Help for Cancer
Radical Forgiveness - A Complementary Treatment for Cancer
By Colin C. TippingFounder/Director: The Georgia Cancer Help Program
and Together-We-Heal, Inc. (a non-profit corporation)
When I suggest emotional/spiritual healing to people with cancer, they almost always misunderstand me. They hear it as emotional support. They think I either just want to comfort them, or show them how to have a more positive attitude. They don’t get that something like forgiveness might be the key to their getting well. I see their eyes glaze over when I go on to say that emotional toxicity is most likely the cause of their cancer, and that forgiveness, if used with appropriate treatments and lifestyle changes that address the physical, is a ‘first-line’ primary treatment.
Their inability to hear this as a strategy for survival, is a measure of how brainwashed we all are into thinking that treatment for cancer must always be harsh, drastic and violent. With our War-on-Cancer mind-set, it’s hard to imagine that something so seemingly ‘soft’ and gentle as forgiveness could be the answer to our problem.
Yet science, particularly psychoneuroimmunology, is showing that forgiveness and other forms of emotional/spiritual healing, is extremely powerful, and that anyone with cancer who doesn’t include forgiveness in their treatment protocol is ignoring a huge part of the problem and, by extension, a large part of the solution.
Our fear-based approach to cancer blinds us also to the possibility of our cancer being our friend and loving messenger. Rarely does cancer arrive without a clear message designed to move us toward healing.
Almost invariably, the loving message it brings concerns releasing repressed or suppressed emotions connected with something that happened in the past — usually between two and seven years prior to the onset of the cancer. This is usually a severe loss or disappointment or a major and prolonged emotional upset, or both.
This might be loss of a spouse or child through death, loss of a relationship, loss of a job, etc. I have yet to find someone who has cancer who does not have something like this in their history - something that could easily have been the starting point - the cause even - of their disease. I am convinced that cancer starts out as an emotional/spiritual disease and only later moves into the body.
Jane came to me for hypnotherapy and counseling. She had had a mastectomy. On the second visit she arrived distressed because an MRI had revealed minute spots of cancer in her brain. The doctors were surprised because only very rarely does cancer spread directly from the breast to the brain. This seemed to me worthy of investigation from an energetic standpoint.
An attractive woman in her early forties, Jane had not been in a romantic relationship for about seven years. As we explored this, she touched into some grief she still felt about one relationship that had been extremely passionate and intense. She had clearly worshipped the man and planned to marry him. After four years, she discovered that he was married already and had children. He had no intention of leaving his wife.
Jane was devastated but could not stop seeing him. It took her another four extremely painful years to pull herself away from this relationship. Clearly, Jane had suffered a broken heart — something that most women with breast cancer have experienced — and she had shut down her emotions completely.
As she was going out the door at the end of our session, Jane said in a whisper, “I put him in the attic.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Well, everything I had that had any connection to this man, or that would remind me of him, I stuffed in a box.” She replied. “I then put the box up in the attic. It’s still there. I haven’t touched it since.”
I told her to sit down and tell me that again. I had her repeat the same thing three times. Suddenly, she saw the connection between the box in the attic that represented her broken love affair and her brain cancer.
“Oh, my God,” she said slowly. “
That’s him in my head, isn’t it? He’s in my attic.”
I told her to go home, go up into the attic and take down the box. I told her to bring it with her to her next session, and we would go through it piece by piece. I planned for her to tell me the story around each item until she had totally disconnected from his energy and released the pain that she had repressed. Then we would do the Radical Forgiveness work to complete the healing. Jane understood that this might be the key to her getting well and was very excited. Tragically, she had a seizure the next day and was taken back to the hospital. She died a month later without ever touching the box in the attic. I believe that, even though she was excited about releasing the pain, the idea of going through the box and re-awakening to all those memories was probably more than her soul could bear, so she made a decision to make her transition.
I visited Jane a number of times during that month. I knew, from the way that she squeezed my hand, that in telling me her story, she had released a good deal of the pain. Just by agreeing to bring the box down out of the attic, she had expressed the willingness to let go of the blame and anger.
In Radical Forgiveness willingness is everything — Spirit does the rest. So, even though the disease process moved her towards death, my sense was that she had healed her life and that, as a result, she was able to slip away peacefully — more so than if she had died without ever sharing her pain.
We can only wonder whether the outcome would have been different had she been able to bring down the box and go through the Radical Forgiveness process and release all that toxic energy before the onset of her cancer — or even when it was first discovered. I personally believe that it would have.
O. Carl Simonton, M.D., the oncologist who made guided visualization a respectable mainstream treatment for cancer, said it very succinctly; “Cancer is perfect feedback.”
The only thing I would add to that is that the feedback is always loving and comes from your Higher Self.
