Yellow Stream - A Cancer Diary

Chapter 13: My New Career

7/23/97: Mindfulness and ART in Healing

Today was one of the best days of my life! Gail Teehan and I led a two hour workshop in Leslie Davenport's wellness group at Marin General Hospital. The group was so pleasant and open to experiencing what we were there to give that the two hours just flew by as if they were only minutes. I took much pleasure in telling my story and leading the mindfulness meditation, and I was very impressed with Gail's handling of the check in and Feldenkrais lesson. The feedback was phenomenal! We are ready to take this concept around to healing centers everywhere!

This is our idea: We will set up a non-profit organization so that people who want to take our workshop can do so without financial burden. We will apply for grants and accept donations from wealthy people who have been helped by our cause. We will use this money to offer scholarships to those people who can't afford to pay for our services, and we will still draw our salaries from the corporation. The concept is still under development, and we are open to suggestions and contributions. Naturally, sales of Healthy Cells Grow All By Themselves will help promote our workshop, and our workshop will help promote sales of the book. Eventually, we will publish a book together based on the workshop. All it takes is time and money!

After the workshop we had lunch at an authentic Mexican restaurant and Gail gave me another one of her magnificent healing massages. Her work on my abdomen and bladder continue to inspire my complete recovery. I am very grateful for our relationship!

7/24/97: Insight Does It Again!

In my session with Leslie Davenport this morning, I was feeling a little down because of a series of bad dreams I had the night before. In two of the dreams, I was trying to escape. In the first one, I had to step through a lot of broken glass on the floor. I saw the broken glass and my shattered dreams from the past. During the session, I was able to reframe the broken dreams and create new ones. But, the second dream was more difficult to reframe. In this dream, I saw an opening in the prison fence and a car stuck in the railroad tracks. I managed to get in the car and drive it up the hill that was in front of the car, when I realized that the road had no exit out of the prison, so I was stuck. These two dreams brought out the seed so of doubt in me, and I was feeling a little desperate. In my session with Leslie, I was able to not only reframe the first dream, but I was able to see the joy that I was bringing to people, rather than the suffering, and I felt completely better. I took a walk along Corte Madera Creek, and felt the joy of insight.

7/27/97: Busy Days

I have been very busy the last three days with tennis, work, and family. However, the main thing has been getting the bugs out of the Sniffer! Now they are gone and I feel a little freed up.

My wife is off to Carmel for three days and I have the girls. This should be interesting!

7/28/97: Six Months Later

I spent most of the morning doing work and then went out to play tennis with my younger daughter. We had a nice lunch together and then her friend came over. Later in the day, I met Gail Teehan for dinner and Anna Halprin's class. Tonight, Gail came for me, as my support person, but from now on, I think that she is going to come for herself! She had such a marvelous time.

In Anna's class, we did movements that reminded me of what Gail taught last Wednesday at our workshop. We began with massaging our feet, and then migrated to moving the rest of our bodies and especially our pelvises. As a result of earlier sharing, the theme of the evening was anger and determination. It was viewed that the energy of anger and the energy of determination were of the same nature. My drawing reflected my determination to get well. It began as an image of a boy jumping up and down, but since I didn't have the artistic skills to represent such an action, it turned into what looked like fireworks triggering other fireworks! Or, I even thought that it represented a one thousand petal lotus with each petal having one thousand petal lotuses upon it. It was a marvelous event!

7/29/97: Good Feedback!

Gail Teehan and I had lunch with Leslie Davenport today to discuss her thoughts about our workshop last Wednesday. Her reaction was excitingly positive! She thought that the guided mindfulness meditation was wonderful, and she even wanted to use some of what I said in her guided imagery practice! As far as the Feldenkrais lesson was concerned, her only criticism was that Gail taught the lesson from a script, and it would have gone over better if she had memorized the movements. Gail accepted this comment with grace and charm, and the willingness to do so.

Since my wife was returning this evening, I wanted to make it somewhat special! I cleaned the house with the help of my daughter and bought her some roses. I even offered to make dinner for her, but she had had enough food over the past three days! It was nice to have her home again, and after apologizing profusely for all the mistakes I made, she seemed to settle into being home again.

