The story as I want it to be

I signed up for the daily quote from Abraham yesterday, and this is the first one I received:

Many people protest when we explain to them the power of telling the story of their finances as they want it to be rather than as it is, because they believe that they should be factual about what is happening. But if you continue to look at lackful what-is and speak of what-is, you will not find the improvement that you desire. If you want to effect substantial change in your life experience, you must think thoughts that feel different as you think them.— Abraham

Abraham gears so much of its teaching to making money, but it can easily be applied to making health. So I thought I would give this a try. I am actually a too-honest person. I have noticed that I feel this need to tell the bad side of any story out of a belief that I am being dishonest if I make things sound too good. This is clearly coming from the ego– a belief that nothing can be purely good.

Like if I am describing a vacation I might say, “We had such a good time.” And then feel the need to say, “Although the girls were completely overtired by the end.” Or something else negative.

So all that’s just to say that it doesn’t come naturally to me to say things are all rosy and perfect. Or to completely deny what I see is the truth. BUT I am going to give it a try. Right here, right now. Here goes:

I am so grateful that I have perfect health. I am so so grateful that the thyroid tumor has completely subsided. You can’t even tell that it was ever there!  It disappeared so quickly, too. Literally it was there one week and the next week it was gone. My doctor recommended an ultrasound, and the scan showed nothing there. Absolutely nothing there except a healthy thyroid.

I feel so free and easy. So happy! I know that this world isn’t real–that it’s only a dream that I am creating with my beliefs and that I only have to change my beliefs to change my experience. It is so easy for me to change my beliefs now. My mind is completely flexible. I get it.

I have no more fear of cancer. I was in a cancer ward at the hospital the other day, and I felt only peace and joy. Cancer is only a state of mind that I don’t have anymore.

What’s even better is that I am filled with energy. I don’t have any more allergies. I put on a sweater that was sitting in my closet all summer, and I didn’t experience even a sniffle! My back feels strong and flexible. I never get colds any more.

And my sex drive is back! It is so fun to have sex now. It’s like this whole new option of something to do in the evening with my husband. It’s just like it was when I was in my 20s, only the sex is so much better!

And I am at the perfect weight. I didn’t even do anything to lose the weight. It just came off naturally and easily. I eat what feels good and stop when I’m full, and that’s all I have to do. I can wear anything in my closet that I want to, and I look so good! I went clothes shopping and I actually loved what I saw in the dressing room mirror.

Thank you thank you thank you!

Okay, that was fun. I think I will do more of this on my own.

Update and Chiropractic Results

My mother’s melanoma has not spread to her lymph nodes and the surgery had “clear edges,” which I think means that they removed all of it. She is ecstatic. I don’t think I can imagine how difficult the last couple of weeks have been for her.

On my health front I have been seeing a chiropractor for the last two weeks to help my lower back pain. The pain actually has been gone for the last week or more, but I was following the chiropractor’s suggestion to continue getting adjusted. He took x-rays at our first meeting. (These by the way are the first x-rays I’ve let anyone take of me since getting diagnosed with cancer. I have been staunchly anti-radiation.) He said he really needed them to see what was going on in my spine.

Last night I had a meeting with him to review the results, and it turns out that my right leg is 15 mm shorter than my left leg. This makes a lot of sense because I have been wearing out the left heel of my shoes forever. And when I stood on the scales at the chiropractor– you stand with one leg on one scale and the other leg on the other scale– my left leg was holding 20 pounds more of my weight than my right. And I only weigh 120 lbs.

So this can be helped by putting “lifts” in my right shoes. And luckily my lower spine is only off kilter by a little bit, which seems very good since the right hip is dramatically lower than the left.

I also have a subluxation in my neck. This is what they call it when the vertebrae in your spine are compressed or out of alignment. They believe that subluxations in your spine can be at the root of all kinds of health problems since the vertebrae are pinching or compressing the nerves in your spinal cord at these subluxations. My neck is fairly screwed up. It’s supposed to be arching backwards– they used a banana as an example of the ideal curve– and it’s straight and even slightly arching the opposite way.

