Natural Cancer Remedies Meditation & Awareness Raising

Meditation has a long history of being helpful for healing across many religious traditions. Meditation is a natural cancer remedy that operates in a multitude of ways and we strongly recommend it as one aspect of your holistic cancer treatment.

	Meditation contributes to relaxation. Relaxation has a positive impact on immune functioning, which assists the healing process.
	Meditation changes the dominant brainwaves and encourages more of the healing brainwaves that usually occur during deep sleep.
	Meditation brings awareness which gives insight for change. We become aware of what we no longer wish to tolerate. We get in touch with our experiential Inner Wisdom and have insight into what we can do differently – physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. It has to do with a self-defined quality of life, choices, decisions, and how you come to interpret your own experience.
	Meditation has been shown in research to reduce negative moods of depression, anxiety, anger, irritability and confusion in patients with cancer. This is positive as each of those emotions not only feels less than desirable, but they also decrease the immune system’s capacity to deal with the cancer naturally.

Most people feel much better after becoming regular meditators. They come to be more at peace with themselves and the world, have a greater sense of trust and improved coping capabilities. It feels sufficiently good and rewarding for it to become a regular activity. And some form of meditative practice was undertaken by each of the survivors I interviewed in one of my studies about healing. It was a natural part of their own holistic cancer treatment.

But for some people the good feelings don’t come quickly. And for some it doesn’t come smoothly. So I’ll address these issues shortly. Meditation not only increases positive hormones which increase the immune system’s capacity to deal with cancer and other diseases; meditation increases self awareness.

Why is awareness important?

Without respectful self knowledge, you will not recognize the need for change, nor how you might be able to implement that change in a way that will work.  Such changes might be small, even tiny, in the eyes of others, however these are changes which are important to you in your life.

People feel strongly about doing awareness raising (such as meditation) or not doing it.  This is partly because when people are put in touch with their bodies they start feeling. With high symptom levels, lots of strong beliefs and negative emotions they can become very uncomfortable.

So what do we actually do to raise our awareness?

If you are of conservative religious background you may want to do this part within your religious tradition. 

For those who don’t come from such a tradition - you have a choice…

What you are trying to do is to do is to encourage your body to go into a deeply relaxed state and for your mind to go into neutral for a short period each day.  You can use meditation from various religious traditions

Christian, Hindu

Buddhist,Tao

Sufi

Or the almost religious-free Transcendental Meditation (TM).

You can use a more physical approach such as

Yoga

Tai Chi

Qi gong

Progressive muscular relaxation

The advantage of doing a physical type of meditation is that the process not only keeps the body occupied but it also stills the mind.  And mind-racing is a very real problem for people under stress of illness or caring for people who are ill.

What is best?

OK having made a list of what’s possible… are there some that work better than others?

It depends…

But I won’t just keep you dangling…

Progressive muscular relaxation

As a general rule in my research I found that the progressive muscular relaxation, so loved by the psychologists in the small city where I did my research into healing, was the harshest.  The effect was just more than most people could handle. The awareness levels rose more quickly than the content could be handled. By this I mean that they started to feel very strongly about circumstances and how they interpreted events. Their feelings were very uncomfortable – lots of anger, guilt, fear, irritability and their judgement about others and self judgement were also more than they wanted to cope with. So I’d only recommend it if your symptoms are well managed and your psyche reasonably robust. This is usually taught by a registered psychologist who is then likely to give you a tape they have made. And if you have their support to handle all the strong feelings that come up then you can make some brisk progress in your self development and a much faster route to inner peace and improved coping.

However most of the people in the research group were sure they didn’t have psychological problems and so they didn’t want to go to see a psychologist (not to mention the cost). Now don’t get me wrong most of them didn’t have any more psychological problems than average, but anyone who has to face cancer and may feel horribly ill will naturally build up grief, resentment and anger at life, along with the ordinary baggage we pick up over our life  Psychologists under these circumstances can be very helpful.

I do need to tell you about some other research – it suggested that although self awareness increased with progressive muscular relaxation, the beneficial changes in brain chemicals, particularly melatonin, did not and so many of the good feelings and improved immune function did not occur. Hence it is not as good a natural cancer remedy as some of the other forms of meditation.

Religious meditation

Religious approaches come with their own set of issues.  Religions come with beliefs. Some of these are strong beliefs which the believer “knows” are right and therefore should not be questioned. These beliefs can cause a lot of pain if they are challenged either by others or your Inner Wisdom. If you meditate within your tradition and you have a lot of these strong beliefs you may find some difficulties as personally rigid belief systems may get in the way of your personal journey.

You have to be open to wherever your God or Higher Power or your experiential Inner Wisdom (for want of better words) wants to lead you.  And where you are with your beliefs (even traditional beliefs) may not be what your Higher Power wants for you right at this moment.

Self hypnosis

A gentle approach can be achieved through self hypnosis and most of the research participants found that learning how to do this was the most helpful way to start. However once they were on their way to recovery they wanted something stronger.

