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

Fire in the soul, Part 2   A talk by Joan Boryensko, Ph.D.
 
Importance of Authentically Sharing Emotions

The actual important aspect of the emotions impact on illness is this. In order to have true social support, we have to be authentic. To be authentic is to say what is bothering us. This is a real interesting thing.
 
There is a male female difference, too, in how we cope and get support that is worth noting. All of the gender difference studies show that the way that women cope is that they need to talk about their despair. They need to talk about everything that is bothering them and to air that. At that point, they can find a better way to cope. Men are socialized differently. It is very hard for a man to actually talk about that. I was at one of Dean Ornish’s groups once where a bunch of guys was in his study with coronary artery disease, and the wives were in the social support group, too. They were supposed to talk about what had happened that week that might be stressful. One guy finishes, and I see him flinch slightly as his wife kicks him under the table. She says "Excuse me. You lost your job last week. Don’t you think that qualifies as a stress?"
 
Women would have instantly brought that foreword. You get a group of women together, and in general they are not strangers for long. They bond by sharing despair, by sharing what has been most difficult. Yet here we have a difference. There is one subset of women who will marinate in their despair, stay there and not transform it. They live in the dark night. This is not helpful. I think that this will eventually culminate in mind-body changes that are not good for them or those with whom they live either.
 
But there are other people who, by feeling the depths of those feelings, don't stay stuck in those feelings, but use the energy. There is a tremendous energy psychologically, physically, emotionally in that negativity.
 
Tibetan Buddhists prize negative emotions more than anything else. I often teach a form of Tibetan meditation called Tonglen, which is a form of transforming negative energy into something that parts the clouds around your heart and reveals the light that's always been within you. They say that there is so much energy in negative emotion, that it's great stuff.
 
That's what fuels transformation. You don't try to deny negativity or push it under the rug. You work with it. It's energy. It's wonderful. This in a certain sense is what happens in a good support group. People take the energy and transmute it into helping others, looking for meaning and being more creative.
 
Rachel Naomi Remen, who is the medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Program in Bolinas, California, has always said that there is no such thing as a negative emotion. A negative emotion is only an emotion that you will not allow yourself to experience. The resistance to experience anything, is, at a mind-body level, what really creates the most havoc. That sense of being open to one's own process, being able to share it is what begins to transform emotion. The studies are there that say this can certainly help the prognosis of cancer. It also helps us to feel an awful lot less helpless.
 
Optimism versus Pessimism
 
There was a very good researcher by the name of Nancy Levy, who used to be head of the National Cancer Institute's Session on Behavioral Medicine. She did a very interesting study with women who had early stage breast cancer. She looked in their diaries, because from diaries and letters you can code whether a person is an optimist or pessimist.
 
A pessimist, she found, is someone who, when something bad happens tends to blame themselves, saying, "This bad thing is all my fault." They generalize, "Not only did I do this wrong. I got cancer. I fought wrong. I've done this, but I mess up everything that I do." This is what's called an internal and global stable attribution or description of why bad things happen. She discovered that the optimists are more open minded. They might say things like, "Why me? Why is this bad thing happening to me? I don't know, but I can learn from it, I can grow from it." They tend to see adversity as a challenge rather than as an indictment.
 
At the time of diagnosis, the study showed that pessimists were much more likely to have cancer in their lymph nodes than optimists. Levy wanted to know, "Would a group help people to heal some of the underlying things so that they could be more optimistic in their approach?"
 
The Environmental Factor
 
But now that we've gone through some of the data, I want to add a very important disclaimer. For this I must get out of my big soap box and stand on it because I think a very serious misunderstanding happens when we take mind-body medicine, and we want to say that everything in our body is due to the way that we think. There's a relation, but it is only part of something much larger.
 
For example, we live in the middle of a breast cancer epidemic. In 1960, 1 in 20 women got breast cancer. In 1993, 1 in 8 women got breast cancer and many of them were pre-menopausal. It used to be more typical of someone like my mother; postmenopausal, 78. The question is why that has happened.
 