If it could speak, the cancer would probably say, “You have been living your life in a way that serves neither you, nor your divine purpose. You have put your priorities in all the wrong places; you have put everyone first before yourself; you dishonor yourself all the time and withhold love from yourself. You stuff your feelings, worry about the future, hold on to resentments and losses of the past, and you will not forgive. Living life this way has caused your soul to become very sick and it has decided that it does not want to live any longer in this manner. This is a signal to change. This is your chance to heal.”
At first blush, this seems like a harsh, critical message - not at all loving. That is true, but it is designed as a wake-up call, to show you how you need to change. It is not to make you feel guilty, so please don’t go there. It is only when you see where you are and accept yourself totally just the way you are, that you can change. And cancer is a message to change, to let go of what is not real and what is not you. It’s basic message is that it is time for the REAL YOU to show up, and for you to understand that no-one is more important than you, and that it is OK for you to feel your feelings.
The reason I have written the message in this way is that it would apply to most cancer patients because it more than hints at a set of characteristics they nearly all share. Principal among these are a tendency to put everyone else before themselves; to deal with life by suppressing emotions and to be very unwilling to forgive. These are the ones that kill the most people. A study by Stephen Greer, in England, shows that people who suppress anger and resentment, are much more likely to get cancer than are those who feel and express their feelings.
Besides genetic predisposition, this study showed that suppression of feelings is the only scientifically proven predictor of who in the population might get cancer. And it is important to realize that it is not emotion that is bad. Quite the contrary, feeling our emotions is good for us. The problems come when we suppress or “stuff” them. It is clear then, that emotion that is “stuffed” is highly toxic and needs to be released if we are to reduce our chances of getting cancer, or to heal from it. Obviously, anyone who has cancer, or is a high risk for getting it, should make every effort to heal the emotional event that has caused, or might cause, the cancer. For those who are in remission, it is absolutely essential to do the forgiveness work in order to prevent a recurrence.
To ground this is a practical analogy, think of your body as being like the filters typically found in home heating furnaces — the kind we have to clean from time to time to ensure that the furnace works efficiently. Just as these filters were designed to allow air to move easily through them, the same is true of your body. Life force must be free to flow easily through it.
Whenever we judge, make someone wrong, blame, project, repress anger, hold resentment, etc., we create an energy block in our body. Each time we do this, our filter becomes a little more blocked and less energy remains available for our “furnace.” Sooner or later the filter fails and, starved of the vital oxygen it must have to keep burning, the “flame” dies. When our bodies become too clogged for life force to flow through easily, our body starts shutting down. This is when we manifest disease.
When we talk here of “the body,” we include not only the physical body, but the subtle energy bodies which surround us as well. These subtle fields, which constitute our mental, emotional and spiritual bodies, envelop the physical body in layers, each one an octave higher than the other. They each resonate harmonically with the vibrating patterns of the physical body, enabling consciousness (mind) to interact with the body. This is what we mean when we speak of the “body-mind continuum.” The reason that I suggest Radical Forgiveness over other forms of forgiveness is that it is all encompassing, works at the energy level, and happens very quickly. Ordinary forgiveness takes its own time. You can’t force it — time will heal it, we say. But when you have cancer, that’s not good enough. You want results NOW!
A friend of mine took ill recently with a particularly virulent strain of flu that typically kept people in bed for 10 days or more. It hit him hard, too, but instead of giving all his power to the virus, he decided to do some inner work around it, work that might shift the energy pattern holding the virus in place. Using a process called “Active Imagination,” which simply involves writing down thoughts as a “stream of consciousness,” he came upon a hitherto unconscious and unresolved emotional issue. He used Radical Forgiveness to clear the issue, and the flu disappeared almost immediately. He was working full-time and feeling great within two days of the onset of his illness. This served as a powerful demonstration of the medicinal power of doing inner work in the form of Radical Forgiveness.
But what if the illness had been cancer rather than the flu? And suppose the disease had begun as a deeply repressed emotion. Would the treatment still be that he get in touch with the repressed feelings, feel them fully and then let them go?The problem with that is that, unlike the flu attack, which probably moved from his subtle body into his physical body in just a few days, the energy pattern of cancer might have taken many years to move from the subtle body into the physical body. The question that haunts us then becomes, “How long will it take for the disease process to fully reverse itself using emotional release work alone?”
Conceivably, it could require the same number of years it took for the disease to manifest — not very practical if you have cancer. Yet, the way we think about time becomes a factor in and of itself.
We used to think of time as something fixed and linear until Einstein showed that time is relative, and one of the factors is consciousness which itself is related to our vibratory rate. The higher our vibration the more quickly we can effect things in the mental and physical domains.