Other

Gentle gardening, walking, needlework or fishing worked for a few.  I include it because some people found it worked for them. But most people became “productive” – the need to weed, catch another fish, walk so many kilometres - and that took away from the intention, which was to go into neutral. This type of mindfulness meditation can be very effective, but you have to stay “in the present” and let go of achievement.

Holosync

I am sorry if this next bit sounds like an advertisement, but it works.

There is one other way which is exceptionally useful and I only found out about it in the last few years.  This is a method which uses binaural technology. It comes on CD and you listen to it through stereo headphones. The idea is that one sound comes through one ear, a different one through the other ear and the brain tries to synchronise them. As the brain does that the CD slows the brain waves down and the person goes into the meditative state.

The people who sell it make absolutely no health claims about it at all.

I found it when I became very ill after going down with shingles in 2002.  After six months I was able to do less than half of what I was able to do before going sick.

I used to meditate a lot when I was ill several decades ago. I complained to a friend about being ill again and talked of going back to the meditation. But it was such hard work and I didn’t feel like working, so I was complaining.

My friend suggested I listen to her advertising CD of Holosync.  With only 7 minutes of advertising spiel over the top of the meditation sounds I could feel myself going into the familiar meditative state. Hmmm…

So I borrowed my friend’s full CD for three days.  And it was brilliant. I knew it was going to work. I relented and spent the several hundred dollars on my own CD and recovered in two weeks! It was worth every cent. As I said earlier, they make no medical claims whatsoever.

But they did have a 100% money back guarantee for a year so there was no risk.  If it didn’t work I could get back the money I had shelled out.

So if you want a completely religious-free, simple, easy way of meditating then I can recommend Holosync by Centerpointe. This is really the simplest, easiest and, I believe, the best way to develop awareness and help the body in its recovery. Now I know this sounds like an advertising spiel, but it got me out of a bad fix and it worked better than biofeedback, other meditation CDs and DVDs and self hypnosis material that I have used. And it was so much easier than my previous type of meditation.

A last resort

For the totally non-religious, non-spiritual people who just don’t want to do any of these, and for others who might like to do it for variety, it can be useful to go to the beach and watch the waves. (I had to suggest to a macho male that he take a can of beer if he needed an excuse – but told him only one as we didn’t want him under the influence of alcohol).  The idea is that you stop physical activity and stop thinking. Focus on the waves as they come in, and out…

An old miner would go out to his old gold mining site in the desert and just sit for hours.

A farmer would climb a mountain at the back of his property and gaze at the countryside.

It’s not working for me

Some people feel that meditation or relaxation is not doing any good at all and they stop doing it. 

They just do not see or feel a cause and effect between increased awareness and the meditation or relaxation exercises. Partly this is because they expect meditation to make them feel “better”. While it does for many it doesn’t for some but it does increase relaxation and it increases awareness.

The more psychological pain you have, the more you need to make sure you do your personal work.  Generally we cause the emotional pain through unhelpful beliefs and the way we talk to ourselves about them. Mostly you will need to stop beating yourself up in your self talk. It can be very helpful to find a counsellor or support person to address these issues with.

Awareness is a two edged sword

Awareness is a necessary part of getting better.  If you aren’t aware, you won’t be able to change. If you don’t change you are less likely to get better - because the person you are is the person who became ill.

But when you become aware you may be one of those who hurt.  Who wants to be aware when they suffer enormous pain, when they are exhausted, when they don’t sleep well and when they may be facing the end of their life?

As a result few people will undertake awareness raising activities without a good understanding of the reason behind it all.  It just hurts too much.

Being a pain to others

And those few who do their meditation and relaxation in spite of the pain can find psychological coping skills that are not always a positive experience for others.  In other words, doing meditation or relaxation can make you a pain to others.

Some of the most uptight, rigid, not really nice to know people in the research group were the strongly religious people (both eastern and western traditions) who meditated a lot and who knew they were right in their faith.  The impact of this was that they were not able to question the consequences of what they believed.

So why on earth would you do it?

Because, despite one’s initial feelings, meditation does improve immune functioning, the body’s hormonal cascade and psychological functioning. Remember the scientific and medical research shows that it does work and does lead to improved outcomes. It is a natural cancer remedy. And…

Survivors in my research all did some form of meditative practice and developed a strong inner peace, built on their strengths, and developed a moment by moment enjoyment of life by letting go of their negativity and focussing on who they were, where they were and who they were becoming in the time they had left. The majority lived for decades.

Carlson, LE, et al. The effects of a mindfulness meditation-based stress reduction program on mood and symptoms of stress in cancer outpatients: 6-month follow-up. Support Care Cancer. 2001;9:112-123

Speca, M, et al. A randomized, wait-list controlled clinical trial: the effect of a mindfulness meditation-based stress reduction program on mood and symptoms of stress in cancer outpatients. Psychosomatic Medicine. 2000;62:613-622.

Massion, AO, et al. Meditation, melatonin and breast/prostate cancer: hypothesis and preliminary data. Medical Hypotheses. 1995;44:39-46