This chiropractor has proposed a program whereby I go to get adjustments 3x/week for 2 months, 2x/week for 2 months, and 1x/week for the the rest of the year. The cost is $3000 or it could be 15% less if I prepay for the year. The program also includes doing a form of traction to my neck at home and maybe some exercises.

So I need to make a decision about this. It’s an awful lot of money and a huge time commitment. It takes me 16 minutes to drive there– so each visit is about 45 minutes out of the day. I am going tomorrow again for an adjustment, and I will perhaps decide then. I’ve been trying not to try to figure out what to do with my thinking mind but to let go and be guided.

I do wonder if perhaps correcting my neck will have an impact on my overall health. I never used to have allergies, for instance. Maybe these have developed because of a weakened immune system due to the subluxation. And of course there is the cancer:) My dear companion. It is in my neck after all. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Just kidding. I have no idea.

It is ironic to me that we have just increased our monthly income (or decreased the outflow) by refinancing our mortgage, and now I’m going to spend all that money again. Last night when I was a bit worked up about the cost of it all, I thought that I should do The Work on my belief that the U.S. healthcare system is so screwed up. We pay $1,134 a month for health insurance and get so little out of it. If we could just take that money and spend it on maintaining our health with chiropractic and acupuncture and massages, etc. it would be so much more effective.

 

 

Patience

When I was first diagnosed with thyroid cancer in September 2010 and decided to try to heal naturally, I had this idea in my head that it would take one year. It was so arbitrary now that I think of it, but that seemed to me to be a reasonable period of time to heal. I had been reading Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, and she talks about healing her ovarian (?) cancer in something like six months. (I may have this all wrong.) So I thought a year was the right amount of time.

Then a year went by, and I wasn’t healed. And another year. And now it’s been two and a half years.

I know personally of at least three people who have been healed naturally from thyroid cancer. One did it by switching to a raw food diet, which as far as I know, he is still maintaining. Another also did it through diet, but her diet includes raw meat and cheeses. She has worked a lot with a man named Aajonus Vonderplanitz (for real) who has a diet called the Primal Diet.

The third healed her cancer but didn’t find out until her tumor and thyroid were removed and they biopsied it. I don’t know everything that she did to heal, but I do know that she was doing Tong Ren. The acupuncturist I was going to regularly for a while was also her acupuncturist, and she told me about her. Her story interests me. She did Tong Ren regularly for 9 months then got frustrated that she wasn’t getting better results and got surgery– and then it turned out her tumor wasn’t cancerous anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if my tumor is no longer cancerous. But I do know that it’s growing so that is a problem if it doesn’t reverse itself– whether it is cancerous or not.

How will I know when it’s time to get surgery? And how will I know if I am just being impatient?

My doctor decided that two years was long enough to make an effort– and that if I hadn’t healed by now I should get surgery. But what is my decision?

My husband who has been very quiet on the subject of the cancer for the last five months, who didn’t even ask about the results of my last ultrasound (and I didn’t bring it up), brought it up today. He said that the lump on my neck is more noticeable, and he wondered when my next ultrasound would be.

Here is something on Patience from Regina Dawn Akers’ website, called “Patience is Key.”

Question: Holy Spirit, I have several friends who seem to believe they are victim of their own minds or victim to the thoughts in their mind. They are caught in a loop of believing and experiencing that they cannot seem to emerge from, and they are clearly feeling trapped in hell. What is most helpful to share with these friends who are seeking help? I surrender all thought to you and wait gratefully for your answer.

Answer: The answer lies in remembering who you are all of the time. Although you may not have the experience of being creator, you have the knowing of it, at least intellectually. That little bit of knowing is enough to take you very far. But when you remember yourself as victim, you forget who you are. In that moment you are being you, pretending to be something else, and the entire experience you are having is coming from you.

When you remember what you are, and you decide to trust that knowledge with faith, you begin to create an opposite driving force. It is the opposite driving force that will begin to create an opposite driving experience. Then experience and faith can be combined to create a stronger opposite driving force.

The beginning of reversal is most challenging. It is helpful to praise even the smallest of gains with intense gratitude during this time. Remember that where ever you focus you carry yourself, and be willing to focus your mind in the direction you want to go.

