A Complementary Treatment For Cancer
By Colin C. Tipping, M.Ed
Founder/Director,
The Georgia CancerHelp Program,
and Together-We-Heal, Inc., A non-profit corporationClick here for a .pdf download of the article.
(if you need a copy of Adobe Acrobat 5.0, you can download it for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html)When I suggest emotional/spiritual healing to people with cancer, they almost always misunderstand me. They hear it as emotional support. They think I either just want to comfort them, or show them how to have a more positive attitude. They don't get that something like forgiveness might be the key to their getting well.
I see their eyes glaze over when I go on to say that emotional toxicity is most likely the cause of their cancer, and that forgiveness, if used with appropriate treatments and lifestyle changes that address the physical, is a 'first-line' primary treatment.
Their inability to hear this as a strategy for survival, is a measure of how brainwashed we all are into thinking that treatment for cancer must always be harsh, drastic and violent. With our War-on-Cancer mind-set, it's hard to imagine that something so seemingly soft and gentle as forgiveness could be the answer to our problem.
Yet science, particularly psychoneuroimmunology, is showing that forgiveness and other forms of emotional/spiritual healing, is extremely powerful, and that anyone with cancer who doesn't include forgiveness in their treatment protocol is ignoring a huge part of the problem and, by extension, a large part of the solution.
Our fear-based approach to cancer blinds us also to the possibility of our cancer being our friend and loving messenger. Rarely does cancer arrive without a clear message designed to move us toward healing.
Almost invariably, the loving message it brings concerns releasing repressed or suppressed emotions connected with something that happened in the past -usually between two and seven years prior to the onset of the cancer. This is usually a severe loss or disappointment or a major and prolonged emotional upset, or both.
This might be loss of a spouse or child through death, loss of a relationship, loss of a job, etc. I have yet to find someone who has cancer who does not have something like this in their history - something that could easily have been the starting point - the cause even - of their disease. I am convinced that cancer starts out as an emotional/spiritual disease and only later moves into the body.
Bringing that trauma, whatever it is, to the light and processing it relatively painlessly through Radical Forgiveness is the best way to heal this. The beauty of Radical Forgiveness is that it is not a therapy in the normal sense of the word. It does not require you to go digging up the past and rehashing the pain. That's exactly what cancer patients have spent a lifetime avoiding!
No, Radical Forgiveness is about coming to see whatever happened in a different light and being willing to see that, like all things, it may have happened for a reason. If we were able to stand back and see the bigger picture, so to speak, we might see the reason, but being willing to be open to the possibility that there might be more to it than meets the eye gives your soul the opportunity it needs to heal the wound. Then you begin to find genuine peace and tranquility as opposed to denial.
The reason that I suggest Radical Forgiveness over other forms of forgiveness is that it works at the energy level, so it happens very quickly. Ordinary forgiveness takes its own time. You can't force it time will heal it, we say. But when you have cancer, that's not good enough. You want results NOW! Radical Forgiveness is quick and it is easy to do and is therapeutically non-invasive.
Radical Forgiveness occurs in present time, as a shift in perception; a sudden flash of insight or spiritual realization. This in turn creates an almost instantaneous and dramatic release of all those energies that caused the cancer in the first place resentment, anger, sadness, guilt, and grief.
Anne came to one of my workshops. She had been given, at most, three months to live. She was depressed and had little life force left in her. She only came because her church had collected money for her.
On the third day she recalled an event that occurred when she was 2 1/2 years old, involving her older sister, that had made her believe that she was utterly worthless. When she realized how much of her life she had lived according to that belief she began to feel angry. She beat cushions with a bat until she was exhausted, did some art therapy and then a breathwork session. The next day, she did some forgiveness worksheets around her sister and her husband.
By the time she left, her life force had returned, and she was all fired up to find an alternative program that would help her beat the doctor's prognosis. After two weeks of frantically searching for something, she realized that her healing would come through prayer. So, she worked with a couple who literally prayed with her for a week. Upon her return, she went to her oncologist who examined her. These were his words. 'I don't know how to explain this, but you have absolutely no cancer in your body. I could say it was a spontaneous remission, but I believe in God and I am not willing to describe it in any other way than as a miracle'.
This woman serves as a wonderful example of how raising the vibration through Radical Forgiveness and prayer reversed the seemingly hopeless physical condition in days rather than years.
This is not an either/or choice. In fact, it is always wise to combine this with whatever medical treatment you feel comfortable with and feel is right for you. This may not always in alignment with what your medical doctor will advise, but if you get strong feelings about what is best for you, follow those feelings.
Another approach is to go ahead with whatever treatment the doctor recommends, but with the viewpoint that the treatment is buying you time. Ordinarily, since there is no real cure for cancer, the unspoken assumption is that the cancer will come back – one day. The medical profession's definition of success is five-year survival. It is a reasonable assumption therefore that all the treatment did was to address the symptoms not the cause.
But that doesn't mean you can't tackle the root cause nor take steps to rehabilitate the immune system that the treatment trashed, after the treatment is over. If you use the time that you bought to do the Radical Forgiveness work and the emotional healing, and you do all you can to strengthen and nurture your immune system back to health, the chances are you won't have a recurrence. You will have heard the loving message of your cancer and used it as a chance to change and to heal.
Looked at this way, Radical Forgiveness is one of the best preventive medicines available. Radical Forgiveness Therapy, which I created for this purpose, clears the energy in the subtle bodies long before it becomes a block in the physical body. When I help people resolve forgiveness issues by using RFT, I am not only helping them heal a wound in their subtle body, I am helping them prevent disease occurring in the physical body. I am convinced that if we keep the energy flowing in our bodies as it was designed to do, we never will get sick.
My strong recommendation then is for you to gift yourself the Radical Forgiveness Experience. Either a 5-day personal healing retreat or at the very least the Miracles Workshop. This is in my opinion essential for anyone who has cancer. It is also crucial for anyone who is in remission and wants to prevent a recurrence and I would also advise it for those who have a high risk of getting cancer.
Radical Forgiveness enables us to release anger, blame and resentment. It shows us how to let go of control and surrender to life in the moment so we can heal even from cancer. Through Radical Forgiveness, our relationships improve, problems dissolve immediately, we become more loving of other people as well as of ourselves, and we raise our vibration. That's when miracles happen.
Colin Tipping, December 2001