There are a couple of researchers who used to be colleagues of mine at Tufts Medical School who work on something called xeno-estrogens. It looks like the estrogenic substances are highly related to the increase in breast cancer. My training as a scientist would have me say that further studies are definitely needed. As a woman I would say that there is no doubt in my mind that our exposure to all of these pesticides that have accumulated in the food chain, accumulated in the fat of animals, of cows, of milk, are what's related to the increase in breast cancer, and it has to stop.
 
So if we all sit on our behinds and meditate, this is not going to help the incidence of breast cancer. It has nothing to do with our thinking. It has to do with the practices of agriculture and money making and greed in this country. Fifteen years ago, Israel banned these organo-chlorine pesticides. Israel is the only developed country that has had, in the last ten years, a decrease of 35% in the breast cancer rate. There's no question about it.
 
What we need to do is to take some of the negativity and the feeling of helplessness and victimization and say, "We're not going to let this happen to our sister. We're not going to let this happen to our children. We're not going to let it happen to our sons and husbands, who may not get breast cancer-although some will-but are at a much-increased risk for prostrate cancer. Not to mention the fact that the sperm count in the average man has declined 50% in the last 50 years. Unless we do something, we won't have anyone left anyhow, so we won't have to worry about all this, right?
 
Why illness and other bad things to happen
 
So, that's number one of my soap box speech. Here's number two. What causes cancer? When you say to yourself, "Why me?," how many of you thought about your genetics? How many of you thought about the things in the environment that you eat and you breath? How many of you thought, or still think that you created you cancer with the way that you think. How many of you think that that cancer is some kind of lesson that you are trying to give yourself? I am coming to that in a moment, because it is a source of pain isn't it? How many of you think that there is something called sacred mystery and you'll never be able to answer the question anyhow?
 
So there are these four things: environment, genetics, mind-body, sacred mystery. We do have to think about all of these. Yet there remains a simplistic kind of thinking that says, "If I just thought well enough, my body would stay healthy. My body is a perfect reflection of my psycho-spiritual state." How many of you have heard that somewhere?
 
Consider this one, too: Every saint and mystic is dead as a doornail? It's true. There's always this sense that they've died in some totally elevated fashion, that they've sat at the top of a mountain and gone off in rainbow colored light, leaving a small pile of clothes and fingernails behind them. At times they have done that. There are a few cases of that. But generally all of the saints and mystics, whether you are looking at the Christian mystics, the Jewish mystics or the Eastern mystics die of such common things.
 
Buddha died of food poisoning. An important aspect of this is that he forgave the cook first. He said he needed a way out of his body, and said, "Thank you, thank you. You have given me the way. I was finished here. It is time to move on."
 
One very great mystic, Ramana Maharshi from India died of cancer of the arm. His devotees came to him and said, "You have such control of your mind. You can walk on water. You can stop your heartbeat. Why don't you get rid of your cancer?" He said, "Because you all have a lot to learn from it." Now that's interesting, isn't it?
 
How about Bernadette and the miracles at Lourdes. To be a miracle at Lourdes is not easy. If you have cancer throughout your body and have a healing there, they don't consider it a big deal. They say that's natural healing, not supernatural. Supernatural or miraculous healing at Lourdes has to be something like you're born without optic nerves, which can't regenerate, and instantly, your eyesight is restored. There are 67 such miracles meticulously documented.
 
How did Lourdes come to be? This beautiful 14-year-old girl Bernadette saw a vision of the Divine Mother in the form of Mary there, who said, "Dig in the dirt, the healing spring will come." It came and many people have had healings. Is Bernadette meditating on top of a mountain? No, she died at thirty of bone cancer. So what are we supposed to say? She was out of touch with her divine nature? She didn't know how to pray?
 
