Doorways of Support and Inspiration::
Healing Mind, Body and Spirit

Fire in the soul, Part 1   A talk by Joan Boryensko, Ph.D.
 
Note: This is the first part of an inspiring talk which is well worth reading in its entirety. Part II follows in the Healing Mind, Body and Spirit section. Shorter pieces of it (parts of Joan Borysenko’s personal story) are also included in People Tell Their Stories under the sections Death and Dying and Healing/Illness/Caregiving.
 
My husband and I have a friend, Peter Russell, a physicist and philosopher, who like many of the new physicists, is very interested in spiritual matters. He wrote a wonderful book called A White Hole in Time. Peter’s telephone answering machine has a great message. It says, “This is not an answering machine; this is a questioning machine. Who are you? And what do you want?” And it continues, “In case you think these are trivial questions, most people come to this earth and leave it without answering either one.” I tell this story all the time, and I know these messages have popped up all over the country because I have heard them on some machines.
 
Often times we don’t ask these big questions and life goes on as usual. It is when the bottom falls out of our life and we get put face to face with the fact that we are mortal, at least in these bodies, that those big questions of who am I, what really makes a difference to me, what is the most important thing about being here, come up within our hearts.
 
Facing the Big Questions
 
For me, it has been a great privilege to work with people who are facing life challenging illness, because I saw reflections of these questions in everyone else’s story, in my own, and in my own search. The day that you have a diagnosis of cancer or any life threatening illness, you enter something that is really a sacred journey. You enter what has been called by the 15th century Christian mystic St. John of the Cross, the dark night of the soul.
 
How many of you are smack in the middle of that dark night somewhere? How many of you have started to see the dawn? It is cyclical. You are now seeing the dawn. Eventually the circle will turn, and you will be back in the dark night.
 
We don’t get to where it is all perfect, and then we get to go to the beach, and that’s it? That is actually a line I took from Swami Beyondananda. If you want a good laugh, get his tape, Swami Beyondananda, the Yogi from Muskogee. He said that he has designed a course in speed suffering—one miserable week and you finish it all. Then you can go to the beach.
 
The fact is though that we don’t ever get there. The courses often keep coming throughout our lives. They move us a little more deeply each time into that set of questions: Who am I? What is a life well lived? What is really the measure of success? What is it to be happy?
 
Dark Night of the Soul
 
There comes a time, in this dark night of the soul that I think it helps to appreciate the anatomy of the dark night, so let me briefly explain it. The dark night begins as life as we know it ends. The moment that we are given a diagnosis, we die at a certain sense to who we were. Your whole identity just sort of fades away, and here you are now, a person with cancer. Of course, the way our society tends to see that is that we are not even a person with cancer, we are a cancer victim. So we are now helpless, we are now diminished in some way. Our creativity, or our life force in some way feels diminished to us. And we don’t know what is going to happen to us next.
 
So we enter this period of the dark night. If you ever saw the wonderful Joseph Campbell series when he was interviewed by Bill Moyers years ago, Campbell talks frequently about the dark night. He calls it a terrifying night sea journey. All the mythology around the world supports that sense that the dark night, the terrifying night sea journey is what all human beings need to go through in order to find the true strength within their hearts and the true answers to the big questions: Who am I? What is my role in this universe? He talks about the fact that at the darkest moment, that is when we can expect the light to come. There is great truth in that, and that is what I really want to talk about.
 
But there's a period before we see the light, that terrifying night sea journey, during which all we can do is just hold on and move through it. The most important thing, I think, when we are in the midst of the terrifying part of the journey is to have the support of friends, the support of family, and the support of faith.
 
I used to run several different mind-body groups at a couple of different Harvard teaching hospitals: one for people with cancer, one for people with AIDS, one group for people with plain old stress related disorders, which is the rest of the world. People with cancer and AIDS used to tell me that the moment you get a diagnosis with a potentially life threatening illness, your priorities become crystal clear. Suddenly things that you didn’t want to do before but didn’t have the bravery and courage to get rid of, now you have the bravery and courage to get rid of.
 
A few husbands have gone in that process, a few wives too, when people were in relationships that didn’t support them and had not been able to move out of them. A lot of jobs have gone in that process. People have said, “Why am I giving my life force to something that is depleting me and not supporting me?” But what people have told me is the most important thing that has come out of the reevaluation following the dark night, the most important thing about being human comes down to the three F’s: faith, family, and friends. Because that’s where the love is. That is where the humanity that is growing in each one of us finds its truest expression, in matters of the heart.
 
