Withdrawal Symptoms It is close on two weeks since I returned from China and they have been the most challenging two weeks I have experienced since being diagnosed over 18 months ago. This is completely counter-intuitive; I should be happy and calm in the knowledge that my tumours have been removed, albeit tempered by the need to have tests to confirm there is not still some active cancer churning away inside. I could write pages about the inner struggles that I’ve had over this time: the dreams, visions and intense energy that has boiled away inside but that would only be fuelling it further and I now think that I have come to a place of understanding over what is transpiring. As usual it is not just one thing, but several that come together as a combined force of inner mayhem. When I was diagnosed I found myself generally experiencing greater peace and love for life. What happened is that my ego effectively surrendered in the face of the immediate presence of death. Death’s proximity made it impossible for the ego to maintain any illusion that it was in charge and it let go of assuming responsibility for my journey. This allowed me to come to a place of deep surrender to Life: I was not longer responsible for what happened: I could not be and so I rested: relaxing into the journey and surrendering the outcome. In this state I was able to remain in the present moment and experience a state of grace. There were times, off course, when I was not in that state but it was my basic reality and it felt good. But the ego was not mastered: he had not surrendered unconditionally. His surrender was merely due to the presence of death, and herein lays the great gift of death: it is the master of the ego: Life’s greatest instrument in the on-going battle with the mind and its desire to dominate her. With the immediate threat of death seemingly removed the ego has surged back again and is once more trying to take control of my life. I don’t see the ego as bad: it is just that it takes responsibility and tries to thus manage my life. In my case it tries to burden me with tasks that will shore up the ego’s sense of my identity. Again I could go on but I have no desire to write about this game: I’ve lived it for ten days now and want to give it no more fuel. Along with the inner struggle I’ve also felt a sense of despair: sadness bordering on depression. As I sit with it today I realise it is a deep sense of grief. My new GP suggested today that I was grieving the loss of cancer which I’d come to love and see as my teacher. This is partly true but it is only the surface level of my grief. What I am really grieving is death: the intimate presence of death that I have felt the past 18 months or so. I know this might sound terribly strange: after all, we live in a culture that is so afraid of death, but this is not how I have experienced the energy of death. Off course I do not wish to die: I have come to love Life too much for that, but neither do I want to live in slavery to the ego. My deepest desire is to live in freedom. On the plane, on the way back from China, I watched an action movie about ancient Greece and Sparta. In the movie they were engaged in a war with Persia and were terribly outnumbered. At one stage the hero spoke to his men and said words to the effect of: “I’d rather die fighting for freedom than live as a slave.” These words affected me deeply. At the time I felt as if he was speaking on my behalf about chemotherapy. How I’d rather die trusting my connection with Life than live with the dullness of mind and energy that chemo invokes. Now I think it was deeper than this: it was referring to freedom from the slavery of my controlling ego. Ironically this is exactly the prayer I was making before I got cancer. I felt trapped: unable to move forward in life with freedom and I was beseeching the universe to free me. Then the universe sent me cancer. I am completely convinced that the cancer was a gift sent by Life in response to my prayer. And it worked, but now, with the immediate threat gone, I feel I’ve been transported back to the place I started from. But off course this is not true: the difference is that I’ve experienced the freedom of living each day as if it might be my last. I’ve experienced the joy and ease that comes from liberation from the ego and I know what brought that to me: it was a gift of death. This brings me to the second strand of my on-going challenge. For more than 12 years now I have been pretending to be a shaman. I say pretending because I have never fully embraced it. What it means to be a shaman is that I fully embrace reality as something much vaster than what we perceive with our senses. We see the material world as an effect of a play of deeper energies. If I completely embrace this then cancer is simply a manifestation of deeper energies and I can work with those deeper energies. In this state I am completely capable of healing myself and the medical system is simply a player in a larger game. But I’ve never fully embraced this reality. The scientist: the engineer in me is incredibly loyal to the “story” that we have collectively created as our current world-view and so I am engaged in an internal struggle between the belief system I want to embrace and the one that still has roots in my mind. The ego seems to be beholden to the latter and so as it re-emerges I feel drawn back into the current worldview. But I’m not going to go there. In China the inner engineer changed and embraced the wider energetic reality, he started working with the cells of my body and fields of helpers, such as the plant people. But it seems he has been drawn back into the claws of the ego, momentarily at least. I’ve been shown that the remedy to this internal struggle is the gift of death. It is often said that one cannot become a shaman without undergoing death and I think I am seeing this from a much deeper perspective now. I always thought it was only symbolic: a death of an old me, for example, and that is true, but it is more. Death is also the ability to surrender the controls of the mind and move into a state of flow and movement where I become part of a larger field of consciousness. Death is the energy that allows me to let go of yesterday and tomorrow and live in the present moment. It is the energy that allows me to trust in Life. As long as I am afraid of death then I will be caught in the need to try to protect myself from death and that means I will be protecting myself from Life. I have concerns about grieving death: so much so that I’ve stopped myself from doing it and so have locked myself into this state of torment. I’ve locked myself into it because I’ve not allowed the intensity of the grief to move through me. I’ve been afraid that in mourning death I’ll draw it back to me in the form of cancer again. But it is death I grieve: not cancer. The cancer can go and the presence of death can remain as my companion. It is to this place that I must go and in order to do this I need to, at the same time, fully step across the line that I am currently straddling. I have one foot on the side of the shaman: the side that dances with invisible forces that shape our reality: and another foot on the side that sees reality as that only defined and understood by science: meaning I am a victim of circumstances. Being stuck in this space is ripping me apart and I need to take that next little step that is a very giant one in actual fact. This is why I am writing to you really. If I take that step then there is no fear of embracing death as an intimate companion. Death is just another energy: a source of constant renewal and surrender. The reality is that we are all walking alongside death every moment of this Life but we do not recognize it. Sometimes I fear that my writing may come across as somewhat self-indulgent, but in writing to you: especially as some of you might well think I am a little insane in wanting to embrace death as my companion, it really helps me to integrate this shift. I need to write to you all as part of anchoring this change. Cancer gave me this gift of freedom with no conscious effort on my part: now I need to embrace it without the presence of cancer there to force me to surrender. On the practical side I met with my Australian Oncologist yesterday and it was a very strange meeting. I was agitated about the meeting and expected it to be tough given the noises the nurses had been making. I was ready to fight if he gave me any grief about going to China but tried to let go of any expectations. I know that I’ve bene projecting onto the medical system: they have become the symbol of the part of me that is captured by the ego- that remains loyal to the prevailing “story,” and so my relationship with it has mirrored the state of my inner struggle. It turned out that he was so nice and respectful: more so than ever before. He was almost reverential in a way and I was quite taken by surprise. I had some blood tests taken and the results will be sent to me in the mail. These tests will be the first indication of the level of cancer still in my body so it will be a nervous time on one level. But on another level it is just a snap shot of what is taking place inside of me and if I fully embrace the shamanic view then there is nothing to be concerned about. I’ll also have a CT scan on 12 September and get the results on September 16, just 2 days before I go to India. I’m still experiencing pain on the surface of my body near the liver and my new doctor (not the Oncologist) advises me to not do any serious exercise for 6 weeks so I will probably not be playing tennis or doing yoga till I come back from India. The freezing of the tumour that was on the outside edge of the liver has obviously caught a nerve or some muscle tissue, but it feels more like a nerve. What is interesting is that the pain sits right on the third chakra which is the centre for personal identity and power. I’ve always seen this centre as the core of the ego, so it makes senses that I’m experiencing some pain in that location. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Much Love Alistair
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 13:19:42 +0000
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