Principle Six: Tending Emotional Wellness
Don’t underestimate the role that your emotions play in creating your physical bioterrain. Emotions and thoughts are all chemicals and electricity and translate into and influence our physical states. They play into all five of the previously discussed principles as much as physical substances. Find your happy place, tend to your emotional wellness…
- Mind & body relationships
- The role of stress and trauma in disease
- Meditation, mindfulness, & healing
- How I use(d) meditation
- The role of hope in healing
- Miraculous Healing
- Concepts to consider
“if the opposite of living is “no, thanks”,
then the opposite of dying is “yes, please.”
– shane koyczan
Mind & Body:
The relationships between
emotions and physiology
Our body is made up of physical building blocks. Our consciousness can be measured, in part, by the combination of those physical building blocks, by the chemical processes that occur within and between those building blocks, and the electrical energy that results from those chemical processes. The ‘metaphysical’ is what we don’t understand about that. As I am fond of saying, ‘magic is just what science hasn’t figured out how to explain yet.’
Just because we don’t have all the details mapped out, doesn’t mean the magic of the mind-body connection isn’t real. I do not, for the life of me, understand how a cellphone works…. the fact that I can watch movies on this little device astounds me. But that lack of understanding does not interfere with my acceptance of the technology. If you sent me back a couple hundred years with this technology, I would probably be burned at the stake for being a witch.
Many things that I cannot explain scientifically have happened to me in my life. By accepting these gifts anyway, I am able to receive their benefits. In Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Strong, I relate many personal stories of healing that I could not explain. But when I opened my mind to possibilities that could make sense in a scientific paradigm, I was healed. And science is now actually making breakthroughs in understanding the role of the mind-body connection in healing.
The role of stress & trauma in disease
When we experience emotional stress or trauma, our body releases stress hormones, particularly adrenaline and cortisol, to better prepare us. Adrenaline increases heart rate, elevates blood pressure, and boosts energy. Cortisol increases blood glucose, enhances the brain’s glucose utilization and increases substances that repair tissues. However, when we are constantly exposed to stress (chronic stress), we have too many of those hormones circulating and that is not good for our health. Elevated cortisol levels and chronic stress worsens and increases the risk of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, cholesterol, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, depression, mental illness, gastrointestinal problems, and asthma. They also lower immune function and life expectancy and have been linked to cancer… onset, development, metastasis, and risk of mortality. Women with breast cancer have higher levels of cortisol. Those with more abnormal levels are significantly more likely to die sooner.
– The effects of chronic stress on health
– Psychological stress and breast cancer incidence
– Stress and breast cancer: epidemiology to molecular biology
– Stress hormone may contribute to breast cancer deaths
– Diurnal Cortisol Rhythm as a Predictor of Survival
– Impact of stress on cancer metastasis
– Self-reported stress levels predict subsequent breast cancer
In addition to stress, emotional trauma and repressed anger have been found to increase cortisol levels and are linked to cancer incidence and mortality. The good news is that resolving these emotional issues can prevent progression and increase your chance of survival.
– Psychological attributes of women who develop breast cancer
– Emotion Suppression and Mortality Risk
– Expressive/suppressive anger-coping responses, gender, and types of mortality: a 17-year follow-up
– Anger and cancer: an analysis of the linkages
– Does Change in Emotional Expression Mediate Cancer Survival?
In Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Strong, I tell of the major role I believe my inadequate dealing with stress played in my Stage 0 cancer morphing into Stage 4 with tumors all over my body in spite of a preventive mastectomy. Anecdotal, yes, but supported by a study that found that found an excess of over 260,000 cancer deaths linked to the 2008 Economic crisis (behind my increased stress).
Another compelling anecdotal story is of a friend gone too soon. She was very in tune with naturopathic ways of dealing with MBC and was doing everything I did and was doing very well. But she was a single mother who adored her two young daughters and had an ex who seemed determined to make her life as miserable as possible by constantly threatening to take them away from her instead of supporting her. I believe it was this constant stress that played the major role to her eventual passing. It broke my heart.
