beings, and when we come into our bodies for the second time, we aren’t crying. We are laughing! For it is laughter that creates such a high vibration which is a medicine for us, dissipating all darkness and negativity within us and around us. When we laugh we clean ourselves of the dark energies that have trapped themselves in our bodies, and with this cleaning comes a feeling of freedom that I can only explain as a rebirth.  

So it is here that I have been reborn, tumbling out into this world head first and laughing with every cell in my being. I have never been so happy in my life. Two weeks ago I shaved my head. My long hair that I have hid behind for so long had become heavy with the weight of the last 5 years of sickness, and it was the last part of myself that I needed to let go of to complete my rebirth process. So I started over fresh, with nothing weighing me down, and gave my hair as an offering for my health. I think it is so important, especially as a cancer survivor, for me to break everything in my life down to nothing so that it can grow back again healthy and strong. This is exactly what chemotherapy does; I have just done it without the chemicals…

The most essential aspect of the rebirth for each of us as individuals and for our species as a whole is the breaking down of the ego. Our mind is what makes us sick in the first place, and in order to clean ourselves to come into this world new again, we must escape the thoughts that trap us in our dis-eases. I believe this shedding of the ego is the final frontier in our expedition to awakening fully to the light.

I have changed so tremendously since I moved here. I have learned to simply act out of love in each moment, instead of react to everything. I have an overwhelming feeling of peace and gratitude for each day that I live. And my body has never been so physically healthy. All of the symptoms of sickness that have plagued my body for so long have left and I feel free spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically. And above all, I am happy. So incredibly happy. And that, my friends, is the most powerful medicine of all. As Ratu always says, there is no way to happiness; happiness is the way.

Life is Beautiful

There are days when I feel like I’ve been here for years, lifetimes even. The changes that have occurred within me are becoming more and more obvious each day. While I continue to find myself slipping through the quick sands of time, I have finally come to understand what it feels like to truly be present in the moment and enjoy every last drop of the sweet nectar of this life. Last night I stood watching the sun sink below the Balinese horizon, tie dying the sky with the most brilliant pinks, purples and oranges, and for the first time in my life, I felt so alive with the understanding that God is in everything. Later I realized that the feeling I had had came from me being able to fully step out of my mind and connect with the farthest reaches of my soul. Each day I brave the cold showers, hundreds of mosquito bites and the sore muscles and joints to have this feeling, even if it only lasts a moment. For in that moment, I feel that I am absolutely one with everything.

I am really finding my home here. I have connected with some amazing people on levels so deep I can see us dancing through past lifetimes together. I have started painting again and creating things I had no idea I could produce. I sing and play guitar in the little downtime that I have, and during the week I teach, which is what my heart has always longed to do. I teach English to the small kids three times a week and I teach short yoga classes twice a day. I feel like I have become part of this wonderful, loving family that lives here, and accepted into a culture so vastly different from my own.

Last week my body started processing something that I have been challenged with since the day I was born. Since the moment I came into the world, my lungs have been the physical and emotional center that takes the burden when I get sick. At birth I couldn’t breathe on my own, and throughout my life I have suffered from pneumonia or bronchitis, leaving me trapped in the fear of not being able to breathe.  So here I have started the process of cleaning out my lungs, which on the outside looks like I am sick again, but I know that this is profoundly different. For each time I wheeze or cough up fluids, I know that I am cleaning out and allowing sickness to leave my body. That doesn’t mean that I will never have a cold again, but it signifies that this darkness that has been trapped in my lungs since the day I was born will finally be set free, and it will be gone for good.

I have seen countless miracles happen here; people who have cured anything from depression to broken bones to HIV and hepatitis C. There is nothing that the Energy can’t heal if we allow it to and we do the work. I now watch in wonder as my own miracles unfold before my very eyes.

Om Swastiastu Ratu Bagus

Ya Se Fue

My time in Bali has been filled with so much love and light, but also with some intense work with the deep negative emotions that have dwelled within my being throughout this life. But this is how it works—we must allow and process these darker emotions in order to clear them and live freely. It has to come up to come out.

How different this is from Western medicine. In our conventional practices, we do things to “fix” the problem, instead of allowing it to surface fully and process through it. We take medications to make the pain and the sickness go away, when really these ailments are our body’s way of trying to release something. By suppressing the problem, we cannot clear it, and it will return worse or in another part of our body or mind.

Ratu (the Guru I have been working with) has taught me many valuable lessons, but the one teaching that has rung loud and clear through it all is that our soul is always well. For the soul is connected with the Infinite, the Universe, the Great Source, or as some would say, God. So to connect entirely with our soul is to tap into this infinite source of energy and light, putting us in perfect harmony with all that is and ever was. This is how we live freely of all dis-ease. So in this sense, we can trust that a part of us is always well, we only have to align with that. It is here that I am learning to do that, which has brought me to the greater understanding that I am already well; the cancer is already gone. Ya se fue.

As simple as this concept may be, the practice is difficult at times. We work hard to clear our bodies of dark energies. We shake every day, three times a day, for two hours each time. The shaking helps to move energy quickly, allowing us to feel the fear, anger, sadness and sickness and then move through it in a healthy way, rapidly liberating us from our ailments. The most difficult part of the practice is stepping out of our mind. Ratu says that the mind is the umbrella that shades us from the light that can heal us. When we can surrender, slipping out of our minds and into our bodies, then the real work can be done. This is much easier said than done. ..

I have decided to stay here for a while and see how deep I can really go. So much has happened in these three short weeks, I can’t imagine what can happen in three more months. In doing this work, I often think of the lotus flower. This magnificent blossom only opens itself in the most putrid and dark swamp environments. So out of these dark and contaminated places comes one of the most beautiful creations of nature. As I learn to open and radiate my petals, I am reminded that sometimes the most beautiful blossoms of light come out of the darkest and least expected places.