7/30/97: Short Term Vision

In my session today with Leslie Davenport, I touched on several important areas. The first was trying to decide between a massage Friday morning or playing tennis. Thinking about the weeks ahead, it became clear that a massage would work better for me, even though I have finally been invited to become a regular in a foursome that I have been substituting in for the past two or three years! I see a lot of massages and a lot of tennis in my future!

My short term vision was that a lot of the issues I'm dealing with in regards to my illness will be cleared up in September, after I spend six days with Thich Nhat Hanh and have my cystoscopic exam the week after. Somehow, I sensed that there would be some clarity in my life about the issues around my illness as well as other aspects.

7/31/97: Nobody Wants to Go to Pleasanton!

I spent the whole day in Menlo Park. NGC just bought a company in Pleasanton, and it turns out that the group that I'm part of is the one group that has been chosen to work closely with the merged company! It was proposed that we all commute to Pleasanton, but this did not go over big with anyone except my boss, who lives there. I don't think my live would change much, since I'm a telecommuter, but it radically affected some of the other people in the group. Fortunately, NGC is open enough to reconsider it's decision!

8/1/97: A Great Massage!

Today, I .had a wonderful massage from Gail Teehan! It was a hard decision to make - between tennis and massage, but in the end, the massage won out! I had such a good time!

8/10/97: Ten Days Later

It's been over a week since I've had an opportunity to write in these pages. Two weekends have gone by, and a week of hectic activity. I've finally become a "regular" for tennis with D. F. and E. M. on Mondays and Fridays. I've been a substitute for years and now I'm finally playing all the time. This changes a couple of things around for me. It means that I will have to miss Gail Teehan's Feldenkrais lessons at D. B.'s house. It also ties up two mornings a week, but it's what I want to do.

Last week I went to Anna Halprin's class on Monday, which was led by Julie. We performed a "hands" ritual, and my drawing was of hands in various positions. They were all variations of "loving hands", even though none of the drawings had that name. They were called, "praying hands", "begging hands", "healing hands", and "just hands". The "begging hands" came from an insight I had while doing the ritual: we are all beggars, asking for just one more day on the earth, but there is no one to beg, and no one to answer. Therefore praying and begging amount to the same thing. We need to take responsibility for our own lives and allow other people to live around us.

I had a great Feldenkrais lesson with Gail on Tuesday, and a wonderful session with Leslie Davenport on Thursday.

Wednesday was quite exciting! I received calls from two publishers and met with a third. The first one wanted a copy of the complete manuscript for Healthy Cells Grow All By Themselves! I have been very busy converting the web pages to a document in the format required by this publisher. This has taken all of the time I usually spend writing the web pages.

The second publisher wanted to see a business plan for the book, which contains a synopsis and Table of Contents.

The third was Burton Goldberg, publisher of Alternative Medicine Digest and co-author of  An Alternative Medicine Definitive Guide to Cancer. I told him my story and listened to his. Apparently, there is a lot more to the cancer cure than I or anyone one that I know is currently aware of and Goldberg's book has many new answers. I don't quite know where this relationship is going, but it could be very interesting. He especially likes my ideas of teaching people about cancer alternative, through Mindfulness and ART in Healing. He thought that my idea to form a non-profit corporation to raise money to offer the workshop for free to financially handicapped patients was quite viable.

8/15/97: A Family Vacation

Today, we celebrated my younger daughter's birthday in Santa Barbara. We drove down here yesterday, only to find out that the reservations that had been confirmed were purged from the computer of the Pacifica Suites. Fortunately, someone canceled in time and we were able to get in.

I was especially exhausted today, for reasons unknown. The days before the trip were pretty much normal for me. I had a massage on Tuesday, but had to leave immediately for a meeting in Menlo Park. Wednesday, my wife and I had a joint session with Leslie Davenport. The session was fairly stressful, as many difficulties came up, but I seemed to recover from that session pretty well. So basically, I don't understand why I was so exhausted today.

8/19/97: Another Birthday Celebration!

Today, we took five eighth graders to Windsor Water Works in honor of my daughter's birthday, and wouldn't you know it, there was rain in August in Northern California! We were there long enough to enjoy the slides, however.