Let's give ourselves a break here, and say, "How can we possibly ever know?" The mind can affect the body, but it is only part of something much bigger. The cog in a much bigger wheel.
 
In Service to Love: A Near Death Experience (NDE)
 
I met a woman last year who told me a fascinating story. She and her daughter were in a car crash, and both had a near death experience. About 1/3 of people who have NDE's go all the way through a life review. It's not like you are viewing your curriculum vitae, I've been told. It's all about relationships. You find yourself in the body, and in the emotional state of everyone you've ever related with. The question is, "Could you open your heart to give and receive love, because that is what we are put on earth to do?"
 
This woman said that she and her daughter had the life review and saw each other's reviews. They saw all the threads from the beginning of time that had brought them together-what they meant to each other, what they learned from each other. At this point the being of light gave the mother three choices. Normally you have two: Stay there, come back here. She got three: Stay there, come here with minor injuries, or return in a vegetative state. Now, that's heavy.
 
I asked, "Would you have done it?" She answered, "Of course I would have done it. When you are there in the light, it is very clear that the whole reason for physical incarnation is about love, and, the question I asked was, 'How could I be of service to love?'" She asked if there any one of her friends or family who would, in the dark night they would have gone through when she entered that coma, have somehow opened their hearts and learned about compassion, become wiser in some way.
 
The being of light showed her a life review of all of those people with and without the vegetative state. When it turned out that it wasn't going to be particularly helpful to anybody, she chose to return with minor injuries. If I only had heard one of those stories, I wouldn't bother to tell you. I must have heard the variant of that story 100 times. I've heard hundreds and hundreds of NDE's from patients.
 
It's a pretty amazing thing, that sacred mystery. Who's to know that your cancer or other challenge has anything to do with you at all at a certain level? Maybe it's a soul contract you took on for the growth of another person. Then how simplistic to say it's a lesson I'm giving myself, or it's some form of negative thinking. If negative thinking was the sole reason for what goes on in our bodies, we'd all be completely dead. Who do we know that is so positive?
 
Making Peace of Mind the Goal of Healing
 
Facing death is a tremendous opportunity for growth, and yet it is something that no one wants to think about. People don't like to think that sometimes the greatest healing occurs at the moment of death, that our whole life in some way may be a preparation for the moment of death. That is what the Tibetan Buddhists think. Somebody interviewed the Dali Lama. He said, "I want to stop going around and doing so much public stuff, because I have to spend time now preparing for my death."
 
What popped into my mind was a story about Mark, a man with AIDS, a patient of mine 10 years ago whom I loved dearly. He came to me and said "Look, I am not try to make my immune system better. I am not trying to use mind-body stuff to live longer with AIDS. We've all got to die sometime. I want to have a healing death, and I want to prepare with you for my death."
 
So this is what we did. Every time we had a guided imagery, he would be going back in his life and forgiving all of his relatives. He was doing all the work of figuring out what the meaning of his life was. It was wonderful to be with him because he was often in a state of grace, having one of these holy moments. He was like being with a kid. Sitting in the office, he would say, "Look at that tree, look at the way the sunlight looks on the leaves, look at the way that the shadows fall." Mark had nothing to lose. He said his death was the greatest freedom, because he had nothing to lose.
 
What was fascinating was that he lived longer than anyone I have ever met with AIDS. He was the only one who wasn't interested in living longer. After a while, he said, "I can't believe it. Why don't I die already? He was like Dustin Hoffman in the movie, Little Big Man. Dustin Hoffman was the Indian at the top of the mountain. He lies down to die, and says, "Great Spirit take my soul." In the morning he's still there. He brushes himself off and says, "Well, I guess it wasn't time yet."
 
