Thank You Cancer, I Love You Cancer
Dear Community,
It’s been a few months since taking a hiatus from the bi-weekly writings on the New and Full Moon. I’m thrilled to be back with updates on my health, some initial insights from this cancer journey, and a look ahead at what our team is developing for 2024.
The results of my latest scans are great news.
Nearly eight months after diagnosis and six months into treatment, more than half of the tumors are gone. And the most problematic tumor, which is in the lung, has reduced size by another 50%. Initially measuring 3.5cm in diameter at the time of diagnosis, it’s now down to 0.4cm.
Given where things are, I will be in immunotherapy treatment for one more year. While I still have to stay the course in all the ways, I feel well on the path to being cancer-free.
I’m happy to report that I have enough energy to begin creating again. I’ll start by picking back up the New and Full Moon writings with a slightly different take. Each lunar cycle, you’ll receive an email highlighting ‘INSIGHT on…’ a particular theme. For the Full Moon in two weeks, you’ll receive INSIGHT on Contentment to kick things off.
For today’s New Moon writing, I offer insight into my approach to healing through cancer and delve back into why I use ‘Thank you Cancer, I love you Cancer.’ as a mantra. I hope the story has universal aspects that you can apply in your life, and if you know anyone moving through cancer or you have a loved one or friend who might benefit from what I’ve written, please forward it along.
You’ll also see a mention of some of the things our team is cooking up for 2024. A new website, INSIGHT Digital Practices, in-person workshops, and retreat offerings are all in the works. Our team, our offerings, and our community are all growing, which is so exciting.
Most importantly, I want to thank you for all of your support and for being with me through this unexpected chapter in my life. Thank you for walking alongside me and bearing witness.
I've read every message and feel the prayers and good thoughts coming my way every day.
This community has been a cornerstone of my healing, and I will forever be in awe of the power a felt sense of community has to help us heal.
10,000 gratitudes wouldn’t be enough, so I’ll leave it at one more…
Thank you.
_____
In my last New Moon writing in August, I spoke a bit about what is behind this statement, ‘‘Thank you Cancer, I love you Cancer.’’ I’d like to return to where we left off and pick up this thread.
This expression of gratitude and love for cancer, especially considering what a ravaging disease it is, encompasses much more than I can share in a short piece of writing. I hope the following serves as a start.
‘Thank you Cancer, I love you Cancer.’ isn’t simply a platitude aimed at superimposing a positive attitude toward cancer for the sake of being positive. The meaning goes beyond that and ultimately translates on multiple levels.
The Physical + The Mental + The Emotional
These cancer cells are cells in my body. They may be misguided cells that divide before they mature, but they are still a part of me. More importantly, these diseased cells and the physiological components responsible for healing these cells are all part of the same network. Every cell, healthy and unhealthy, is part of one system.
How I talk to one cell is how I talk to all cells.
Our body’s systems are profoundly influenced by what we say, think, and feel. Becoming consciously aware of this and learning to direct our thoughts skillfully is essential to sustaining health and vitality.
From a physiological perspective, we now know that an emotion like anger is associated with increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system, leading to changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and hormonal responses like increases in cortisol and adrenaline.
In short bursts, anger is plenty healthy and an essential emotion to express. Yet sustained over time to the extent it burrows into the psyche, such a systemic infiltration of anger becomes problematic. Stagnate anger sours into resentment and negative core beliefs and can suppress and imbalance many of the body’s vital systems.
On the contrary, feelings of love and gratitude activate the parasympathetic response, boost the immune system, release hormones like oxytocin, reduce stress levels, and contribute to better sleep.
Love does heal, after all.
The Energetic
On a metaphysical level, the life force (energy) produced from authentic feelings of love and gratitude has a higher frequency than the energy of anger. The higher an energy’s frequency is, the more power it conducts. That’s not to say that anger doesn’t transmit plenty of power; it does. However, the energetic power of love exhibits a higher frequency and a higher-grade potentiality for change.
From a tantric perspective, energy (prana) is our most precious commodity; becoming skillful at managing it is vital. We learn to gather it, collect it, and place it. Doing so, in turn, nurtures and refines its quality.
Enhancing the quality of our energy directly informs the central nervous system, and the state of the body’s nervous system influences all other systems (i.e., immune, endocrine, digestive, circulatory, etc).
Going one step further, the state of the nervous system directly impacts the epigenetic layer above the genes. This epigenetic layer is a complex regulatory network that directly affects the expression of any given gene. The genes are what they are, but the epigenome regulates the expression of genes, determining when and to what extent they are activated or silenced.
That means that if I create feelings of love and gratitude vs. anger or resentment towards the disease, I am altering the systemic nature of how my body responds to cancer by optimizing the epigenetic layer of the genes responsible for fighting the disease.
That’s good. We want that to happen.
So I choose to say thank you, cancer; I love you, cancer. Thank you for what you’ve done to raise my awareness of the impact my thoughts and feelings have on my physical well-being.
