SURVIVOR's NOTES:What we’ve learned about cancer –for our friends’ sakes…
- Richard
- Oct 25, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 12
Notes from an open session on Cancer, Mindfulness, and Healing at Hollyhock in 2013 — where seven cancer survivors (and the significant caregiver for one of them) gathered to express and collect the important things they learned from the experience. The resulting list is reproduced below with minimal editing. Please share if useful.
General
Listen to your dreams.
You are likely to have great moments of clarity and insight at times of great trauma.
Trust this insight and work with it as it unfolds in your life.
Drink more water.
Diagnosis
Never let your friends go into the hospital alone (especially single friends).
Seek out the best medical care. Make the system work for you.
Medical testing is not a perfect science; there’s an element of art in interpreting the results, so find a good artist.
When you hear the diagnosis, think of it as words on an iPad held at arm’s length; don’t take it into your body right away.
Apparent bad news isn’t necessarily actual bad news; reserve judgment.
Treatment
Trust your own discernment and intuition as an ally/equal to the medical analysis
You are the team leader and you assemble the team.
You have to be your own doctor; share responsibility for decision-making.
Whatever the proposed treatment (regardless of traditional, alternative, or integrative), take full ownership and collaborate with it, absorb its maximum healing power; life-giving.
Hold all treatment alternatives and medicine as a single medicine bundle.
Beware of passive agreement to any treatment.
Ask what your doctor would do if the patient was a family member.
Support
1. Ask for what you need.
2. Accept all offerings from others as love—even if it first you’re not so sure…
3. Well-intentioned supporters: Don’t offer advice unless solicited.
4. Manage your support. Assign the management to someone else if you can.
5. Assemble your friends when you need them; e.g., a council to mirror your intuition or a love-in to play and love with you.
6. Ask your friends to support you during key moments by being with you in meditation or prayer or energetic support. Thank them afterward.
7. Three circles of sharing (direction of sharing goes outward, not inward—i.e., don’t burden patient
with your own grief)
Healing
1. Honor the trauma.
2. Treat yourself with gentleness and compassion.
3. Allow all emotions to come and go. Accept everything that comes up.
4. Face your fear and embrace it.
5. Find the healing metaphor that works for you:
a. Some are attracted to the warrior
b. Some give power to the healthy cells
c. Feel compassion (as a mother would) for unhealthy cells (like adolescents who can learn)
6. Let yourself have the time/space you need.
7. When working with your inner guidance, trust the surprises.
8. Cast the widest net (Eastern, Western, Ancient modalities) for love and joy.
9. Discover what brings you joy and learn how to bring it into your body/cells as healing power.
10. Everything is fair game in healing; there is healing power in many things/people/nature/etc.
11. Create ritual and ceremony (spontaneous and/or planned) around treatment and healing.
12. Practice! Visualize and prepare for all treatment and recovery.
13. If your counts are low, take an online course that brings you joy; if your counts are high,
go out and find joy.
14. The Arts are healing. Find and practice your gifts.
15. Celebrate the milestones (letters of gratitude, marathon markers, etc.).
16. The healing continues. The goal isn’t necessarily physical cure, but healing a life. Develop your
healing muscles.
Growing
1. Articulate the story that’s happening to you.
2. Use the opportunity to heal your life.
3. Find meaning in this adventure; consider the shamanic journey (descent journey of the
wounded healer) to discover true self.
4. Embrace the unknown. Build your tolerance for ambiguity.
5. Death is not a failure, but a part of life.
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