You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. – Eleanor Roosevelt
Cancer is the ultimate wake-up call. Not only is your body sick, your spirit is sick. A diagnosis of cancer is devastating, but it can also be an enormous opportunity to achieve true healing. Remember the well-known quote, “Cancer is a word, not a sentence.”
What is it that is so powerful about cancer? If we can break down the power of this word, we can begin to see the light of healing beyond the darkness of the diagnosis.
What is Cancer
I’ve worked with thousands of individuals who have cancer and the one thing I know is that cancer is nothing more than a part of ourselves that has forgotten who it is. When we are children, we take parts of ourselves that we deem unattractive—emotional responses to situations that are unacceptable, undesirable, or just too upsetting—and push them down deep in our bodies. When we try to stuff something down, hide it away, we literally stop a part of the energetic flow in our own body. So it is with cancer: any time we shove something down and the blood flow can’t get to that area, stagnation can occur, a likely breeding ground for a tumor. A tumor is nothing more than some cells that literally have forgotten they are part of you and start to develop at their own rate.
It’s so important that you know that cancer is not a death sentence, but an invitation from your body to your psyche to integrate that forgotten part back into wholeness. It’s equally important that you know that you didn’t do anything wrong: you are not at fault; you did not bring this cancer on. Life forces and circumstances, many if not all of them out of our control, put us in situations where we turn to defense mechanisms that we learned as children that encourage us to deny parts of ourselves. Think of the cancer as a message from a part of you, asking you to bring that part back to yourself, even a part that before you deemed unlovable. It is work with that deepest part of yourself that will affect you the most. No matter what the physical result of your experience with cancer, if you do this vital work to make yourself whole, you will be the winner.
What Causes Cancer According to Traditional Medicine?
Cancer, medically speaking, is a general term we give to diseases in which abnormal cells grow, divide, and invade other tissues in the body. In a normal, healthy body, cells grow, divide, and die regularly, which allows for new cell growth. Cancer cells form when this process is disturbed in some way. The cell’s DNA mutates or is damaged, and it doesn’t die as it is supposed to. This leads the body to produce new cells when they are not needed, and these new cells form tumors. The tumors can be benign, or noncancerous, and they will not invade other tissues. Benign tumors can be removed and usually do not recur. Malignant tumors, however, are cancerous and pose a serious threat as they can spread (or metastasize) to other areas of the body.
There are over one hundred diseases that fall under the cancer umbrella, but the one thing they have in common, according to the American Cancer Society, is that the body’s own cells “grow out of control.”
Leukemia is a type of cancer that doesn’t produce tumors; it forms in the tissues that produce blood, such as bone marrow. Abnormal blood cells then enter the blood stream.
The other major categories of cancer are Sarcoma (cancers that form in bone, cartilage, fat, blood vessels, muscle, or connective tissue), Carcinoma (those that form in the skin or tissues that line organs), Lymphoma and Myeloma (those that begin in the immune system), and Central Nervous System Cancers (which start in the brain or spinal cord). According to the National Cancer Institute, there are 1,437,180 new cases of cancer diagnosed each year. There are 565,650 deaths each year.
What causes the DNA in our cells to mutate? Conventional medical wisdom tells us it is due to environmental factors, such as chemicals, toxins, tobacco smoke, or too much sunlight, or to genetic predisposition, and this would seem to be true. For example, the most prevalent type of cancer in the United States is non-melanoma skin cancer. Over one million people are diagnosed with this form of cancer each year. A leading cause is prolonged exposure to harmful sunlight without protection. This seems like a clear case of cause and effect. Of course, this has led people to stay inside, or never to go out without slathering on sunscreen—a good idea midday in summer, but a bad idea in terms of getting the sunshine Vitamin D we are all lacking these days.
But there is more to cancer than environmental and genetic causes.
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