A Journey Through Cancer
by Deborah Rose

Just before Tsultrim went into retreat in February of 2001 she generously advised me in a 21-day Chöd retreat I had undertaken during the final weeks of chemotherapy treatment that I was receiving for breast cancer. The purpose of the chemotherapy was to shrink the large tangerine-sized tumor in my right breast; if that objective was not successful I would need a mastectomy.

On Halloween night, in the year 2000, I received a phone call informing me I had breast cancer.

Right after returning from a month in France I noticed that most of my right breast was hard and I thought oh, some kind of lymphatic congestion from the endless - and delicious - local cheeses. But no, the surgeon at the other end of the phone told me, with great kindness, that the biopsy indicated I had infiltrating ductal carcinoma. From the bone scan and other tests she could see that the cancer had not traveled beyond my breast to the surrounding lymph glands but the cancer was a stage III, called advanced local cancer, and the situation was urgent. Treatment was called for immediately .

In that moment and in the millions of moments that followed, huge tidal waves of emotions swept over me. Shock, panic, fear and anxiety scattered me to places I had never inhabited before the C-word came directly into my life. I worked very hard not to split off and disappear, but to breathe into all the new and terrifying places and to love myself fiercely no matter what. I continued seeing my acupuncture clients during this time, but the focus of life became practice: 2-3 hours of yoga a day and another 2-3 hours of meditation. Those practices and twice-a-week acupuncture were enormously helpful.

In the time I set aside for meditation I worked with many of the practices I had accumulated over my lifetime: Native American chanting, vipassana mindfulness, guru yoga visualizations and the familiar Catholic prayers from my childhood. The Dzogchen purification chant OH Shuddhe Shuddhe became a great friend. Over and over again I would sound out the words and visualize the five colors cleansing my energy field.

As the time approached when the first of the four chemotherapy sessions was scheduled, I was quite afraid, but I knew in my gut the awful chemicals were going to save my life, and with luck and many prayers, save my breast. Before the actual treatment, my oncologist had invited me to meet the chemotherapy nurses and see the chemo booths. I was surprised to see how social and upbeat the place was. The nurses were kind and very loving, and the chemo chairs! They were dark pink leather recliners! How could a girl not be comfortable! It was so strange, so incongruous to be in a place of pleasantry that was also a killing ground, where death was defied, where cancer cells were poisoned to extinction. And yet, all the patients hocked up to the IV's were placid and calm.

The beginning of my first chemotherapy started out just like that - placid and calm. The nurse hooked me up to a saline IV to wash out my bladder. My dear friend Nadine was with me and together we created an altar with Mary, Tara and the reclining Buddha. It was indeed quite pleasant sitting in the pink leather chair, in the little pink room watching the first winter snow gently falling outside. But then, the red liquid, the powerful adriomycin poison, began dripping and it was awful, awful, awful. I felt cargo trucks running full speed up my left arm, aggressively slamming right into my heart. I started screaming to Nadine "protect my heart, protect my heart." I wanted to rip the IV out of me and jump out of the window, get away from these people, tear out my right breast and find a cave in Tibet and heal. I never ever wanted to do this again. Surgery would have been far better. I felt trapped, tied down to a monster that would not release me from his grip. Nadine began whispering just let yourself ally with the drug, it is here to heal you. "Fuck you" I said "I am perfectly fine, get this out of here, get it out of my body. Please, please, please help me find a way not to do this."

I bit my hands and began punching parts of my body. Sweet white Mary was irrelevant as was kind Tara. I needed Sinhamukha with her flayed skins, Kali with her lolling tongue, old fat ladies lifting their skirts, Sheila-na-gigs, lewdness at all costs. If I were alone I would have started masturbating to try to counter the intensity of the feeling. I told Nadine and both of us began howling with laughter. She told me all the dirty jokes she knew. And then she made wild outrageous faces and absurd gestures. She grabbed all my available body parts, pulling hard. She even started screaming and the nurse ran in, saw us laughing and was confused. The nurse tried to help. Mind-body tapes? No, nothing that would bring me more into my body - no, no, I needed to go out of my body.