Drawing from Many Traditions
 
I want to back up a little bit and fill in with a little of my own story, then weave together for you a little bit of web about psychology, spirituality and the ability of our bodies to heal.
 
I will be talking from many different spiritual traditions. People always ask, “What’s your tradition of origin?” I usually joke and say, “I am a recovering Jewish American Princess.” In fact I have come full circle as many people have. I have studied mystical Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American studies and found strangely enough that it was all there in Judaism all along.
 
I was at a Rosh Hashonah service this year led by a wonderful woman Rabbi in Boulder, Colorado which is near where I live. She quoted Israel Ben Eliezer Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidic Judaism in the 17th century. It said that in God’s kingdom is a house with many rooms. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s from Christian theology, too. A house with many rooms, and every house has a different key, but there is one master key that can open every door. The master key is a broken heart.
 
That really touched my heart because I look back at my life, and I’ve said, “Yep, every time a new door has opened, it has always been through some difficulty. The ground has fallen out from underneath me. I didn’t think I would survive and I would have to look inside me. Yet something new has birthed that never would have been birthed before. That is the truth of it. You find that in every tradition.
 
Another of the Hassidic sayings is that suffering is the first grace. And of course the Buddha had this to say in the four noble truths. The first noble truth is that life is suffering. And the other truths have to do with how we can use that suffering in a way to open our hearts and grow as human beings, rather than to despair. This has been fascinating me for a long time. How can we support one another so that we come out of the dark night transformed, and we don’t give up into bitterness and despair?
 
My Personal Dark Night Journey
 
A little bit about my story now. I experienced a dark night of the soul pretty early on in my life when I was about ten years old. I was living in a suburb in Boston Massachusetts, where I was raised by an excellent Jewish mother—she was a character—and a very loving father. I had quite a nice family life. All of a sudden, I had a very odd experience. Out of nowhere I became completely insane. Over a period of about a week, I became psychotic.
 
I’d seen a movie called White Witch Doctor with headhunters and poison darts and snakes and scorpions and all the things that scare kids. I started to dream it, but then the dream started to go during the day as well. Finally I couldn’t tell dreaming from reality. This is called psychotic. The landscape that I was in was a landscape of primal terror. Can you imagine looking at the floor and thinks that a snake pit has just opened up and you’re the only one who can see it happening? It was really terrible.
 
Talk about a mind-body connection; I hallucinated a couple of headhunters down the corridor at school one day. I can tell you I was not popular with the school nurse. The poor woman didn’t know what to do. I came running in with two enormous welts on my arm, and I said I have been hit by poison darts. That is the mind-body connection. The ability of what we think to manifest in our body. That was the beginning of my healing because they didn’t let me come back to school again. Wise choice.
 
Over the period of time, not only was I psychotic, but I developed something called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which in a way I think was a very creative strategy of a child to deal with the terror. My obsessive thinking was that unless I did a certain number of rituals, the snakes, the scorpions and awful stuff would kill my family. So I became the caretaker.
 
This is big time caretaking—to feel like the lives of everyone are dependent on you. I did hand washing and rituals of self-mutilation. I would have to scrape the sides of my mouth until they bled. I had one where all of my reading had to be done upside- down and backwards and repeated three times. Some of these are quite typical rituals of this disorder. You can say that I was in a big time dark night. This is called being in a hell space.
 
I agree with John Milton that hell and heaven are states of mind. I know many people in very bad physical conditions who are in a heaven state of mind. I have a friend who is confined to a wheelchair with Multiple Sclerosis. She can barely move, yet that woman has transformed her life. She is a beacon of peace and love and is enormously creative although her body hardly works at all. This by the way is called healing—when you can be in a heaven state of mind, no matter what state your physical body is in.
 
My physical body at 10 year old was in great shape, but my mind was in a hell state. Hasn’t that happened to you before? Haven’t you been in a terrible dark part of the soul with a well body? That is part of it.
 
Spontaneous Remission
 
What happened to me is something very unusual called spontaneous remission. As a medical scientist and psychologist, I can tell you that when we don’t know what has cured somebody physically or emotionally, we open up the wastebasket called spontaneous remission. We drop their case in there, because we just don’t know. How can it be that somebody who has got metastasis of bone cancer throughout their body and lungs, could in a month be completely healed?
 
I know a person like that; he has been well for over 15 years. He runs a wonderful Australian cancer patient foundation. It’s interesting to note, his physician never asked him what on earth he might have done to support that kind of tremendous healing. He said actually, he had the strangest feeling that he was a big disappointment.
 