The first step in reversal is the choice for patience. If you expect some kind of perfection from yourself when you believe you are not experiencing perfection now, you will only have the experience of failure through judgment. This isn’t helpful to your goal. Decide on patience, not perceived perfection. Remember that patience is a symbol of love in what seems to be a world of time, and remember to love yourself through patience.

Patience is more than being nice to yourself, and it definitely is not treating yourself with the gloves of weakness. Patience is a powerful, powerful trust in yourself, which teaches that you will reverse the energy of the universe through will. And patience also knows that the energy of the universe is never reversed through force, but always through cooperation. So as you see, the energy of patience is love.

Once you have decided for patience, you have taken a giant step toward the reversal of energies that seem to harm you. Take time to be grateful for patience. Take time to celebrate your decision. Through these simple actions, the energy of patience is increased, and the energy that seems to surround you is softened through love.”

There is quite a bit more to this message. If you are interested you should click the link above.

I had part of this message on my bathroom mirror for the last year or so. I only recently took it down because it didn’t seem that helpful anymore, but now it is suddenly seeming massively helpful. I don’t think that I was ready before now to actually choose patience over a tumorless neck. Actually I don’t think I even saw it as a real choice. I think my thoughts probably went something like, “Choose patience? What does that even mean? I can see being patient, but how can I choose it as an option?”

The message used to serve as a reminder to me to be patient, but my choice was clearly for the cancer to clear. But now I think my trust has grown enough that I can actually, honestly choose patience over “perceived perfection,” over no tumor.  I can see now that patience is actually trusting myself and my ability to create a reality that is different from the one I am experiencing now. I don’t think I had this trust before. Or it was too weak to hold on to. All I could see was the tumor.

You know I worry about my doctor who still hasn’t contacted me since the last ultrasound in mid January. And I think what I worry about is exactly what this message is saying not to believe in: “If you expect some kind of perfection from yourself when you believe you are not experiencing perfection now, you will only have the experience of failure through judgment.” This is what I imagine my doctor is doing– she expects some kind of perfection (the tumor to  disappear or shrink dramatically) and she is seeing the failure of my approach because the tumor has not disappeared or shrunk dramatically. I think when I worry about my doctor, I am just projecting my own fears onto her. Again.

I am very excited about this. I am making progress. I am going to stay with this message for a while now– reread it often to make sure it sinks all the way in.

Iodoral and Vitamin C

I had a tough week last week. It turns out that a lot of it was self-inflicted. My lower right back was  bothering me for a good week– a lot of dull, aching pain that kind of wore me down. And then on top of that my stomach was really bothering me. It was a stomach ache that wouldn’t really go away. It seemed to come on after lunch and last most of the rest of the day.

I find it very difficult to stay positive and believing in my healing when I am in pain. It’s just really hard. It’s one thing to have energy and feel good and then to look at the tumor and think, “This is not real.” To be so uncomfortable for so long pulls me down.

But on Sunday I realized that the stomach aches are all due to the excessive Vitamin C that I have been taking as recommended in Dr. Brownstein’s book on Iodine. I have been taking Iodoral along with Vitamin C and Celtic sea salt. I started with a low dose– half of a 12.5 mg pill. Then I ramped this up to a whole 12.5 mg pill and added in the Vitamin C and salt. It took a while for the stomach aches to kick in, which is why I didn’t figure it out sooner. On the web, they say there are very few side effects of excessive Vitamin C. One is diarrhea, but this wasn’t my problem. Mine was more of a straight stomach ache.

It looks like now that the dust is settling I will be taking either 6.25 mg of Iodoral every other day or every two days, salt, and maybe trying a little Vitamin C– more like 500 or 1000 mg as opposed to the 2000 mg I was taking. Dr. Brownstein actually recommends 3000-5000 mg, so I was taking it easy.

I have been figuring out my dosage the hard way. It’s tricky I think because the effects didn’t kick in until the second week I was taking it. What I have found is that when I take too much Iodoral (which is a combination of iodine and iodide), I wake up very early, as early as 3:30 or 4. And when I wake up I’m feeling uncomfortably warm in bed, I don’t feel like I got enough sleep, and my mind is very restless.