– Economic Crisis of 2008 Followed by Excess Cancer Deaths
Sympathetic (SNS) vs. parasympathetic (PNS) nervous systems. Both are part of the autonomic nervous system and work involuntarily. The SNS is responsible for ‘fight or flight’ responses to stress and the PNS reacts by ‘rest and digest’ responses. Under chronic stress, the SNS is ‘turned on’ all the time and can alter genetic code leading to pro-cancer processes such as: activating inflammatory responses; inhibiting immune responses (including the reduction of natural killer cells), DNA repair, and apoptosis; and stimulating angiogenesis and the creation of new cancer stem cells. One study of breast cancer found that stress-induced neuroendocrine activation induced a 30-fold increase in metastasis to distant tissues including the lymph nodes and lung.
– The sympathetic nervous system induces a metastatic switch
Vagus Nerve. The vagus nerve is a pair of cranial nerves that interface with the PNS to regulate heart rate, keep the gastrointestinal tract working, and carry sensory information from internal organs back to the brain. Stimulating it produces anti-inflammatory responses and plays a role in tumor modulation and improved cancer prognosis. We can actively control the SNS, PNS, and the vagus nerve through deep breathing, meditation, and mindfulness.
– The Role of the Vagus Nerve in Cancer Prognosis
Meditation, mindfulness, & healing
The healing properties of meditation and mindfulness training are being studied and documented with exciting results:
- Telomeres are those little ‘legs’ on your chromosomes. As we age they shorten and shortened telomeres are associated with the rate of aging as well as to the development of cancer. Basically, you want your telomeres long for as long as you can. Meditation has been shown to slow telomere shortening .
- Meditation reduces stress and the presence of stress hormones .
- It has been shown to be effective in the modulation of pain.
- Meditation affects brain structure and activity related to depression, anxiety, attention, memory, and cognitive flexibility.
– Telomeres, lifestyle, cancer, and aging
– Cognitive stress, mindfulness, and telomeres
– Brain Mechanisms Supporting Modulation of Pain
How I use(d) meditation
Whether you currently do mediation and you think I am too simplistic, or you are a skeptic, or you don’t know where to begin… indulge me. When I was a child, I suffered from insomnia. My mom gave me a book on self-hypnosis and I taught myself to cure my insomnia, giving me my first taste of ‘mind over matter.’ I don’t take pain medication if I can help it. Whenever I have, I have regretted it.
To help my body heal, I need to hear what it is telling me. I have withstood a lot of pain in my life and have learned to leave my body when it gets too intense. Or I walk right into the pain and through it, as I learned in natural childbirth. Face it, breathe deeply, fortify yourself, and walk straight towards it, not stopping until you are through it and past it. The more you tense up and tighten and fret, the more it hurts.
I was reading two books when I got the diagnosis of leptomeningeal metastases in my brain…. Remarkable Recoveries and Radical Remissions. The books were filling me with awe… everyone who had survived against all odds (not just cancer or even illness, but also horrific accidents) had at some point decided that they were going to live, in spite of what everyone said. They didn’t just say it… they believed it with every cell in their body.
Then, I read The Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton, on the concept of a ‘nocebo.’ A placebo is something that has no obvious physical mechanism for working, but does, due to the belief that it will. A nocebo is the opposite… the belief that we do not have the ability to heal ourselves. It comes from years of being convinced by the western medicine establishment that they, and only they, hold the key to our recovery. Dr. Lipton says that you can reverse this ‘programming,’ but only on the subconscious level, by achieving an altered state through meditation.
It made sense and I had nothing to lose, having been given no hope and just weeks to live. I was so lucky to be in Hawaii, living on the beach I grew up on, when I was going through this existential hell. I was alone and everyone thought I was crazy for being alone during this time (especially since I was watching and waiting for symptoms such as seizures and losing consciousness). But I felt it was best to focus all my energies on healing myself… that was my ‘job.’