In any case, I had a spontaneous remission, and nobody ever asked me what happened. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I figured out what had happened. Here’s what went on for me. I’m ten, I’m in this terrible hell state, and I’m alone in the living room of our home one day. All of a sudden I had the oddest sensation of an electrical change in the room, of a change of perception. I looked around, and everything looked like it always looked, but it looked different. It looked more beautiful. I felt more connected to everything that was there.
 
Have you ever had that feeling? Everything is the same, but it’s different. It’s like you just woke up at some level. You see that the world is different, that the world is a miracle. Isn’t it amazing that we are actually sitting here? Here we are, we each have a different face, we each have a different history, we each come from somewhere else and we exist with all of our beauty, with all of our ability to create. What a miracle.
 
A State of Grace
 
From time to time we enter a little state of grace where we become aware that we are part of the miracle, and that is what happened to me. I was very clear minded. What usually accompanies that kind of shift in consciousness, is that you shift out of the normal fears of your ego, the fears of your past and your future, and you enter a state that is beyond the physical, a state where all wisdom becomes really available to you. There have been many different names for this state.
 
The astronaut Edgar Michael had one of these experiences when he was looking down at the earth from outer space, and suddenly he knew things that he couldn’t have known before. He came back and asked, “What is this kind of intuitive knowing that’s beyond the conscious mind?” He found there was a Greek word for it called “noes.” He came back and founded The Institute of Noetic Sciences to understand this kind of inner wisdom and knowing.
 
I, too, had a noetic experience. What I knew at that time was that I had a choice: I could remain mentally ill or through tremendous act of will I could chose to recover. Now I am not all saying that everyone who is mentally ill can recover through will.
 
It is the same thing with cancer. Some people can do everything possible; their bodies are not going to heal. I think we can get too carried away sometimes with thinking we have to cure ourselves. We get so carried away with cure that we miss deeper healing, which is entering that noetic state of mind. Entering the state of connectedness where we really feel the magnificence of the universe. And are able to stay in touch with that state of magnificence regardless of whether our mind functions the way we want, or whether our body functions the way we want.
 
What happened then in this particular state is that I said, “Okay I’ll use my will and do whatever I am required to. I want to recover.” The answer that came to me is, “You can never do another ritual. One more and you will stay stuck in this state forever. You have to simply stop.” Which of course was completely terrifying. At that moment, when I said, “I really need help, I don’t think I can do this by myself,” there came from inside of me, from that intuitive place a poem. This is my dark night of the soul poem which has stood me by through all the other dark nights of the soul and there have been many. The poem didn’t have much to do with the conscious mind of a ten-year-old child. It came from someplace much deeper.
 
Somewhere in the darkest night
There always shines a little light
This light up in the heavens shines
To help our God watch over us
When a small child is born,
The light her soul does adorn
So when our only human eyes
Look up in the lightless sky
We must know, even though we cannot see
That this light burns far into the night
To help our God watch over us

 
There was an expression for me of very deep faith. I don’t think it was so much an expression of my own faith as a gift to tell me to have faith. Even when you can’t see it, the light is there, but our eyes are too small to see the divine plan. We have to recognize that the light has never left us. It has always been there.
 
I knew what I had to do then. Every time the need to do a ritual came up, all I had to do was say the poem and the fear would disappear, and the state of peacefulness and connectedness would come back. Sure enough, over a period of three or four days, I kept doing that and the whole mental illness disappeared. I don’t think it went into remission. It’s a long remission if that’s what it is—40 years later.
 
It was quite interesting because like spontaneous remissions of all sorts, nobody asked me a thing about it. I got up one day and said I was ready to go back to school. Everybody said, "Good". Nobody said, “God, you were crazy as a bedbug last Tuesday.”
 
I am only sorry both my mother and father died before I understood what happened. I understand that there is a feeling sometimes that when someone is recovering that we better not rock the boat, we better not say anything, we better not curse it, better knock on wood. My mother would have said in her Yiddish, “Kina hora,” which means “no evil eye.” Don’t even look.
 
We Are Never Alone
 
That left me with an interesting question. I came through that first dark night not by myself, but by divine grace. No one of us ever come through anything alone. Whether we appreciate it as such or not, we are riding on a current of divine grace.
 
There is a wonderful Hindu sage by the name of Rama Krishna. He was a great devotee of the divine mother of the feminine face of god. Rama Krishna said that the winds of grace are blowing all the time. All we have to do is raise our sails.
 