Mark was like that. I think that the interesting thing was that he was not using mind- body techniques to cure his body, knowing that you only live in a body for a limited time anyhow. He made his single ideal of healing, peace of mind. If you've read A Course in Miracles, you know that one way to reach peace of mind is through forgiveness. That was his primary function: to learn to forgive himself and to forgive other people, who hurt him. To practice forgiveness in a broader sense, which is to be open to light, to be spacious, to let down the judgments that keep us out of the present moment. Because of that, he wasn't creating a battle with himself.
 
I think often times when people do mind-body things to live longer, they are thinking, "My god, are my lymphocytes going up or down? Am I thinking right? I forgot to meditate. That will be the end of me. They are always making a battle ground out of things. If you make a battle ground at a mind body level, you ravish yourself from the battle. If you make peace of mind your single goal, you will heal your life. At that point, physically healing is more likely to happen if it is with your destiny. I think that we each have a soul contract here, and at a certain point, we're done. We are finished with our incarnation for whatever reason.
 
The Experience of My Mother Dying
 
I am going to finish by telling a story of my mother. My mother was the worst negative thinker in the world. She had a lot of difficulty because her whole family other than her father had perished in the Holocaust. They lived in a little border town between Poland and Lithuania, and the Nazis came and killed off the whole family. That killed off my mother's faith. She said if there is a loving God in the universe then Holocausts don't happen, little babies don't die, and bad things don't happen to good people. She just sort of gave up. The way she dealt with her pain is to say, "I won't examine my life."
 
She had two things that she taught me as a child. Number one, she said, "Thou shalt not ever study psychology. If you get in touch with your pain, it will swallow you up." That was how she dealt with it, one foot after the other. The other thing she said is, "Whatever you do, don't study any religions other than Judaism." She didn't think there was anything interesting in Judaism anyhow, but that it was safe.
 
Religion, she, like Marx, said, is the opiate of the people. It is some kind of line you feed yourself to give meaning to an existence that's intrinsically meaningless. You'd think that this kind of thinking would kill her off quickly. She lived until she was 82. This after a lifetime of smoking and drinking, too. This woman had cast-iron genes.
 
I do want to tell you about the experience I had with her dying. It was most remarkable because we had not gotten along well. The day that she died, we had tried for months to talk about something with substance.
 
I looked, so many times at my relationship with my mother and father as part of my own healing. I realized that I had so much anger for years about my mother. Her name was Lillian. For years, my chief definition of myself was not as Joan, but as "not Lillian." Whomever she was, I wanted to be different. That's about the most grievous form of attachment in non-forgiveness that I can think of. It kept me totally out of attachment with my own self and with what my own life meant.
 
The healing for that has been long. I have to credit it to people just like you. When I came together with a group of people who had cancer, and we would work on forgiveness, I was working on my own issues of forgiveness. I might be the most fortunate and privileged person in the world, because I've had so much of an opportunity to do that work. To understand what healing really is. To realize that many people have had tremendously healing deaths. I've learned so much from being able to go through that passage with people.
 
My mother's death was a really great healing, too. One thing I encourage everyone to do, whether you have a physical illness or not, is get your stuff together. Make sure your wills are in order, that someone has power of attorney and that you have a living will. My mother had done all of those things.
 
The day that she died, she developed some internal bleeding. They took her for some sort of test in nuclear medicine at nine in the morning. At four in the afternoon she had not come back. The room was filled with her friends and relatives there to say goodbye, and they said, "Joan, she's going to die alone on a stretcher somewhere out there unless you go get her." I put on my white coat, and I resolutely made my way to nuclear medicine and she was there on a stretcher alone. All day long. Something had happened. There had been an accident. Other people had come in.
 
You really have to assert yourself. Don't let them take your loved one's away. Don't let them take you away without a second thought. I looked at the doctor and said, "This won't do. We have to have her back." And the doctor said, "I'm sorry, we need a diagnosis." My mother, always the joker says, "Aahhh! That's why I've been laying here all day? Why didn't you ask me? The doctor said, "What?" She said, "I'm dying. That's your diagnosis."
 