On the positive side I think the Iodoral has helped my period. My periods have been averaging every 25 days for the last year or more. They used to be much more like every 28 or more days. Normally they are pretty short– 2 days of heavy flow and maybe a day or two at the end petering out. But this fall they had begun to stretch out. I was having up to 3 days of spotting before it started in earnest and then it would take a little while to end– so it was twice as long and then every 25 days or so. But this month for the first time in a very long time, my period came 29 days after the last one, it started quickly and ended quickly.

Still no effects on my sex drive which is nearly non existent and has been low for years. But I am hopeful.

Also my back is much better after seeing the chiropractor.

I AM a Jedi.

I am reading Byron Katie’s Loving What Is. It’s really very good and helpful. I learned of her at a retreat I went to a couple of years ago. I had taken another book of hers out of the library, but it didn’t do that much for me, and I didn’t read most of it. Then something got me re-interested and last winter I watched all the videos I could find on her website of her doing the work with people. It turns out there are many many more on YouTube. Here is a very good one a friend recently showed me.

It’s this same friend who recommended that I read Loving What Is, and she is right. It is really helping me understand The Work more. In Loving What Is, Byron Katie tells a story about her 3 year-old grandson who gets a toy Star Wars light saber. When he pushes the button on it, Darth Vader tells him, “Impressive, but you’re not a Jedi yet,” and so he knows that he is not a Jedi. “I not a Jedi,” he tells Byron Katie. And when she says, “But you’re grandma’s little Jedi,” he says, “I not.”

Then Byron Katie gets invited on a plane ride over the desert, and has the idea to bring her grandson. At the end of the ride, the flight crew tells him that he is now a Jedi. And he might be happy then, but has to go home and check. When he goes home and pushes the button, it tells him again that he is not a Jedi yet. Katie asks him if he’s a Jedi now, and he says, “Grandma, I not.”

This morning I was trying to take some kind of fairly accurate measurement of the thyroid tumor on my neck. I have these plastic body fat calipers that I have been using, but they are so springy, it’s hard to get a consistent measurement. I was trying to visually mark where the calipers went to in the mirror and then see what the actual measurement was when I looked closely at the ruler on it, and I realized that the tumor nearly maxes out the measurement on the ruler. That is, if it gets much larger, it will be off the scale. This was not comforting.

And then I recalled the “I not a Jedi” story, and I realized that this is what I take from looking at and measuring the tumor: “I am not healed.” “I have cancer.” It doesn’t seem to matter how good I feel or how much energy I have; when I look at the tumor, it tells me, “Impressive, but you are not healed yet.”

So it seems to be a matter of me taking my power back. It’s so clear in the Jedi story that this little boy is allowing a plastic stick to tell him who he is. Am I not doing the same thing when I look in the mirror and get angry and frustrated by the size of the tumor? “I not healed.” Nothing in the world can tell us who we are– only we can decide what to believe and so what to create.

More fear of cancer

Last week I was in a cloud of fear for several days. My mother, who has stage 4 lung cancer, just found out that she has a melanoma on her leg. I have seen it. It’s looks a lot like a blood blister. It’s about the size of say, half a pea, and it’s kind of bluish. Last year I removed two moles from my face using apple cider vinegar. I told my mom about it, and she said she might try it for a mole that had developed on her leg. That was sometime this past year– so she’s had this I think for at least 6 months.

My aunt, her sister, died of a melanoma on her leg. She died within 6 months of them discovering it. I wrote a little bit about this in Background story 01. My poor mom has been through a lot lately. In September they discovered that her lung cancer had spread significantly. She began getting shortness of breath easily because the tumor was pressing on her lungs. Up until this point she had been feeling fine. In January she spent three weeks at Dr. Forsythe’s cancer clinic in Reno, Nevada. They do targeted, low-dose chemotherapy in combination with alternative methods to boost the immune system to treat cancer and have had much better results than conventional methods.

By the time she entered the clinic in January, she wasn’t feeling very good. Her hip hurt a lot (the cancer had spread there), and her energy was low. Then there were a few complications at the clinic. Her white blood cell count was too low at first, and she missed two chemotherapy treatments because of it. She continued to be very tired and didn’t feel that good. When she returned home she was a bit discouraged that she still wasn’t feeling better. She was hoping that it was because her body was recovering still from the treatment. And then she went to the dermatologist and found out that the “mole” was a melanoma.

