It’s crucially important to understand that cancer is very rarely a purely physical condition. Most of the time, there is a psychological or spiritual component to it that is the true cause of cancer. Perhaps it’s intended to help the person reach a certain understanding that was previously lacking, or teach a lesson (or several of them), or force him/her to make lifestyle changes, or affect others around them — or most of the time, all of these and then some.
The fact that people have used a staggering variety of approaches to cure their cancer — from fasting combined with a simple plant-based diet to prolonged fasting followed by one-meal-a-day (OMAD) consisting virtually exclusively of red meat and vegetable juice to high doses of Vitamin D to Rife technology to essential oils or glutathione or turmeric supplementation only to cannabis oil to fenbendazole to Essiac tea to a combination of multiple approaches — should be sufficient indication that a specific physical path is not as important as addressing the root cause of the disease.
With this in mind, both these psychological/spiritual aspects and physical aspects need to be dealt with for cancer to be cured. To start with, the main question you need to ask yourself is not “Why me?”, which many recently diagnosed people tend to fixate on, but “What is it trying to teach me?”. The answer to this question will determine both how you see your condition and how you choose to treat it. Of course, there is a lot more to it than that, and the following list describes those things that I find critical to understand and, most importantly, apply.
Psychological/Spiritual Prerequisites
Take responsibility for your health
People usually confuse taking responsibility for something with feeling blame or guilt. Yet these two are, in fact, polar opposites. Guilt makes you small and powerless. It’s a dead-end street filled with regret that offers no solutions.
Responsibility is the understanding that you are the right person who is in the right place and at the right time to solve the problem at hand.
Perhaps it’s easier to illustrate the difference between them with a simple example. If you have a small child, and the child falls when playing in the yard and badly scrapes his/her knee, if you are a caring parent, you are most likely not to blame for the incident and thus shouldn’t feel guilt, but you certainly are responsible for fixing the problem as you are the authority in charge of your child’s well-being.
Same here. Your cancer may or may not have been caused by something you did — you can analyze that later — but you are certainly the one’s who’s responsible for fixing your body, not a doctor who doesn’t remember your diagnosis from one appointment to the next and who goes over your test results right during the consultation. If you want to get well, you absolutely must acknowledge that no one else will do it for you. People will certainly help you, including doctors, those who have done it before you, and many others, including complete strangers, but only you can actually accomplish it for yourself. Acknowledge that you may have caused your condition, yet accept total responsibility for getting back to health.
Make peace with death
Before you can fight cancer, you have to accept the possibility that in the end, nothing you do may make a difference and you may still die. Everyone has to go sooner or later, and it may simply be your time and your way to go, and of course, this has nothing to do with your age.
Making peace with death accomplishes at least one critical prerequisite to fighting cancer: it frees you from fear. Fear is an enormously powerful emotion. It drains our energies that, especially in these circumstances, are extremely precious and must be spent elsewhere; it kills motivation, ruins our determination, and sucks our faith dry. Fighting cancer requires fearlessness, at least most of the time. Isolated instances of fear are ok, but you certainly don’t want it gnawing at you 24/7 because if it does, it will definitely win.
Making peace with death means other things as well: forgiving others who may have done you harm, and even more importantly, forgiving yourself for the harm you may have done to others, as well as to yourself. Even if you brought the disease upon yourself, through bad habits, a bad environment, etc., you are just a human who did the best you knew how with the information you had at the time and amidst a host of other life challenges you were dealing with at the same time. It is certainly not a capital offense; but you do need to acknowledge it, forgive yourself — truly and sincerely — and resolve to fix it and do better in the future. Yes, it takes a lot of contemplation or meditation to do that, but with proper intention, it’s quite possible and is an absolutely necessary step if you are to succeed.
Suppressed (or not) anger is frequently one of the psychological roots of cancer. A deep, visceral forgiveness of the people who you think have done you wrong is a non-negotiable prerequisite to healing cancer. Give up your anger and desire for justice completely and place them at the feet of the Only One whose judgment is inescapable and true. It is not your job to fix the world — the only one you can fix is yourself.
Fighting spirit
This would appear to be a major contradiction: how can you make peace with death and have a fighting spirit at the same time? It’s simple, really: you make peace with the very real possibility of death (and do it sincerely), yet if it is not yet your time to go, then your cancer is not a death sentence but a challenge to understand and overcome. No one is given a greater burden than they can bear. While you don’t know what the outcome is going to be, you can simply state to yourself and to whatever higher power you believe in that if it is not your time to go, you will fight single-mindedly to get well. Decide that if there is a potential future — and all future is potential! — in which you continue living as a healthy individual, you choose that future. Resolve that you truly want to live and that you will do anything necessary (within moral limits, of course) to achieve this goal. See your future the way you want it to be. Make specific plans with dates and commitments and stick to them.
If there is a single overriding factor in this whole process, it is this. The will to live is an absolute must if you are to get well. You may survive and live for years if you follow some sort of physical-only program, conventional or otherwise, but complete healing absolutely requires an unshakable will to live.