There is a strange irony in that. That at the moment of death, we don't know when to let go medically. It is a difficult thing, and it is not the fault of the physicians. Everybody is so afraid of litigious people. "You could have kept them alive one day longer if you'd done this." Somehow we all have to help elevate this system in some way. It is a problem for all of us, not just our health care professionals.
 
I got her out there. They were going to put her in an elevator where there was only room for the stretcher and one person. The orderly said, "You have to meet her in her room." I said, "No I don't," and kicked him out the elevator. This is against hospital rules. You can't wheel your own family member around. God forbid, something could happen.
 
A Deep Healing
 
She looked at me, and she could see that this might be our last chance ever to say anything. Who knew who would grab her next when the door opened? She said, "I have to complete this with you. I know that I've made a lot of mistakes, I know it. And I'm sorry. Can you forgive me?" That was wonderful, but even more wonderful was the fact that I had the chance to acknowledge all the mistakes that I had made. Not by making a list, but just by feeling the feeling. She wasn't interested in long emotional lists. That wasn't her style.
 
I was sorry for the fact that we had never been friends. For the fact that I couldn't be there for her so often. That I had held her in judgment. That I had kept her out of my heart. Just being able to look her in the eyes and say, "Can you forgive me for the mistakes that I have made?" And she said, "Yes," and had that real meaning through the eyes and through the heart. That was all it took. That was truly the healing of a lifetime. It was truly amazing. Really incredible things happened from that.
 
I got her back to the room. Everybody had gone off for a cup of coffee. I was still alone with her, so I figured I would press my luck. I looked at her and said, "How about we exchange soul qualities?" This was not the sort of woman with whom one e xchanged soul qualities. But she said, "Oh sure, I'd love to." There was this great moment of openness.
 
I said, "What I've always admired about you was your courage. That you had a tremendous fortitude no matter what." I tend to crumble when the going gets tough. She said, "I'll give you that," and "What I would like from you is compassion." The fact that she could even see that in me, when I could be compassionate to everybody but her, was most amazing. If I had another two hours, I would tell you about the series of dreams that happened after we had exchanged courage and compassion after her death. If you think that somebody is gone just because their body is gone, no way.
 
One morning I had the most luminous dream about courage. The kind of dream that changes your body. You wake up tingling; you wake up changed. There by the coffee maker is this little thing. It looks likes it says Coca-Cola, with red and white swirls. I look at it and it says courage. It's the red badge of courage. I ask, "Where did this come from?" Nobody in the house put it there. Nobody knew where it came from. Little miracles happen.  
Our science often thinks that we start with the material, that we start from the brain and thought comes from there. No. Everything exists first in mind and consciousness, and filters down into the body. Which means that at a physical level, miracles can always happen. If we are meant to stay in our physical bodies any longer, those miracles will happen for us. The biggest miracle is the miracle of love.
 
A Vision of Divine Light
 
Hours later, I was with my mother, and our son, Justin. He had spent a lot of time with my mother-she babysat for him when he was little-and was very close to his grandparents.
 
Most of the night of her dying, he lay in bed and held her. We said prayers to her and sang, everything you could think of. Finally, about three in the morning, she was asleep, and we were sitting on opposite sides of the bed. I was meditating, and I had a vision. I have only had one vision. It wasn't a dream. It was very different from a dream. All I can say is that it is much realer than this level of reality. The old Tibetans say that we are dreaming now. This is the substance of a dream. Then we are going to wake up.
 
In this vision, I was a pregnant woman, giving birth to a baby. My consciousness was present in both places. I was both the pregnant mother and the baby.
 
Talk about a dark night of the soul. A baby being born is having a terrible dark night of the soul. You are dying. You are dying to the world of the womb, being born to a whole new life. Those of you who are mothers, when you were giving birth, it was a dark night of the soul, too. You definitely die to who you are in that process. When that child comes, you aren't the person who was somebody else before. You are in relationship. Every time we are in a relationship like that, we change and become something other.
 