Finally the red liquid ended and the next one, champagne colored, did not attack me. And then it was over. The oncologist arrived at the very end (where had she been?) and informed me I had had an unusual but not uncommon "psychotic" reaction to the steroid that is part of the chemo-brew. I didn't believe a word she said. I couldn't understand why all those kind people would put me through such a malicious experience. I whimpered all the way home feeling like a small and very injured animal.

After burying myself in the arms of friends and crying with great abandon, I found myself laughing with these same good friends and later I ate a huge meal. As the days passed with no nausea, thanks to the very effective medications, and no fatigue, I moved into a period of bliss. I experienced myself as a pulsating light field and I was able to easily send the light into all the directions of the universe and then pull it back to myself. The white A practice came alive on a 24/7 basis! I walked around in a state of ecstasy constantly offering the light for the benefit of all beings.

This state lasted through the second chemo which was smooth and easy thanks to large amounts of the sedative Ativan which antidoted the psychosis-inducing effect of the steroid. The hair loss was worse than I imagined: I loved my long reddish hair and I didn't realize how attached I was to it as "my identity" until it began to fall out. As my friend Nadine said "and that, too?" Yes, that, too. Fatigue set in but I was able to remain remarkably joyful until the third chemo, which led me right into a thick swamp of depression. Ah, change, how predictable.

I cried for two weeks solid, two weeks and a day, except when I was with clients. What happened was this: Minutes before the third chemo infusion the oncologist examined my breast and implied a mastectomy would still be needed. I didn't want to lose my breast. I was enormously attached to that clump of tissue. And so, I plummeted. My two best friends who had come to be with me didn't know how to guide me out of the black hole I was rapidly descending into. Miscommunications with them ended in a cold anger on my part. The nurse forgot to sedate me before the evil steroid arrived in my veins. Thankfully Nadine was able to intervene but I began to disappear deep into myself.

For the next two weeks I went down into a most difficult hell realm. I felt abandoned by my closest friends who were not able to meet me in the darkness of my despair. I felt betrayed by the oncologist who had led me through the torture of chemotherapy to no avail. (If I had started with a mastectomy I would only have needed radiation). And yes, I knew intellectually the chemotherapy might or might not work in terms of saving my breast; the oncologist had made no promises but I had leaped on the wagon of hope and screw her anyhow for giving me her crummy opinion minutes before the treatment which required enormous composure on my part. What terrible timing! Didn't she know anything about human psychology? Worst of all, I felt abandoned by my own intuition, which repeatedly told me I would not need to give away my beloved breast.

I lost my way. The large subterranean cavern I found myself in had not one iota of light. I could find no one to help me. None of the Chöd deities. I called out to Tara but she never appeared. Even Guru Padma Sambhava who had always been a sure guide, I couldn't find him either. I felt crushed by isolation and loneliness.

I saw clearly that my attachment to 'how I wanted life to turn out' was causing me great suffering… and cutting me off from the great vast flow of light and love that had been readily available to me. Out of this place my resolve to practice Chöd arose.

I have a great affinity to the Chöd practice and I have had instructions from Tsultrim many times but I have never mastered the coordination of the drum and the bell with the singing and the visualization. Out of my sacred objects box I pulled out the practice book, my damuru, my bell, a tape of Tsultrim singing the Chöd, a CD and video of Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche singing the Chöd and the red booklet explaining the rhythm of the drum. For the first couple of nights I watched the video of Norbu several times and practiced the drum. Then I sat at my shrine with the tape player on listening to Tsultrim, working with the drum and the bell and the voice. After about five days I moved inside the practice, that is, I actually started doing the practice and I immediately got stuck. I thought I was supposed to feed my breast to the demons. But I couldn't. It was mine, goddamn it. No demons or even highly realized beings were going to chomp away at my breast. I saw myself in an immense tug of war with all the Superior Guests, inferior beings and those I owed debts to on one side and me with both my breasts on the other. I watched my attachment become increasingly solid, and I tortured myself for not being able to release it.

Out of the blue Tsultrim called me. I had written her a note a couple of months before asking for her prayers and here she was, exactly the person I needed! She was able to show me that I was making the practice too literal: she reminded me that the inner Chöd is a simple gestalt of asking your demon (the cancer in my case) who it is and what it needs and then giving it to them. Oh god, what a relief to get that guidance.

