When it comes to cancer, there is a tendency to make emotional healing all too important or not important at all. I repeatedly encounter this issue with my patients. Many people think that if they just get to the emotional cause, their cancer will be cured.  Others say that emotions are not important. They think that cancer is clearly a physical disease so surgery and medications are the way to go. Anything emotional or spiritual is ineffective “fluff.”  Although both attitudes do certainly help one navigate the cancer landscape, it doesn’t help to emphasize one at the expense of the other.   In my  35+ years as a body-mind-spirit holistic healthcare professional, with the last 10 years focused on energy healing for cancer, I have learned that there is a middle way that works better.  

Getting to the emotional cause: If you’re in the camp of those that say, “my childhood wounds caused my cancer,” it’s a little bit like blaming the victim. Even though emotional healing is so important to the healing process, it often doesn’t transform the physical body the way we hope (though sometimes it does).  I don’t say this lightly.  If you deeply respect the mind-body connection, please know that I do too.   I do think emotional healing is always supportive to spiritual and physical healing, but one rarely fixes their “causal” emotional issues and cures their cancer. While negative emotions certainly contribute to lowered immunity,  I feel that the deep emotional healing that accompanies a natural cancer cure happens as a result of a spiritual healing–it’s not usually the cause of it. Because you can talk about the emotions and tell stories about them, they get the credit!  Think about it. 

 When you had some emotional resolution/forgiveness/peace… think back… there was some ineffable “something” (that I call “spiritual”) that elicited the emotional healing. This “spiritual something” is beyond emotions, beyond our imagination and  beyond Duality.  Chinese Medicine would say it comes from the Wu Qi (the formless void that exists prior to Yin and Yang).  Anthroposophy would say that the “cause” of cancer happened hundreds of years ago when at your “midnight hour” you decided to incarnate into a genetic stream and cultural landscape that would best serve your soul’s purposes. Other cultures describe it in different ways.  How do you describe this place or dimension that is beyond emotions?  I suggest that our emotional work can open a door to this spiritual healing realm and then it gets confused with it.   My work has much to do with cultivating the opening between the emotions and the non-dualistic surrender that is the actual healing gesture that causes healing.  I also feel it is tremendously powerful to think of healing as coming from the future, rather than fixing the past.  When healing arrives in our NOW, the past and future are healed as well.  

 The spontaneous” remissions I’ve witnessed and that I’ve read about include emotional healing.  I don’t think you can cure cancer naturally without also curing some emotional stuff. They  are paired.  If you have wonderful traction with your emotional healing… your tumors are softening and shrinking as a result of it, then by all means continue!  If, however, you are vigilantly going after your inner demons in order to heal your body, and the body problems persist, try looking at the demons from a different point of view.  See your emotional demons as the result of the actual cause of the cancer.   The “cause” of cancer could be spiritual (think Karma, or soul lessons to be learned), physical (think radiation poisoning or other toxins), or reduced vital force (think ageing, nature deprivation, lack of movement, poor nutrition) OR emotional (think traumas from about 25 years before the cancer spread). 

  Usually the “cause” of cancer spreads itself out holographically.   To reach into the non-dual “cause” of cancer is profoundly simple and paradoxically intricate at the same time.  This is what I teach my patients to do.  Since I am directing them to a dimension where there is no language, no ego, no control, it’s a bit hard to describe with words.  Poetry and music may reach there better.   Emotions are not important at all: And if you’re on the other extreme that the emotional work is too fluffy to impact something as lethal as cancer,  then you’re just not up on the latest research. Emotions matter a lot.  And no matter what you’re doing, finding peace with yourself, your ancestors, your parents and forgiving people is hugely beneficial for the immune system.  So please give yourself permission to do the emotional healing that you need, while you attend to your physical medical procedures. 

Don’t feel like you have to “put all your eggs into one basket.”  Working with psycho-spiritual issues is complimentary, not competitive with physical medicine.  Having watched quite a few natural healing cures and quite a few people that just turned cancer from a death sentence into a chronic illness, I’ve learned some things.  These “successful” cancer patients do emotional work, but they are also very focused on their physical protocols. They seem to trust the process of life and are attentive to their emotions, but they are not scared that if they don’t become emotionally pure they will die.  They have a more matter-of-fact attitude towards emotions.  They experience them, and let them go.  Anything that happened in the past is reverberating into the present, so it’s quite a powerful stance to simply be Present with the here-and-now.  So when I work with patients where we often work with psycho spiritual things because they come up, but the healing comes from the future, specifically our Future Free Self.  The part of us that is freer to be ourselves and to be healthy.   Connecting with this free and healthy future happens in the now. I have ways of helping my patients get into the now and how to pay attention.