Tag: Buddhist

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Stop Cancer Introduction

Lying still,
Breathing in, breathing out,
Healthy cells grow all by themselves.
I am free of cancer!

white-blood-cell-543471_1280This Zen poem came to me during my guided imagery session on the day of the Vernal Equinox, 1997. It represents the theme of this category (Stop Cancer): Healthy Cells Grow All By Themselves. We have to be willing to allow our bodies to heal themselves by paying attention to our healing process, by paying attention to our breathing. We have to live moment by moment.

This category is devoted to cancer patients in general and bladder cancer patients in particular. It traces the symptoms and diagnosis of my bladder cancer from the onset of symptoms to Father’s Day, 1997 and beyond. It is given in frequent articles in diary format so that other sufferers of the disease or any other disease can make use of my experience in whatever way is beneficial to them. Hopefully, my readers will be inspired to take an active role in their own recovery and be willing to participate in their own healing, rather than being at the mercy of the surgeon’s knife. There is a considerable body of evidence that patients who have a positive mental attitude and engage in their own treatment have much better chance of long term survival.

Not everyone will want to do the amount of research I’ve done to find out about my disease, but if you do, the articles in Stop Cancer should give you a good idea of where to start and what resources are available to help you participate in your on healing. I have incorporated a lot of alternative medicine and spiritual practices in my recovery, and I hope to inspire you to do the same.

There are a few bits of background information that you should know in order to understand my motivation for doing this in the way that it is being done. First of all, I was a 57 year old male living in Marin County, California, one of the best places to live in the world, both from a pure aesthetic point of view, and because of its access to medical resources. The University of California at San Francisco Medical Center is just across the Golden Gate Bridge, and Stanford University Hospital is only fifty miles away. Furthermore, Marin General Hospital and its associated medical organizations are among the best in the country. So, right away, I feel that I am blessed to be living here.

Secondly, I am a person with a deep spiritual commitment. My orientation is Buddhist, and my interests lie in Interactive Guided Imagery1 (mind stories), the enneagram, and conscious evolution. Being diagnosed with bladder cancer was a shock to my system of values, but the supportive community I live in combined with my Buddhist outlook has made this period of my life reasonably tolerable.

Micah age 7
Micah age 7

Thirdly, you should know that cancer runs rampant in my family. My father died of bladder cancer at the age of 86 and my mother died of another form of cancer at the age of 71. In addition, my son, Micah, now 47, survived a stage four Wilm’s Tumor (kidney cancer) which he had in 1976. The key to his survival may have been the use of some of the supplementary medical care techniques described later in this blog, as the surgeon had given him up for dead. Even my surgeon said, “We weren’t saving many stage fours in those days.” My son’s story was told in two episodes of “In Search of…” with Leonard Nimoy in 1976 and 1980.

Finally, my younger sister died of Leukemia in 1968 at the age of 27. With all of this happening, you might think that I was “predisposed” to get the curse.

PLEASE NOTE: This material is copyright(c) 1997-2016, by Dr. Jerome Freedman. All Rights Reserved.

This document is meant to be a description of the author’s experience and he in no way takes responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of any medical knowledge. The author assumes no responsibility for choices made by any of the readers of this material.

The author is not a physician and makes no claims about the potential usefulness of the subject matter herein to have any medical benefit. Please check with your doctor if you find something interesting that you would like to try.

[1] Interactive Guided Imagerysm is a service mark of The Academy for Guided Imagery, Mill Valley, CA.

 

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More than Nine Years Have Passed

Today, I begin revamping the web site by adding features that may improve the readability and access to information. I am also adding a section on books on cancer.

When I first started working on this web site, I only had done one site before The Enneagram in the Electronic Tradition. Now that I have developed Jewels By Mala, NewTerra, Jobs-Are-Us, Mountain Sangha, and MICAH Affiliates, as well as internal web sites for The Technical Committee, I have enough experience to do a better job on Yellow Stream.