That’s what happens during the dark night, we just get a lot more interested in raising the sails. In terms of the work that we do to raise those sails, the wind of grace always fills what I call God’s matching grant. We take a few steps foreword, and the universe really comes and fills us.
 
I think that is really important. If I ever thought that I had to accomplish all my healing my self, I would give up. It is too big of a project? The thought that healing is always available to you is very, very important.
 
Forgetting and Remembering
 
I am going to tell you a little story. About seven years ago; I was going through another tremendous dark night of the soul. You might think that having had this marvelous experience as a child, I would stay in this state of peace, love, divine connectedness, and wisdom. What, are you kidding?
 
The tendency of the human mind is to forget. We have an experience. We get to a certain point. We forget. I really think all of life is remembering, reminding one another. The way I feel is that sometimes I become temporarily insane. I need something to bring me back to sanity, to bring me back to that place—which is what good friends are about, what being in nature is about, what talking time for meditation, creativity, for prayer, for being present to beauty is about. These bring you back to that spot.
 
This is an important aspect of the sacred. This idea of forgetting and remembering, of coming back to the place that we remember, coming back to the state of grace where we feel a connection with things. I call these moments of our life holy moments. Moments where we feel our wholeness, when we feel intrinsically what it is to be healed. These are the moments when you say to yourself, “If I died now, it would be enough. I would feel complete. “You say, “This is really it. I’ve tasted what it is to be human.”
 
That is one of the reasons that we moved up to the wilderness in Colorado. I felt that I needed to make a choice in my life that supported me in that. I live on a mountain at 8500 feet, and there is an extraordinary view. I find that it takes me out of the compulsive thinking that is always dragging me into the fears of my past and the fears of the future, and cutting off the ability to live my life.
 
Just having the view is a great antidote to that kind of thinking. This restores me to that state where I feel connected to something good within myself. When I am like that is the only time that I can really connect on an authentic level with other people. You have to connect with yourself before you can allow someone to witness who you are. You have to be comfortable with it. Your good points as well as your growing edges. Then, when you feel connected to yourself and others, there is a third level of connectedness, which is connectedness to something larger, to the divine source.
 
The Healing Power of Connection
 
Some of you know the work of Dr. Dean Ornish, who wrote a number of good books, one of which is Eat More, Weigh Less. It talks about not only how to sustain our body in a healthy way, but it talks about the importance of connection to one another, to ourselves, to a larger whole in terms of healing. Both the healing that we have spoken of, the sense of intuition, and a sense of being part of something bigger.
 
It’s also about the possibly that sometimes, when we heal our lives, our physical bodies can follow suit. What he has done is show that social support, meditation, mindful walking, and other things that support our ability to be present, to be in a holy moment, and to be authentic with one another, coupled with a really good low fat diet, can actually reverse cardiovascular disease. That is really good news.
 
Cancer is a disease that I think is a very important one to address, but so is cardiovascular disease. Now more and more women are dying of cardiovascular disease. My mother eventually died from that. She did get breast cancer at 78 though. To give you a little flavor of my mother to whom I will return, she calls me up on the phone at 78 and says, “Joan, I have something that I really hate to tell you.” I asked, “What is it?” She said, “I’ve got breast cancer.” She said “ I’m not sorry for me. I’m 78. I’m sorry that I didn’t die sooner, and then you wouldn’t have a family history.” That was typical of my mother.
 
This sense of connectedness that Dean Ornish talks about to ourselves, to the universe, is healing. I just want to mention a few of the many interesting stories that look at that, because it thrills me as a scientist to know basically that what we have always believed in our hearts—that love heals—is also good science. The most interesting set of studies started with the cardiovascular system. Then in most recent years there were a number that also pertained to cancer. So let me say that a few words about the cardiovascular studies first.
 
Studies Support the Love Factor
 
About 30 years ago, there was a study done in a little town Pennsylvania called Roseto. What actually got the epidemiologists fascinated was the low level of coronary artery disease there. They went literally expecting to find a marathon running group of bean sprout eaters having this low level of disease. Instead, they found sedate, carnivorous, cigarette smokers. They were really shocked. How could there be these high risk factors for coronary artery disease—high fat diet, sedentary life style, cigarette smoking and such a low incidence?
 
They found that Roseto had a very specific kind of community where the values were very different. The prime value was family and friends, what we would call inelegantly in psychology and sociology: social support. The prime value was love, the ability to connect with other people as a primary focus in their lives. People there were really not much interested in material things. Nobody was working two jobs so that they could have the latest model car or bigger house. The main thing was how much time can I have with family and friends?
 