The Personal + The Spiritual
I have a profound appreciation for this cancer for what it has revealed about my relationship to both myself and to death.
In many ways, the yoga tradition is founded on the transcendence of death. This is in part what drew me to the practice in the first place. When we take savasana (the corpse pose) at the end of a yoga class, the idea is that we are practicing letting go and surrendering to the inevitable. We are training ourselves to release our attachments at the highest level.
From 2003-2006, I had a daily practice drawn from a Tibetan Buddhist meditation on death. The practice includes looking into the eyes of everyone you meet throughout the day with the remembrance that someday they will die, and so will you.
This focus on death awakens us to life.
If you had asked me this time last year, I would have told you I had reconciled and made peace with the reality of death. I would have told you I had let go of my fear of death.
On May 5th, 2023, that proved not to be true.
Hearing the words “Stage Four Cancer” brought me closer to the reality of death than any other moment in my life. I was shocked and scared and scrambled for days to try and make sense of what was happening.
I learned everything I could about metastatic melanoma, nutraceuticals, and cancer-fighting diets. I got on the phone with the head of Sloane Kettering’s melanoma department, the doctors at Cedars, UCLA, and MD Anderson. I talked with every expert in the field I could find.
I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t eating. And I couldn’t stop my obsessive thinking.
Eventually, I realized I was doing all of this to avoid one thing: my fear. By endlessly ‘doing,’ I was keeping a torrent of fear at bay and doing everything I could to deny it was there and avoid it altogether.
As this awareness dawned, I also realized that I hadn’t felt that kind of fear since I was a child. And in the rubble of my exhaustion, overwhelm, and fatigue from back-to-back days of adrenalized fear, an inner call emerged to get quiet.
The calling was so intense that I stopped everything: the problem-solving, the research, the answer-seeking, the debate around entering a clinical trial, all of it. I did a complete stop, and I got quiet.
The guidance I heard in that quiet was to get out of my head and silence my mind through all of it. Not just in meditation. Silence the mind and attune to the intelligence beyond the mind. The yoga tradition calls this field - cosmic intelligence.
Call it Source, Creation, Great Spirit, call it what you will; from then on, I made it my most sincere commitment to be in that listening.
I told my doctor I needed six weeks to get my head straight and to get my whole heart on board with stepping into this trial. I explained that I didn’t want to put these drugs into my system if I was feeling any resistance or distress about doing so. I could read that he was reducing me to his theories about me, and it was clear the theory was: I was fucking crazy, and I wasn’t comprehending the severity of the diagnosis.
Over the next few weeks, I went into extensive meditation. I devoted all my attention to receiving an understanding of what the source of this fear was. From morning to night, everything I did was in service to strengthening and evolving my listening. My focus was single-pointed.
I received intensive structural bodywork three times a week, breaking apart frozen fascial adhesions and tissue that was fixed and holding decades of compacted fear. I was working with a master body technician who, at one point, put surgical gloves on, had a couple of people hold me down for stability, and then proceeded to reach into my mouth and work for hours to release the frozen tissue in my jaw.
She pushed the edges of what I thought a jaw could take. As I released decades of stored emotion and crossed well beyond a tolerable pain threshold, I repeatedly roared, giving voice to what I had inadvertently silenced over a lifetime. I was purging decades of stagnancy, and in the process, my nerves, nerve centers, and the brain-body connection were coming back online.
It was intense, to say the least.
On the softer side of things, I did light therapy, sound therapy, and acupuncture; I sat in a hyperbaric chamber, did holotropic breathwork, and spent entire days in quantum healing practices tracking my history of traumas.
It was a complete body-mind-heart-spirit renovation, all in service to get at the root cause of my fear.
And in a matter of six weeks, almost to the day, I got there.
The Visceral
Everything pointed me to one moment in time. One instant.
The moment took place at about 11:00 am on Wednesday, February 25th, 1981. I had stayed home sick from school that day. My mom walked into my room, sat down next to me, put her arm on my back, and told me my dad had just died. I was eight years old.
And what I felt for the first time, I mean genuinely the first time since that day roughly 43 years ago, was the absolute terror that came with realizing I would never see my father again.
As I dismantled these frozen places in my body that had held these emotions for so long, I was finally able to feel my fear's visceral, energetic power.
All the years of yoga, meditation, and philosophical study. All the therapy, the plant medicine, the immersions, retreats, and self-inquiry. Throughout the years of facilitating, teaching, and helping so many people to see, sense, and feel more clearly, I finally arrived at a place within myself that I had been seeking for the last 25 years.
At last, I accessed the inner sanctum of that little boy's heart. I had been in the vicinity of that child with my awareness for the last two decades. Healing. Nurturing. Letting go of layers of protection. But I had never accessed the precise moment my heart locked down that day in 1981.
Sitting in the truth and the visceral sense of those feelings (now at 51) opened a profound range of emotions.
This is where I was from June through October. In my own proverbial cave, tending to the reclamation of my heart.