In the meantime, I am experiencing excellent health. My last cystscopy was in June, 2005 and everything was good. I am experiencing no after effects of the radiation or chemotherapy, other than ease of exhaustion.

My son, Micah is living in New York and doing computer graphics and web site development. He has started a theatre company, QED Productions with a group of his friends. He produced and acted in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia last November at the Greenwich Theatre, which Mala and I attended. The group plans three productions for next season. Come if you can!

Rachael is entering her last year in architecture school at Woodbury University in San Diego, CA. She is a lovely and kind young woman with a bright future.

Jessica graduates with honors and a double major in Spanish and Journalism from the University of Oregon in three weeks. She will be teaching in Spain in the fall under the auspices of the Spanish Consulate. Mazel Tov – Jessica.

Mala is a wonderful and supporting spouse. She is doing great work with her jewelry designs.

For the past four years, I have been intimately involved with the Mountain Sangha in Mill Valley. Our sangha practices in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, whom I’ve written about in previous chapters. Please read My Breakfast with Thay to see what happened when I visited Plum Village for the second time in March, 2006. It was a wonderful visit!

My Buddhist practice now consists of morning meditation, tennis when possible, walking meditation, and reading of Buddhist scriptures. I am an aspirant in the Order of Interbeing. I am also working towards offering a class on Mindfulness in Healing through California Cancer Care and other institutions. The class is based on my experience, which is documented in these pages.

My tennis game continues to improve. I play for Harbor Point and our team went to the divisional playoffs last month as a wild card team. My partner and I won one match, but lost two others – one in a tie break. I try to play every day that I don’t have to go to Palo Alto (where my office of TheTC [see below] is located).

I now have perhaps the best work in the computer industry. I am working as a consultant to the Technical Committee (TheTC) of the Department of Justice. TheTC is chartered to monitor the compliance of Microsoft with the antitrust settlement agreement which just has been extended until 2009. Because of the work I did between September, 2004 and December, 2004, 30 engineers have jobs and we are making sure that Microsoft correctly documents their proprietary networking protocols for licensees.

>>>Next…

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Voices of Healing

I woke up this morning feeling a lot better than yesterday. I had spent much of the night doing mind stories and metta meditation. The metta meditation is a loving kindness meditation from the Buddhist tradition. I’ve adopted mine from several sources and it goes like this:

First you shower yourself with loving kindness by saying to yourself with feeling:

May I be at peace.
May my heart remain open.
May I know the beauty and the radiance of my own Buddha-nature.
May I be healed.
May I be happy, truly happy!
May I not cause anyone to suffer.

Then you shower the loving kindness blessings on someone you love, substituting “you” for “I” in the above rendition. You then shower loving kindness blessings on someone you are having a problem with and follow with showering loving kindness blessings on the whole world, imagining the earth floating in the vast emptiness of space. I practiced this meditation for several hours and woke up feeling fine! It was really important to shower the loving kindness blessings on myself first, so I could feel good enough about myself to shower the blessings on my spouse and other people I love in my life.

In the afternoon, I went to a meeting of Voices of Healing in Mill Valley. It turned out to be a support group much like the life threatened group at the Center for Attitudinal Healing. I was touched by people’s healing stories.

After the meeting, I received a massage from Pauline from Anna Halprin‘s group, and I’ve added her name to the resources list. Pauline is also living with cancer and continues to study with Gabrielle Roth. She was gentle and prayerful as she gave me an Eselan massage. The massage was excellent, and the mood was enhanced by the Tibetan music in the background.

From there I went to a session with Leslie Davenport. I needed to see her again this week because I felt in crisis with the thought of resuming my life as it was prior to the cancer. I felt and still feel that if I allow those conditions to be re-established, I’d be really susceptible to a recurrence of my disease, and this made me panic. There were other issues that came up, especially how much love if flowing into my life from many sources, but I was in the middle of a severe doubt attack.

 >>>Next…

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Eating Soup with a Fork

Today was probably the worst day that I’ve had since I received my diagnosis. I was full of emotion and frequently broke down crying. The morning was especially trying, as I was desperately trying to get in to see Leslie Davenport, having told my boss that I wouldn’t make it in today. The best she could offer was 6:00 tomorrow evening, so I jumped on it.