Twenty-five years later when the epidemiologists returned to Roseto, a strange thing had happened. Materialism had set it; people had a different life style. The community had lost the sense of connectedness, and the level of cardiovascular disease had risen to the national norm.
 
There was also a much-sited study of rabbits that looked at the connection between physical touch and coronary artery disease. The rabbits were in floor to ceiling cages, being fed a high cholesterol diet. Yet, at the end of the study, only half the rabbits had the expected cardiovascular disease, and the other half had a really mild form.
 
It turned out that the technician, who was short, really liked rabbits. Every time she went into the rabbit room she petted all the ones she could reach. The rabbits who were petted were actually protected from the artery clogging effects of the cholesterol.
 
We can heal animals simply by touch and love, and they can heal us, too. About ten years ago many hospitals became interested in pet therapy. The last time that I was actually at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, there was a dachshund going up in the elevator. I looked at the woman sort of askance, and she said “Listen, this is not want it seems to be.” I said, “Really?” She said, “This is not a dog; it’s the pet therapist.” Studies have found that anxiety and depression decrease when you have a pet. It turns out that one of the best prognostic indications of how well a man will do with heart disease is whether or not he has a dog.
 
I got a new kitten. One of the sad things about living high in the mountains is that the food chain is a reality. I saw a local mountain lion for the first time lst week, and I must say that it was thrilling. Except that my second though was, “You son of a gun, you ate three of my cats.” It was really sad to lose cats that had been born in my house. We used to breed them.
 
We finally said that we will get a new kitten, because we can train a kitten to stay in the house, and we won’t let him out to be part of the food chain. The day that I got that kitten, who was a very friendly kitten, he came right onto the bed and sat on my heart. I could feel every cell of my body changing. Do you ever feel that? Everything lets go, there is a rhythmic sense of your heart opening? You just know all of your molecules are doing interesting things, and the fact is that they are doing interesting things.
 
There is a part of the brain called the limbic system, that makes neuropeptides, all these sexy little molecules like the endorphins—molecules and proteins that get people all excited or calm them down. These relate to our emotional experience, and the emotional experience with that cat was total openness, love, giving and receiving.
 
At that moment, the limbic system of the brain makes a whole variety of neuropeptides, which go out through the blood stream, and bind to every cell of your body. Your immune system can then instantly change, so that your cardiovascular system, your liver, every bit of you, every cell can respond instantly. It is clear that we make different neuropeptides when we are feeling fearful or angry, than we make when we are feeling this state of connectedness.
 
A number of studies have also shown that this state of connectedness has a lot to do with the prognosis of cancer. I think almost all of you know the study that was done right here in California by David Speigel about women with metastatic breast cancer. Half of them were in weekly support groups. Half of them had the same treatment, but were not in the support group. Women who were in the support group lived twice as long as women who weren’t. That was terrific. He had said that there was no mind body connection and the point of the study was to disprove it. He said that he was sure that support makes people less anxious, depressed and makes them feel better, but it can’t effect their body. But, like the study showed, what effects you emotionally has to effect your body. That is what that whole mind-body connection is really about.
 
We Are Not To Blame For Getting Ill
 
Here’s the interesting thing though. We can take that information and pervert it in a dangerous way. There is something out there that I call the “New Age Gestapo.” The “New Age Gestapo runs around and says thing like, “Oh, you had a negative thought. That’s it. The neuropeptides are in bad shape now, which are traveling to your natural killer cells, decreasing your natural killer cells activity, and you are going to die.” This is not helpful. And it is not true. Let’s put it into some big perspective.
 
There is another interesting study, also done in California at UCLA. It was a study of people who had malignant melanoma. The researcher discovered that a very short six-session support and coping group actually changed prognosis in a remarkable way. People who were in that support group did remarkably better than people who were not.
 
But it turned out that during the support group, group members were actually more distressed psychologically than people who were not in the group. This is a very important fact.
 
I spent a large part of my life working as a cancer cell biologist. I had grants from the National Cancer Institute to look at receptor sites on cancer cells and see what kinds of lipids or fats might change receptor site distribution and stop metastasis. It was a dark night I went through when my father died of cancer that got me out of the laboratory and into working with people. I said, “I know everything about lipids and cells and tissue culture. I know absolutely nothing about human beings with cancer—how they cope, what is important. I wouldn’t be here today if my father hadn’t died of cancer.