I spent hours, every day, floating in my beloved bay, reprogramming my subconscious, praying to the Kahunas to spare me so I could return to the islands, casting my internal fishing net over and over (see below), and ‘scrubbing’ away my brain metastases with little mindful scrub brushes. Do I feel it played a role in the unprecedented, miraculous disappearance of some of my leptomeningeal metastases? Absolutely! Here are things I try:
Inhale I heal. Exhale I cleanse. As cancer patients, we have many opportunities to meditate… waiting in a doctors office, waiting in a metal tube for scans or treatment, waiting while poison drips into our bodies, during yoga or exercise, writhing in pain, etc. A simple one I can use anytime, anywhere is “Inhale, I heal. Exhale, I cleanse.” Waiting for a traffic light, waiting in line, getting an MRI… I fill myself with healing breath and I exhale the toxins that are hindering my healing… over and over… until the car behind me starts honking.
Cast-a-net. Building on this breathing imagery… as I breathe in deeply, I imagine myself inhaling a fine mesh fishing net that fills me, to my fingertips and toes, pressing up against skin, making a mold of myself from the inside. It takes a few inhales to fill out nooks and crannies. Then when I exhale completely the net is pulled in, like a fishing net capturing all the cancer within it. I tug at the stubborn parts (negative energies and tumors), but gently, so as not to tear the net. It takes a few breaths as I do my legs first, then my arms and then my head, gathering it all centrally near my neck. As it nears my mouth, I expel the net and all the cancer in one large exhale. Begone, you evil bastard!
Breathe deeply of the beauty that surrounds you. I try to practice mindfulness in everything I do. I look for beauty and when I find it, I inhale it deeply into my being, imagining the happy feelings it generates to be starting a chain of healing reactions, activating my cancer-killing T-cells, killing cancer, and re-energizing me. Energy can be a vortex that feeds upon itself. If you feed a negative emotion it will spiral downward. If you grab it by the throat and proclaim, “You’re not the boss of me, I LOVE life, even when it sucks, I’m going to focus on beauty and feed on the love that surrounds me,” it is possible to reverse the energy vortex to spiral upward.
It might seem like the Promethean task of endlessly pushing a boulder uphill, but as soon as you make that proclamation and send positive energy out into the universe you’ll see it reflected and amplified by those you touch with it and pretty soon, that boulder is sailing up hill by itself. Whenever I think I can’t go on, I frantically search my surroundings for something beautiful… if a loved one is nearby, swoosh, all that love for me gets sucked out of them and into me (I’ll return it later).
Wherever you are, there is beauty somewhere, maybe hiding, but it’s there. Sometimes the beauty can be in the image of the cute old lady across from me asleep in her treatment chair who hasn’t realized she put two different socks on that morning. I amplify the smile that brings to my face, imagine it as a healing energy grid I can plug into that courses through my body. When I focus on beauty, ugliness fades away.
Breathing in I calm my body, breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment,
I know this is a wonderful moment.
~Thich Nhat Hanh
Remember the love you have in your life. If all else fails, imagine my love for you and my belief in your indomitable human spirit entering your room, like mist on the moors, swirling around your bed and up around you, tickling you with its tendrils, and recharging your healing powers. Remember that so far your record for getting through bad days is 100%. All this pain brings you wisdom and is leading you somewhere. Stick around for the end of the movie and all will be revealed. I believe in you.
No matter what it is, I bless any substance, medicine or treatment therapy that I receive, and thank it for healing me, infusing it with confidence, intention, and gratitude. We are 70% water, if our thoughts and emotions (or electrochemical energy, if you prefer) can influence the molecular structure of water, it can surely influence the medicine coursing through our veins.
Repack your bags. We all carry baggage that no longer serves us for far too long. It becomes an energy vampire and saps our healing energy. Rid yourself of toxic thoughts, emotions, and people. Process them and get rid of them. Whatever you do, don’t internalize it… it will feed the little cancer bastard. Concentrate on honing your goddess powers… your strength, your wisdom, your beauty, your patience, your ability to love, and your not-being-as-much-of-a-shithead-as-other-people-can-be.