The doubt factor was the strongest. I doubted myself. I doubted my recovery. I was consumed by the idea that if things didn’t change in my life, I would have more trouble as a person who had had cancer than a person that has cancer and knows it. I was extremely afraid to be hurt and abandoned. Now that I am well, are my friends still going to care about me? Will I be able to continue to create my dream? Will my heart remain open? Or, is it already out to lunch? What about the divine love I was feeling last week? What about the love my daughter expressed for me last Friday? How can all of this be simultaneously true in my experience.

Well, here I am, eating soup with a fork! You’ll have to read It’s Easier Than You Think by Sylvia Boorstein to get the full impact of what I’m doing! The book is about the Buddhist way to happiness, and I spent the afternoon reading the whole thing, in between fits of tears and meditation. One of the main ideas that struck me from the book was that, “Traditional Buddhist texts teach that the ability to sustain attention in the truth of the moment is the antidote for doubt.” Many of her stories also moved me to tears. One of the bells of mindfulness that happened during my meditation was as call from a member of Anna Halprin’s group who offered to give me a massage tomorrow after talk at Voices of Healing.

I guess I’m doing a little better now that I’m eating my soup with a fork and writing in Yellow Stream!

>>>Next…

It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness

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Finally Feeling Better

I woke up twice this morning. The first time was the to sprinkler system in the back yard beginning to water the plants. The second time was when the phone rang. Now I am up and feeling better than I have for days.

During the night, I got some answers to the questions I raised yesterday about the foreground thoughts and feelings. I started thinking about what exactly was going on and I remembered two schools of thought about it.

The first school of thought comes from the teachings of the enneagram. In this school of thought, the we function from three centers of intelligence: the physical or body center, the emotional center, and the intellectual center. These are also referred to as the belly, heart, and head center, respectively. Because we function from these three centers, we have bodily based experience impinging on our consciousness whenever we feel a slight pain or discomfort. We have an emotional experience whenever our feelings are triggered. Finally, and probably most of the time, we are bombarded through our mental center with thoughts, memories, plans, images, dreams (really another type of image), and so forth. In addition, we must note that energy follows attention. That is, wherever we place our attention, our energy will follow. If we are focused on a goal we want to accomplish, we may be able to place all of our attention on that goal.

We can actually create pretty much at will each of these experiences. For example, don’t think of an elephant! What happened? You probably thought about an elephant and had an image of one in your mind. So basically, this is the contents of the mind, according to the enneagram.

The Buddhist philosophy about these matters is surprisingly similar, although it doesn’t deal with three centers of intelligence. In The Art of Happiness, Myrko Fryba talks about the four levels of experience on page 88:

  1. Immediate experiencing of real events, processes, and states (and the feelings and sensations associated with them) bodily taking place in the present moment.
  2. The bodily experienced meaning of represented (remembered) events, relations, constellations, situations, and scenes (and the feelings and sensations associated with them) that have led to current states of feeling and alterations of consciousness.
  3. Conceptual thinking related to the flow of immediate experiencing or to the felt meaning of entire situations, which are presently happening. From this thinking are derived matrices and programs for apprehension and action (to the extent that they are consciously accessible and thus also “thinkable”).
  4. Conceptual thinking whose content has no relationship to the current state of the thinker and thus which has no conscious relationship to experiential reality. This could be a kind of non-reality-related babbling that is unconsciously motivated and directed, or mechanical data processing (for example, calculation), or it could also be wise reflection on rules and programs with the help of the meta-language of Abhidhammic algebra-in other words, planning and coordinating of liberational strategies. The key point here is that this level of experience has no present bodily anchoring in reality.