Gratitude, determination, and faith
Gratitude is a powerful emotion. It opens you to receiving gifts that the Universe might otherwise not send your way, not because it’s a bad universe, but because it respects your free will above everything, and if you don’t believe that you deserve solutions, you will not get them. Being humbly grateful ahead of actually receiving help opens you up to receiving far more than you ever hoped for.
Determination and an unshakable belief in a positive outcome are immensely powerful forces. Soak them in until you live and breathe these two states of being to such an extent that even if you lose 50 pounds and look like a skeleton, your spirit still shines through to anyone who cares to look.
Prayer and contemplation
You don’t have to subscribe to a religion to believe that there is an order to things, that the Universe and our lives are not a random occurrence with no consequence. I will not try to prove something that cannot be proven objectively, due to the same concept of free will, yet every single person can get their own confirmation of the reality of a higher power. All they need to do is ask for it, sincerely, purely, and with an open heart and mind.
If you’re not into praying, contemplate your life path, both your past, your present, and your future. Take walks by the ocean, surround yourself with trees, mountains, beaches, lakes, and fields, and contemplate the essence of your life and the nature of the creation. I assure you that it will not be in vain.
Go towards health instead of running away from disease
The difference between these two attitudes is all-important. You can never “kill” cancer. Unless you live in a bubble, there will always be cancer cells, deadly viruses, and other unpleasant things in your body. You cannot get rid of all of them. Hard stop.
What you can do, however, is strengthen your immune system to such an extent where it will do what it’s designed to do: fight these cells, viruses, infections etc. as they occur, so that you don’t even know — or need to know — that something like this is going on, because you created an environment where your body can do its job and it is doing it exactly the way it’s supposed to.
Every action you take on this path should be done with full awareness of it as healing and conducive to getting you to a better state of health. There should be no escapism — no “let me pop this pill to mask the pain, or take this poison to kill the cancer cells and another 100 billion healthy cells along it” type of thing. Do not try to kill cancer; improve your health and your immune system and it will take care of the cancer by itself.
Support system
No man is an island, as they say, and it is difficult or impossible to pull this off all by yourself. I was fortunate to have the support of family and friends, of those who went through this before me and became like family, and, most importantly, of my selfless, loving, and devoted wife who spent many, many hours every day shopping for the right ingredients, juicing, preparing meals, mixing pills, and pouring over mountains of research, coming up with new and better supplements or ways to do things, and what you see here is mostly the result of her research and well-organized notes.
Sign up for a support group on a networking site, read blogs, join a prayer group, go to church — do whatever is necessary to surround yourself with supportive people and energies. Prayers are answered through other people; try not to cut yourself off from them.
Find a doctor or a nurse practitioner who will work with you and will be willing to prescribe the tests and medicines that you need. We already see “through a glass, darkly” as it is; it’s best not to make your job even more difficult by flying blind.
A corollary to this point is to exclude from your life those people who suck your life force out of you. There are people who do it quite intentionally, and a weakened victim is fair game to them. Most of the time, however, when it happens, it happens unconsciously, through a lack of thoughtfulness or simple immaturity. Of course, you cannot cut off your 5-year old child’s connection to you, but even a 5-year old can understand that mommy or daddy does not feel well and needs rest. This will not only allow you to preserve your energies a little better, but will teach your child a valuable lesson in compassion at a young age.
Laugh and sing
One hour of laughter gives your immune system a boost for 24 hours. Same with singing. You may not feel like doing it, yet it’s an extremely important part of the natural approach. Watch good-natured (which these days means old-fashioned) sitcoms and comedies, sing along your favorite songs, listen to classical music, Gregorian chants, or mantras. Violin music especially has a beneficial effect when there’s cancer. Do it on a daily basis, preferably for hours.
Take action
This is where you begin work on the physical aspect. Of course, it needs to start immediately, simultaneously with the psychological part, and it has to be large-scale and all-encompassing. Taking action tells your subconscious mind that you are serious about deciding to live, and it will definitely respond. Unless you are an accomplished yogi, just willing yourself back to health is probably not going to work; for most of us, massive action is an absolute must to show our unconscious mind the seriousness of our intentions.
Dig in for the long haul
Cancer is a lifestyle disease. It takes years to develop (unless you got the COVID shot) and cannot be expected to go away completely in a couple of months. You can certainly start seeing results in a couple of months — e.g. stopping the spread or tumors shrinking, but it’s a mistake to think that the battle is over before it is. Eradicating the disease completely from your body will take a lot longer than that, and you need to be prepared to keep with the effort — which is certainly not minor — for however long it may take you to get rid of toxins and other “splinters”, build a new, healthier diet, create new habits, and get your body back to health. It is said that you typically need two consecutive NED results (“no evidence of disease”), spaced a few months apart, to tell you that you’re clean, and it’s as good a measuring stick as any other.
Before you begin your journey, you have to take an honest and deadly serious (literally) assessment of your own abilities, limitations, and temperament. If you feel that you are unable or unwilling to commit to most of the above attitudes, perhaps a completely naturopathic approach should not be your only option. There are plenty of people who did not refuse conventional medical treatment, but used it in combination with natural methods — and got well just fine.