I had this incredible vision, and suddenly I switch just into being the baby. I was being born, coming through the birth canal and out of the darkness, into the most resplendent light.
 
That was my first of five experiences of divine light. If any of you have had those through near death experiences or something else, you know that the light is not something that there are words to describe. You are seen totally and your soul is pure, regardless of the mistakes that you have made. It's an experience of the greatest mercy and tenderness and forgiveness.
 
In that state, you are so bathed in love. It feels like you have just come home. That is the state of coming home. You realize, "My god I have been a stranger in a strange land, and now I am home. You wouldn't want to leave that state for anything. When we get into that peaceful state here, it's just a tiny little glimpse of what our heart if. Suddenly I knew everything about my relationship with my mother. All knowledge, right there.
 
I opened my eyes, and the room was filled with light. It was like I had been at a 10, but was now stepped up 1000%. I could see that there were no barriers between things. Everything was energy. Everything there was light. Everything was interpenetrating with everything else. The idea that we are separated from one another, in Einstein's words, is an optical delusion. If we could see rightly, everything would be interconnected, and it was.
 
I looked across the bed and Justin was weeping. His face was luminous, like he had seen the face of God. It was shining. The tears were pouring down his face. He looked at me and said, "The room is filled with light. Can you see it?" I told him that I could see it, and he said, "It's Grandma's last gift. She's holding open the door to eternity so that we can have a glimpse."
 
He looked at me with such tenderness, and said, "You must feel so grateful to her." I realized at this point that he had had a vision, too, and that I did feel grateful. He said, "You know, she was a very great soul. She had tremendous wisdom. She came and took a role much smaller than the wisdom that she had, in order to give you something to resist so that you could become who you are."
 
He was 20 at that time. He said, "Isn't there a word for that?" The word he was looking for was Boddhisatva, from the Buddhist tradition. I think we are all Boddhisatvas in a way. That we don't come for ourselves alone. We come because we grow as a group. We grow through what we share with other people. We grow through difficulties, perhaps more than we grow through the times when things go well. We are part of a greater holy and sacred mystery.
 
The most important thing for all of you to keep in mind: You are never alone. If you could see, there are more beings of light here sustaining you then there are people in flesh bodies. You are never alone. Any attempt on your part to become quiet inside, to pray, to bring forth a light for yourself makes a difference in this universe. As each one of us heals, we never heal alone. Our own healing always uplifts the whole of which we are a part.
 
© 1994, Healing Journeys. This is part of a talk given at a San Francisco conference, Cancer as a Turning Point—From Surviving to Thriving™ put on by Healing Journeys, a nonprofit organization. Permission to use this transcript was given by Jan Adrian, Executive Director of Healing Journeys.
 
Joan Borysenko, Ph.D. is the author of A Woman's Journey to God : Finding the Feminine Path (Riverhead Books) and many other books. She is a well-respected medical researcher, a pioneer of mind-body health, and one of the leading authorities on women's spirituality. She leads dozens of women's retreats every year. Borysenko also is cofounder and former director of the Mind-body clinic at the New England Deaconess Hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. She received er doctorate in anatomy and cellular biology from Harvard Medical School. Borysenko has been seen many times on national media, including appearances on Oprah. She lives in Boulder.
 
Healing Journeys (www.healingjourneys.org) sponsors a free annual Cancer as a Turning Point, From Surviving to Thriving™ conference in Northern California and other locations. The purpose of the conference is to celebrate, empower, awaken and network all those whose lives are touched by cancer or any life-threatening illness, including people experiencing illness, healthcare providers and people supporting friends or family with cancer. If you would like more information about Healing Journeys and its conferences or to find out about videotapes of past conferences, call 800-423-9882. You can also e-mail Jan Adrian of Healing Journeys at jan@healingjourneys.com Healing Journeys:
 
 
 
 

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