Later, when describing Satipatthana-Vipassana exercises, he refers to these as the four foundations of mindfulness:

  1. Contemplation of the body (kayanupassana)
  2. Contemplation of the feelings (vedananupassana)
  3. Contemplation of consciousness (cittanupassana)
  4. Contemplation of mental contents (dhammanupassana)

When practicing mindfulness meditation, one becomes aware of the different categories of experience and systematically assigns what I have called “foreground” material to one of the categories and returns to concentration on the object of mindfulness. If the experience is related to light, color, sound, noise, warmth, movement, trembling, itching, stinging, pressure, lightness, etc., it is assigned to the body. If the experience is pleasant, enjoyable, pleased, amused, bored, sadness, pain, indifference, etc., it is assigned to the feelings. If the experience is concentrated, scattered, tense, greedy, hate-filled, freed, etc., it is assigned to consciousness. Finally, if the experience is thinking, wishing, planning, intending, trust, doubt, knowledge, etc., it is assigned to mental contents. One tries to make the assignments as quickly as possible and return to the object of mindfulness.

My wife and I went to the Center for Attitudinal Healing together tonight. I went primarily because she wanted to go and I am not sleeping well, so I thought I’d go. I was deeply moved by the experiences shared by the members of the group! I felt compassion and understanding come to the foreground of my consciousness, and I realized that my side effects from chemotherapy and radiation are pretty slight compared to what some of the people are facing. I did a short sharing of my treatment plan, Dr. Halberg’s surprise statement, and a few other things, but I got more out of listening deeply to other people.

>>>Next…

Art of Happiness: Teachings of Buddhist Psychology

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Having a Bad Day

I had a bad day today, which probably resulted from not enough good sleep. I worked for a while in the morning, and then tried to take a nap. Once again, I couldn’t sleep, but the quite, restful mindfulness of breathing kept me from caving totally in.

In the afternoon, I went to see Alan Sheets for a Feldenkrais treatment. Alan’s gentle hands and compassionate understanding were very helpful. He was purposefully trying to move me into point nine on the enneagram, as this is my so-called, “heart point.” The heart point on the enneagram is the place that you tend to move towards in a secure life situation. It goes in the direction opposite to the arrows on the enneagram. For me, as a point six, the heart point is point nine. Point nine on the enneagram represents sloth with respect to spiritual growth and doing good things for yourself. I often find myself there when I am comfortable and relaxing with my children. Point nine is the point where love enters the enneagram. It is a point where well-adapted individuals remain peaceful without turning away from problems. The point in the direction of the arrows is know as the “stress point.” For me, this is point three on the enneagram. Point three represents the over-achiever, which experience I’ve had many times in my life as I have tried to enhance my professional career. For more information on these and other points on the enneagram, please visit The Enneagram in the Electronic Tradition.

When I returned home from my appointment with Alan Sheets, I once again attempted to nap, with a similar result to the morning. I know what is bothering me, but that hasn’t helped my sleeping situation. I am rather nervous about the results of my transurethral resection of the bladder tumor (TURBT) on Friday.


In the evening, I struggled to make it to Anna Halprin‘s class. She had just returned from the opening of the FDR Memorial in Washington, D. C. Apparently, her husband had a lot to do with the internal construction of the memorial. She sensed my discomfort and had us work primarily on our backs in order to conserve my energy. She had me moving my back in ways I’ve never experienced before, and it was quite amazing. I realized that one could do “moving meditation” in much the same way one does “walking meditation” in the Buddhist tradition. Her guided imagery took us to a clear blue sky above an expanse of ocean, with waves to match our breathing. We were to visualize a creature either in the sky or the ocean. I saw a whale most clearly and drew a picture of the wale just having complete a dive, with its tail still visible above the ocean surface. I wrote:

“I’ve created a ‘whale’ of a problem that needs to be solved. What I need to do is follow the lead of the whale and allow my tail (how about tale – Yellow Stream!) to float freely on the waves.”

By the end of the evening, I was feeling much better. Anna placed me in the middle of the circle so that everyone could send me healing energy for the upcoming ordeal. Each person found a spot to touch me and bring even more healing energy into focus. It was a wonderful experience!

>>>Next…

Copyright © 2004-2018, Jerome Freedman, Ph. D.