She will be getting surgery this Friday. If it has traveled to her lymph nodes this is apparently not a good thing. They won’t know how far it has progressed until they do the surgery.

So last week I was feeling fear. I am a little fearful of my mother’s death, but I have a lot of fear around the idea of her suffering in any way. I am working to let this go, too.

On my own front, I have been having lower back pain. It started about my right hip, and a happy thought that it might be my liver– that the cancer had metastasized to my liver– entered my mind. That is a funny (not really) thing about cancer. If you are afraid that it might metastasize, every little ache and pain becomes possible evidence. But I looked up the liver and discovered that it is higher than the painful area. Also a couple of nights later my back began spasming on both sides, so I’m fairly sure it’s a muscle thing. I started up doing yoga again a few weeks ago, and I think that’s what has caused it.

I went to make an appointment with a chiropractor I went to the summer that I discovered I had a thyroid nodule, and found out that she was dead. She has “passed on.”  I wonder if I will say “passed on” about my mother when she dies. It has always seemed kind of fruity to me, but I don’t believe in death any more. “Passing on” seems much more accurate.

I went to the chiropractor’s website, and it belonged to register.com. Then I called her phone number, and it said that the number was out of service. At first I thought she must have moved, but  when I googled her, an obituary came up for someone with her name. I ignored that several times, until I finally decided to dig a little deeper. I was able to read comments on her obituary page, and they confirmed that it actually was her. Crazy!

I have to say my reaction hasn’t been sadness but more like a feeling of strangeness. It kind of feels like she disappeared. She was here, perfectly healthy, two years ago, helping me who was supposed to be the sick one, and now she’s gone. Eckhart Tolle was talking about how you could make a spiritual movie in which you just showed the progression of time in the world. First a baby being born, then running around as a kid, growing up, getting married, having kids, getting older, then dying. I mean if we speed it all up, it becomes perfectly clear that all of this is very tenuous.

It feels so real and solid when you’re in it. I know a few old people who just won’t die. They hang on and on. They seems to be showing that even when you’re dying age, it takes a long time to die. But then this chiropractor, who was in her mid-fifties, just disappears into thin air.

So I won’t be going to see her:) I have an appointment tomorrow with a new chiropractor. I filled out the health form for him yesterday, and I checked off thyroid problems, allergies, and cancer as existing problems. I’ll see how he responds to that. I have realized that I have a belief that the health care community is not supportive of my effort to heal myself without surgery. I would like to let this go, and I hope I can let it go with him.

But back to the cloud of fear. My fear about my mother stirred up my fears about my own cancer. Experience in the world seemed to be telling me: “This is serious stuff. You can’t mess around with it. You might think everything’s okay, but at any moment cancer could rear its ugly head in a new and more serious way.” Isn’t that what the fear of cancer is? It’s the belief in this silent, deadly sniper that sometimes takes you out so quickly (like my aunt and maybe that chiropractor) and sometimes drags you along with terrible suffering and pain and only lets you go when it’s good and ready.

But this is all nonsense! I will not believe it. I am looking at it now. I used to look away from it, avoid it. But now I am committed to looking it in the face. I am in charge of my own thoughts. Thought creates experience and so I am in charge of my experience. I am choosing Love and Truth. I am choosing Peace.

Background story 02: Bad allergies and a thyroid nodule

In May of 2010, I was suffering from terrible seasonal allergies. I was totally wiped out for at least 10 days straight. I remember I wanted to work in the garden in the afternoons for weeks, and I just couldn’t muster up the energy to do it. I began searching for ways to heal from allergies, and I began reading Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life. She has this exercise in the book where you are supposed to hold your neck and speak into the mirror, and when I was doing this I felt a lump on my neck.

We had recently moved, and I was looking for a new doctor who would have a holistic bent. I was reading recommendations in mother’s forums and made an appointment with a doctor who was supposed to be more alternative. She was a D.O., a doctor of osteopathic medicine, rather than an M.D. I made an appointment with her hoping that she could help me with my allergies.