I believe, in part, that what happened was that amidst the shock of the diagnosis, combined with the fear of my own death, the pain and fear I had been holding for so long found a way out. A door opened when I heard the words, ‘Stage Four Cancer,’ and this systemic fear I had been holding broke through.
Our bodies live in the present moment while we carry a catalog of memories from the past.
Our past traumas, particularly the more traumatic ones, can take root in the body's tissue and surface in unpredictable ways. We might feel something in the present moment, yet not be aware that the feeling is coming from something that happened 40 years ago.
The moment I heard my dad was no longer alive, a part of me froze. Subsequent layers of that ice formed as protective coping mechanisms that stacked and compacted over time. It helped me not to feel the fear but left me unconsciously under the tyranny of it at the same time.
All of that broke open upon my diagnosis.
In these past eight months, I have taken all the skills and practices I usually offer to others in my work and turned them back on myself. The door opened, and I walked through it.
Today, after months of purging, crying, kicking, screaming, and releasing, I have reclaimed those lost parts of myself.
Turning inward, I dismantled critical layers of protection, revealing just how much of me remained in hiding all these years. Thankfully, these parts are now being seen, accepted, given attention and affection, and most importantly, receiving profound love and appreciation.
So I choose to say thank you, cancer; I love you, cancer. Thank you for compelling me to break down the protective mechanism hidden in my psyche and unwind the essential nature of my fear and control patterns. Thank you for opening me to the depth of my heart’s capacity to love.
This is me evolving.
This is me healing cancer.
This is cancer giving me new life.
The Professional
I’ve spent the last ten years helping corporate, political, community, and creative thought leaders radically refine their relationship with themselves. I’ve witnessed organizations, teams, communities, and perhaps most importantly, family systems heal and thrive.
My team and I have spent the last three years honing and refining this sense-making tool and its comprehensive framework to enhance its capacity to awaken the body, mind, heart, and spirit.
The work is called INSIGHT.
Until now, word-of-mouth or referral was the primary way to know about my one-on-one offering. There was a cryptic mention of INSIGHT on my website, but that was it.
For the longest time, I prided myself on being hidden in a cave and hard to find. While I stand by the power of word of mouth and referrals, I now feel compelled to bring my work out into the world in a way I never have.
The parallels of my inner and outer world are not lost on me. That INSIGHT is a creation that came from my heart and soul and that I thrived by having it tucked away and hidden is poetic, to say the least.
The irony is also not lost on me that INSIGHT is a highly honed set of tools to help awaken and illuminate one’s physical, mental, and emotional intelligence in order to help them expand and illuminate their most essential self.
Well, the essential self and everything that stands in the way of experiencing the essential self.
Having turned toward the deep fear I was carrying, I now feel free of it. The byproduct is that I am more driven and inspired to bring this work into the world than ever before.
So, what’s the next clear step for me to take?
It’s time to take all of this forward and do what I love the most.
_______
In January of 2022, we launched a year-long INSIGHT Apprenticeship program, and for the first time, I worked with a cohort to detail the ones and zeros of how to facilitate INSIGHT. This summer, after three years of dedicated study within the method, Julianne Aehree became the first trained INSIGHT Facilitator.
This Fall, we started the second cohort with three incredible humans, one of whom is a long-time dedicated student and dear friend, Erin Rose Ward. With Erin’s vast training and previous experience, she has recently started offering INSIGHT sessions as an apprentice.
The three of us make up this initial triad of INSIGHT Facilitators. We aim to generate an immutable force for good and deliver a body of work that serves anyone called to access and expand the profound intelligence and power alive within their body, heart, mind, and spirit.
In the coming weeks, look for the launch of our new website as we formally open INSIGHT’s doors to a broader community for the first time.
The site will include a growing digital library of classes, and in the coming months, you can practice in person with Julianne, Erin, and me as we eventually begin hosting in-person workshops and INSIGHT-specific retreats. We will start those in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.
We will also create live digital offerings as time and space allow.
It is a time for us to gather, connect, and evolve in community. Unified through a commitment to seeing, sensing, and feeling the true nature of what is arising at any given moment and maintaining the integrity to be honest about what that truly is. That is the vision.
If you’re a current community member, you’ll begin receiving INSIGHT emails, including my writings, every New and Full Moon. As it’s relevant, we will send out workshop and retreat announcements as well as the announcement of new digital practices as they get added to the library.
To ensure you receive these emails, you can get ahead of it by putting Kevin@thisisinsight.com and TheTeam@thisisinsight.com in your address contacts.
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Finally…
I am arriving on the latter side of this cancer journey an entirely renovated version of myself. More of me is available to both myself and my loved ones.
There is also more of me available to serve you and anyone compelled, inspired, and committed to awakening and understanding the extraordinary potential of our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual intelligence.
With life being as precious as it is, I’m certain there is no other way I want to spend my time.
Thank you for being a part of what we are creating. It’s a privilege to be connected.
I look forward to all that is to come.
With love,
Kevin