The rest of the Santa Barbara trip was about the same for me. I didn't recover my energy until today. I didn't sleep well, in spite of comfortable accommodations. The kids enjoyed the shopping mall, and I really felt closer to my wife. She was very caring and supportive of me during the trip. We had a really nice dinner together on Saturday night, leaving the kids in the room with more than enough pizza and Chinese chicken salad.

8/22/97: Feldenkrais with Harold

On Wednesday, I had another session with Leslie Davenport, and today, I met with her with my wife for the second time.  Things went much better this time, and we seemed to get along better after the session.  I was careful to express what I thought would work for me and I felt that M. really got it.

Earlier, I had a Feldenkrais lesson with Harold at the Feldenkrais training led by Anat Baniel.  Although the session was not as good as I am used to, it worked well for me.  Harold runs several old folks homes and his daughter runs physical therapy studios in the Chicago area. Gail and I took Harold out for lunch to tell him about our workshops.  His reaction was favorable and he said that he would talk things over with his daughter and get back to us.  His story about his illness and how he came to the Feldenkrais training was fascinating, but I won't go into it here.

8/25/97: Anat Meets Anna

I brought Anat Baniel, Gail Teehan, and Nancy Aberle, a Feldenkrais practitioner in Santa Barbara to Anna Halprin's class this evening.  The interaction among these wonderful teachers was wonderful.  One of the members arrived at the class and was actually too sick to do anything.  She wanted to be taken to the emergency room to see if there was anything they could do for her.  She left with the lady that brought her and another member of our group.

This put the group in a rather somber mood, so Anna had us do a remarkable ceremony with Native American overtones.  The movement brought us quite close together and we all felt better for ourselves and for the sick lady.  It turned out that she was able to go home that evening.

8/28/97: Gabrielle Roth

This evening, I attended an evening with Gabrielle Roth, and American Shaman.  Back in 1975 and 1976, I spent much of my time with Gabrielle, as her student and assistant.  Her main contribution to my life at that time was to support me through the worst of my son's bout with cancer.  In addition, I learned a lot about movement from her.  She actually had trained with Anna Halprin.  On the day my son went into the hospital for surgery of his tumor, I was supposed to go to Eselan with Gabrielle to assist her in her workshop.  However, this was not to be.  A month earlier, Gabrielle and I put on an amazing event to honor Rajneesh.  We had about 250 people attend, and it was wonderful.

This evening was very nice for me.  As Gabrielle entered the auditorium, I greeted her and she remembered me by name.  She had just recently told someone about my son's miraculous recovery 21 years ago.

After about thirty minutes of movement, Gabrielle began to speak about trialectics (although she didn't mention the name).  From my understanding, trialectics teaches that for every active force and its corresponding passive force, there is a neutralizing force to go along with them.  Gabrielle spoke about awareness, attention, and action in the context of ourselves, our one-on-one relationships, and our relationships to a group.  These last three concepts fit nicely into the three instincts of the enneagram.  In respect to awareness, attention, and action, Gabrielle spoke about thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations - the three centers of intelligence.  At an appropriate time in the discussion, I delivered a little speech about the advanced stages of these centers.  I used my concept of playing tennis with mindfulness as an example of being about to move before you know how you will move, that is, very instinctually.  The phenomena occurs in athletes when the enter the "zone" of ultimate capability.  This was an example of body awareness that goes beyond the normal range of effort.  I similarly spoke about feeling things before you know what you will feel, giving rise to lucid dreams, clairvoyance, and other psychic phenomena.  Finally, I spoke about having thoughts that seem to come out of no where in which you just simply know.  With these capabilities in place, one being to experience what it is like to be another.  Gabrielle was pleased with what I had to say, and told the crowd that this was the essence of what she was teaching.

By the way, earlier that day I had a wonderful session with Leslie Davenport.

8/29/97: Feldenkrais Training

Today I was Gail Teehan's subject at the Feldenkrais training.  She was a little nervous, as she was being carefully observed by one of her teachers.  I could feel her anxiety, but I went along with her as well as I could.