Her waiting room was really depressing. I forget why, but it was very gray and poorly decorated, and I think the other people waiting were not uplifting sorts. Her examining room had a Viagra clock and an advertisement for Flonase on the wall. I thought this was kind of funny since I was looking for a natural doctor. I told her about my allergy symptoms, and she prescribed Flonase. I remember she told me to take it from Father’s Day until Halloween.

I showed her the lump on my neck, and she told me it was a thyroid nodule, that they were common, and occasionally cancerous so that I would need to get a biopsy. But not to worry. She gave me the name of a surgeon who specialized in this.

So I went home a bit worried. As I explained in installment 01 of this story, I had quite a bit of the cancer story going on in my life. I got some Flonase, and made an appointment with the surgeon. The surgeon couldn’t see me for something like 3 weeks, and the appointment wasn’t for a biopsy but for an initial consultation. I remember that this felt kind of torturous to have to wait this long and not even for an answer. I called back the doctor to see if she might recommend someone else and she assured me that none of her patients had ever been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and that I should wait out the three weeks.

When I went to see this surgeon. I brought my two daughters who were then 4 and 5 years old. I had brought an ipod with videos to keep them entertained throughout what I was told would be a 15 minute appointment. We had to wait for over 45 minutes, and 5 minutes into the appointment the batteries on the ipod went dead.

The first thing the surgeon said when I entered the room was, “Don’t worry girls, your mother is going to live for a long, long time.” I thought this was very strange because death hadn’t actually entered into my mind as a possible outcome, even though cancer had. He acted very strange, almost like he was scared, and after looking at my neck he told me that he didn’t think a biopsy would be safe to do since it was too close to an artery, and said that I would should get a radioactive iodine scan to determine if the nodule was warm or cold. Or something like this. Depending on which it was, they would determine the likelihood of it being cancer. It was a bit hard to follow since the ipod touch had died and my daughters were clamoring for my attention. He also recommended that I go to another surgeon who specialized in ears, necks and throats.

I left totally freaked out. I did not want to take any radioactive iodine, and I didn’t like this guy.

The background story 01: Surrounded by cancer

In February of 2010 at age 68 my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. She did 2 or maybe 3 sessions of chemotherapy when she decided to stop. A friend had given her a book called Cancer Free: Your Guide to Gentle, Non-toxic Healing, by Bill Henderson, and she decided to give that a try. The prognosis for stage 4 lung cancer is really bad. I just looked it up, and one website said it was 8 months. I believe her oncologist told her that the chemotherapy might give her an extra 2 months. So there was nothing to lose.

She adopted Bill Henderson’s diet, which is all vegetarian and dairy-free, except for this concoction that you eat daily made from low-fat cottage-cheese and flaxseed oil, based on research by Dr. Johanna Budwig. She began taking a bunch of supplements, which he describes in his book, and started reading everything she could about alternative methods of healing cancer. And she gave up all sugar and alcohol.

She wasn’t sick when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. The reason it was discovered was that she had had non hodgkin’s lymphoma (another type of cancer) in 2002. This had been treated with chemotherapy, but in the scans they had found a dark spot on one of her lungs. They weren’t sure what it was and said it could be scar tissue, but they would monitor it.

The chemotherapy got rid of the non hodgkin’s lymphoma. After 6 months (?) or so of treatment, including losing her hair, she was back to normal. But in February of 2010 in one of her regular scans the dark spot had grown and tests showed that she had lung cancer which had spread to other organs.

Bill Henderson’s diet was wonderful for her. She had had asthma her whole life, and within months it had cleared up. Her skin and eyes looked clearer, and she said had more energy than she had in a long long time. She had been having sleeping issues for years and years, and these, too, cleared up.

The previous summer, her sister, had died within months of sarcoma, a deadly skin cancer. She was 74. And that May of 2010, this aunt’s daughter, my cousin who was 43, died of pancreatic cancer.

So within the space of a year, two people in my family had died of cancer, and one was diagnosed with cancer.

 

Evidence in the world

I had another realization this week. This one about experience in the world. It came in part from reading this in NTI, 2 Corinthians, Chapter 3. The voice speaking is the Holy Spirit:

“Evidence is sought within the world. You look at the world, and you seek evidence that what I say is true. But if you look at the world with the thought that what I say may not be true, that is the evidence you will find. For the world was written as an experience of untruth. And so the world can be used to prove that the untrue is true, if that is the evidence that the mind seeks.