I went back to the practice and the demon immediately revealed herself to me as a frightened monkey child whose screeching was wild and desperate and deafeningly loud. She was crazy with desperation and so noisy I could hardly stand it. I was terrified, repulsed really by the intensity of her neediness. Or was it my own neediness? All that I have walled off and hidden deep in the bowels of my subconscious? And yes the monkey child wanted a breast, but not mine, a monkey mother's breast. In my imagination I gave the child a monkey mother and she clung so tightly it was as if she wanted to annihilate her own individuality.

I kept practicing and imagining all of this and crying and crying for my own isolation and loneliness. Despite my dear family members and my large extended family of friends, I felt very alone facing into the prospect of death and/or major surgery. Alone, unbearably vulnerable and so fucking needy.

Every night I went in to meet the monkey child. Some nights the screeching was so frightening I would have to take a break from the practice and lie back on my bed exhausted from the effort of paying attention to her. When I conveyed this to Tsultrim, she wrote back: "The intensity of the demon is what has been ignored and repressed. So when she first gets a voice she will be very intense, but this is not you, she is a disowned part of your psyche. Have you drawn or painted or sculpted 'her'? The more she can come out and speak the more she will relax. You are doing great, through love and compassion she will be liberated."

And then: "Great that you're 'paying attention' to her. As you do she can relax into Dharmadhatu. Remember, feed to complete satisfaction, if she seems she can't be satisfied, imagine that she is. By not paying attention to her she will and has gotten your attention in other ways, like cancer. But now you're onto her and this will really help. I know once I started to pay attention to my abandonment demon everyday she began to change and eventually completely relaxed. Each day go back in and let the form come out of your body, she may look different each time, don't assume you know her. I'm with you!"

But the monkey child wouldn't relax. She couldn't get close enough to the mother so I put her inside the mother and even then she was still desperate. Finally she let it be known that she wanted to go out the tunnel of this world and back into the primordial soup. I imagined her doing this and the screeching stopped. I finished out the remaining days of my commitment to the practice and on one of the last days I woke up with a dream that the glass case around my midriff had broken and I was carefully disassembling the shards so no one would get hurt!

I shared this story with Jyoti, a spiritual teacher who is also a seer and I asked her to tell me, if she could, whether the monkey child was a part of myself or a kind of possession. She looked for a few moments into space and said the child was not "me" but had come to make her home with me when I was between 3 and 5 years old. That was exactly when the health of my older sister took a turn for the worst. Medics were often rushing to our house to perform emergency procedures to save her life. And I, the frightened baby child was pushed aside and even my loudest screaming got no attention. Eventually after the crisis abated, I was held and cuddled but those moments of abandonment left their mark and if I assume Jyoti's seeing is correct, a similarly abandoned being, an etheric monkey child, entered my energy field and clung to me. Now she was gone.

When I finished the last of the chemotherapy sessions I anxiously returned to the breast surgeon, the one who had originally done the biopsy and then had called me that fateful Halloween night. On the authority of her seasoned fingers, the state of my breast would be analyzed and a determination made as to what should happen next. When she palpated my breast, she smiled and said, "Congratulations, the tumor has disappeared."

I felt oddly calm. Hadn't I known this would be the case? It was I who had betrayed my own knowing.

Western medicine being what it is, the medical process did not stop there. The surgeon wanted to do a "ghostectemy," to go in after "the ghost" of the tumor to definitively gauge whether any cancer cells were still present. Given what has just happened, that I had exorcised a demon with the Chöd practice, I thought a ghostectemy sounded terrific, completely in synch with my inner process. The surgery was scheduled. There was no cancer left in my breast but some microscopic cells were found in my lymph glands. More treatment was recommended which I agreed to and endured for several more months. It was exhausting and difficult but the apocalyptic moment when I faced into the fierce eyes of MahaKala had passed. My life - and my breast - were spared, thanks to those awful chemicals and all my practices, particularly the Chöd.

EMAHO! I am very grateful. May my efforts be of benefit to all sentient beings.

Deborah Rose @2002

 

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