Imagine walking in the woods, carrying the burdens you’ve accumulated. It’s hot, they’re getting heavy, you’re not sure where to go, you sit and rest. You want to leave the suitcase here. You open it… it’s full of soiled, ripped clothes… buttons missing, torn sleeves… what a mess. You can’t just leave it a mess. You examine each piece, mend it, clean, fold it, and pack it neatly away and shut the suitcase. Stand up, bow to it, turn, and run maniacally away into the woods in whatever direction beckons you, giggling with new freedom as you leave your processed baggage behind.
So, by now, you are possibly shaking your head at what a nut case I am. Perhaps. But I’m a nut case who is alive! And nobody thought that I would be or that I’d be NEAD. Plus, I know you actually think I’m kinda cute with all these weird ideas of mine. And I know that you are toying with the idea of practicing mindfulness and meditation yourself, if you don’t already. But perhaps you feel sheepish and don’t know how to get started. If my visualizations don’t speak to you or if you feel you want someone speaking in your ear, check out your local library for CDs of guided visualizations. Check out YouTube for “guided visualization, cancer, healing, meditation.” Check these out …
– 5 Killer meditation apps to get your Om on
The role of hope in healing
Hope and positive thinking may not be enough to change your reality
by themselves. But without them, you don’t stand a chance. -me
Having hope is not ‘being in denial.’ As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t… you’re right.” If you think you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die. If you think you’re gonna prevail, you have a fighting chance. Trust me, no one’s gonna laugh at you for hoping when you’re gone. And if they do? The joke’s on them… you’ll be off on your next assignment!
Scientists have proven it is aerodynamically impossible for the bumblebee to fly. Its body is too heavy and wings too light.
Good thing the bumblebee can’t read – it just flies!
Miraculous healing
Divine energy takes many forms and
thus has many names. There are many doorways to the
Divine. Those who are lucky enough to have entered one of
those doorways can be forgiven for wanting to share it.
But those who insist that their doorway is the only or
‘right’ one are missing the essence of Divine energy,
which is that we are all one and connected to
each other and to the Divine by love.
May you all find your own
doorway to the Divine.
— Me
Oct ’12 – In the lymph node near my collarbone was a large tumor the size of a golf ball. Since the cancer began its quest to colonize my body via my lymph system, they biopsied this tumor, as well as my pelvis, to diagnose and define the cancer that now ravaged my body. That’s how they determined it was Stage IV, was HER2+, and had populated my spine, pelvis, liver, lungs, and lymph.
I belong to a different kind of church. I do not speak for the church. But my story is not complete without telling you what happened. You can generalize to your own faith. We drink a sacred sacrament together (Ayahuasca tea) towards the goal of spiritual enlightenment and growth. In addition to possessing extraordinary curative powers, it opens gateways to the Divine. We sing sacred songs to call to the Divine and evoke spiritual insight. It is a very loving, dedicated group of people.
I have nothing but wonderful things to say about it. We help each other be the best persons we can be and to perpetuate light, peace, and love in the world around us. The spiritual growth I experienced played a very important overall role in my healing, but there are a couple of specific experiences I must share that convinced me that we mortals can plug into a spiritual grid of divine energy in order to heal our bodies.
I moved to Seattle for treatment and there is a chapter of my church there. At my first session, I introduced myself to the leader who knew of my health struggles. Everyone else just wondered who this new woman was and what was wrong with her. I could barely walk but it wasn’t obvious why. Partway into our session, as our collective consciousness reached its peak, the leader dedicated a sacred song about healing to me. I suddenly felt zapped as 40+ souls focused their energies on me. I thought, “Wow, I should take advantage of this energy right now” and placed my right hand on my lymph tumor and opened my left hand to receive the energy. Within the short duration of the song, the tumor disappeared under my fingers! From a golf ball to nothing! Gone, nada, zippo!
A few days later, I saw my oncologist and said, “You know that lymph tumor next to my collarbone? It’s gone!” “Nooo,” she said, “it can’t be.” She came over and examined me and exclaimed. “That’s not possible! Your lymph node isn’t even enlarged! It’s completely gone! I’ve never seen that before… after only one session!”