I ask you to not look at the world. I ask you to look in your Heart and see what you find there. Your truth is written on your Heart. And by seeking there, not in the world, you will find confirmation that all I say is true.”

This is hugely helpful to me and explains a lot of where I get off track. I believe everything that NTI and ACIM tell me. I want to believe it more than anything. I act on that belief, but then doubt creeps in. ACIM and NTI tell me that I have nothing to fear, but I look on the web and I find someone writing that their thyroid cancer has metastasized. And this is what my doctor tells me could happen. And the surgeon. And now I am confused. Doubt and fear creep in. Wait, I say to myself, what if this happens to me?

Up until now I have been avoiding reading things like this. Avoiding it like the plague. I don’t really want to hear about anyone else’s experience with thyroid cancer for fear that they will tell me I a crazy (which is a belief I hold about myself) or for fear that they will tell me of some awful thing that can happen or did happen.  This all seems like evidence of the truth.

Part of the problem is that science sees it like there is this Truth about thyroid cancer. Maybe they don’t have an absolutely specific and accurate truth, but they have a range of truth. It’s says that based on how large the tumor is and what your age is (I’m sure there are other factors, so we can add those in), this is what will happen to you. If you listen to them you would believe that they know something. That you could learn the truth about thyroid cancer from them.

 But what is happening is that they are describing what has happened in their experience. And their experience, too, is limited to scientific studies. Evidence-based science. So any kind of spontaneous healing or alternative healing is excluded from their experience. But they are only describing effect. The effect of cause, which is in the mind.

Up until now I saw that their (mainstream medicine) belief was based on a limited experience. That there were other forms of healing that they weren’t taking into account. But I believed that in the experience you could find the truth. That truth was out there in the world to be uncovered.  I found several cases in which people healed themselves of thyroid cancer with food, and from that I created a new belief that you can heal yourself using food.

But the whole idea of looking to experience for guidance is the problem. As long as I look to experience for evidence of the truth, I am going to be lost. Because as much as I can find someone who has healed themselves through food; I can find someone who was unable to heal with food. As much as I can find a story of miraculous healing, I can find a story of terrible suffering. 

The answer is: I don’t know. But I don’t have to know. I only need to be concerned about what is in my own Heart. Everything else is part of the Flow. Everything else is either other people’s business or God’s business, as Byron Katie would say.

I sometimes wonder why none of the natural remedies have worked for me. One thing I have thought was that I didn’t believe in them sufficiently. I was always waiting for them to prove themselves to me. Or more accurately hoping that they would work for me. I have read plenty of times things where people say, “I never thought this would work, and it did.” Or, “My husband was a complete disbeliever, but this worked for him.” So it made me think that believing something would work wasn’t actually necessary. But maybe those people really did believe in their own healing at a deeper level.

And it may be that I didn’t believe in my own. But what I think might be truer is that I am on a different path. Sometimes it seems like my script is to learn through the cancer that I am the creator of my own experience. And so my healing is only going to happen when I look within rather than without. If I sit around waiting for the next ultrasound to show me that I am healing, then I haven’t learned the lesson.

This morning doing the Nordic Track I saw clearly again how the growth in the tumor in the last ultrasound was helpful. Because it is shaking me awake again—saying, “Stop looking for evidence in the world. That is not where your Truth and your healing are to be found.” Even the fact that it shrunk and then grew again seems helpful—the shrinking to show me that it is actually possible for it to shrink significantly and the growing to remind me that I can’t find my motivation in the evidence. Thought is cause and it must come first.

I am seeing more and more clearly how and why the world is not real or true. It’s only the result of our thoughts. And it’s only because of the consistency of our thoughts that we think things are true in the world. So many people looking at the same thing and believing it  makes that same experience repeat over and over. It’s only by stopping that cycle: by looking at experience in the world but not believing it, that we can change the experience.

I will not look at other people’s experiences of cancer as evidence of the truth for me. I can choose which thoughts to keep and which to let go of. And all those fearful thoughts about bad cancer outcomes are ones that I would let go of.