“Yeah,” I said, “but it was a really good session.” We looked at each other, puzzled, as I realized she meant only one session of chemo and she had no idea what I was talking about. I decided not to even go there. She would never understand or believe my experience and it was far too sacred to have it trivialized. I’m taking that gamble by telling you, but hopefully there are as many of you reading this that have an understanding and appreciation for my miraculous healing as those who don’t.
I was there, I experienced it. It’s okay if not everyone believes or understands it. Perhaps someday, science will explain how we can plug a jack into the divine energy grid. But, I’m still here and the tumor isn’t. It’s the only instance where I witnessed something I was doing to heal myself take effect in real time, leaving no doubt as to its efficacy. If, by telling my story, I can reach one person and instill faith in themselves and the divine energy within all of us to heal ourselves, it is worth it.
At a session a couple of weeks later, I had a second divine healing experience. I sat in a special lounge chair as it was still uncomfortable for my healing pelvis to sit upright. It was tricky because if I leaned too far back, the chair would flatten out. There were fluorescent lights overhead I tried to avoid. As I watched the images shown to my mind’s eye by the tea, I was disturbed by dark, ugly shapes that writhed convulsively.
They looked like scary, icky things at the bottom of a dank pond. Normally, the divine chooses to share with me beautiful, lacy patterns of color and light. Why these horrors? I leaned forward and shielded my eyes so that I could better see the images dancing across my mental movie screen. And I realized it was showing me the cancer… undulating evil that wormed its way through my body.
The sacred song being sung at the moment mentioned opening the doorway to heaven. Suddenly, accidentally, and without purposeful intent, I leaned back and the chair vaulted me into a horizontally prone position. The dark images were chased away as I was now bathed in the intense overhead light. Beautiful, lace-like fractals painted my screen with color and joy. I couldn’t move. If someone had yelled “Fire!” I could not have budged even a finger to escape. I was pinned down by a warm, heavy closeness.
“The doorway to heaven has opened,” a voice in my head said. “A program to rebuild your ravaged bones is being downloaded right now.” I lay there motionless, receiving. After a few minutes, I felt release. I searched yearningly for the beautiful patterns of light but they had gone. “Download complete,” I heard in my mind. Time to move on. I felt healed… at least for now.
The above story is excerpted from Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Strong and I include it because it is something I did and I believe it played a role in my healing. Other than advising spiritual and emotional growth on your healing path, I have no specific recommendation related to it.
Concepts to consider
- What is the monster inside of you and why is he so hungry?
- You are not a victim.
- Kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude are healing.
- What is the role of fear in manifesting reality?
- What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.
- Accepting death can be a part of healing.
- Don’t sweat the little shit… it’s all little shit.
- The difficult we do right away. The impossible takes a while.
- If you are depressed, you are living in the past.
- Anxious? You are living in the future.
- If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
- Don’t carry other people’s baggage.
- Everything can, and will, change.
- Incorporate the confidence vortex, it will build upon itself and spiral up.
There comes a time in your life, when you
walk away from all the drama and people who create it.
You surround yourself with people who make you laugh.
Forget the bad, and focus on the good.
Love the people who treat you right,
pray for the ones who don’t.
-José N. Harris
This post, Principle Six: Tending Emotional Wellness, is from Book 2 of my Thrive Tribe Series, What I Did and Do and Why, a naturopathic protocol that helps me to survive and thrive, available from the bookstore, starting at $7. I am posting the entire book sequentially, in its entirety, on this blog once a week. Subscriptions are free.
Nothing contained on this website nor in my blogs or books should be construed as medical advice. I am not a doctor. I am a Stage IV metastatic breast cancer thriver who is currently NEAD and simply sharing my journey in the hopes it helps you to find your power and path. Please research anything I share to determine if it is a good choice for you. I believe in you! Bless you all on the path you choose.
All original content contained on this blog, What I did and do and why, is copyrighted 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 Kaiulani Facciani, Snarling Wolf, Inc.
1 emotional wellness, emotional wellness, emotional wellness,
2 emotional wellness, emotional wellness, emotional wellness,
3 emotional wellness, emotional wellness, emotional wellness,
4 emotional wellness, emotional wellness, emotional wellness,
5 emotional wellness, emotional wellness, emotional wellness,