If we possess a low vibratory rate, it will take far too long to reverse the disease process of cancer energetically. (It will automatically will be low if we are in fear, hold anger and resentment in our beingness, think of ourselves as a victim, and/or have our energy locked up in the past. Incidentally, it will also be low if we have a poor diet and toxic lifestyle).
For the majority of us, this represents our consciousness most of the time. Therefore, few of us could reverse a disease like cancer fast enough relying solely on releasing the emotional cause of the disease — that is, unless we found a way to raise our vibratory rate at the same time. This is where Radical Forgiveness comes in.
Radical Forgiveness can be the answer because, by its very nature since it is a spiritual phenomenon, it works at a higher level of consciousness. Radical Forgiveness occurs in present time, as a shift in perception; a sudden flash of insight or spiritual realization. This in turn creates an almost instantaneous and dramatic release of energy — which is the energy of resentment, anger, sadness, guilt, and grief, all of which are the energetic causes of cancer and other diseases of the immune system.
If this is true, what kind of insight is it, or what manner of realization can it be that could possibly reverse cancer? Stated simply, it is that life is inherently perfect, divinely guided and always unfolds for each of us exactly how it needs to unfold for our highest good. Whereas with ordinary forgiveness, which actually never gives up the belief that something wrong or bad took place, with Radical Forgiveness we come to recognize, when we look at things from a spiritual perspective and see the ‘bigger picture.’ so to speak, that in truth, there is nothing to forgive and that nothing wrong, or right, ever happened. That means we can then give up our addiction to the victim archetype and, in surrendering to Spirit, let go of our need to control. This is the key, for it is in the act of surrender that we raise our vibration, bring our energy into present time and heal our wounds.
Though all this happens in the mental body, it is not a left brain mental exercise. Neither is Radical Forgiveness a feeling. It is pure insight — the sudden recognition of a higher truth. However, the route to this level of consciousness where the shift can happen is through the heart. This means feeling the feelings first. Nothing can move while those feelings of anger, resentment, guilt and fear remain repressed. As John Bradshaw pointed out, “You cannot heal what you don’t feel.”
There is no short cut. You must do something to get in touch with your feelings so that the energy can flow. Anger work, art therapy, breathwork — whatever it takes. Only then can you use the tools and do the exercises of Radical Forgiveness that will bring about the shift in perception that will lead to healing.
Anne came to one of my retreats. She had been given, at most, three months to live. She was depressed and had little life force left in her. She only came because her church had collected for her.
On the third day she recalled an event that occurred when she was 2 1/2 years old, involving her older sister, that had made her believe that she was utterly worthless. When she realized how much of her life she had lived according to that belief she began to feel angry. She beat cushions with a bat until she was exhausted, did some art therapy and then a breathwork session. The next day, she did some forgiveness worksheets around her sister and her husband.
By the time she left, her life force was way up, and she was all fired up to find an alternative program that would help her beat the doctor’s prognosis. After two weeks of frantically searching for something, she realized that her healing would come through prayer. So, she worked with a couple who literally prayed with her for a week. Upon her return, she went to her oncologist who examined her. These were his words. “I don’t know how to explain this, but you have absolutely no cancer in your body.
I could say it was a spontaneous remission, but I believe in God and I am not willing to describe it in any other way than as a miracle.
”This woman serves as a wonderful example of how raising the vibration through Radical Forgiveness and prayer reversed the seemingly hopeless physical condition in days rather than years. This is not an either/or choice. In fact, it is always wise to combine this with whatever medical treatment you feel comfortable with and feel is right for you. This may not always be in alignment with what your medical doctor will advise, but if you get strong feelings about what is best for you, follow those feelings. I can’t tell you how many people I have in my office who deeply regret not going with their inner guidance. You have to remember that medical doctors have a very limited vision. Their training is very deep but narrow. They have only one model and they are very invested in it. You are free to combine many different approaches and to be the director of your own healing.
Mary Pratt, a co-facilitator at many of my retreats, had stage three colon cancer. The doctors wanted to operate immediately. She asked them for 30 days, and they reluctantly agreed. She went to a little cabin in the mountains and stayed there for a week, meditating and working on forgiving all the people in her life, including herself, using Radical Forgiveness. She fasted, prayed, cried, and literally went through “the dark night of the soul.” She came back home and worked with several practitioners to cleanse her body and strengthen her immune system. At the end of the 30-day period, the surgery was performed. Afterwards, the doctor wanted to know what she had done, for the cancer had all but disappeared and instead of the radical surgery they had said would be necessary, removal of the cancer required only minor intervention. That was five years, ago and she is now entirely cancer free.
Another approach is to go ahead with whatever treatment the doctor recommends, but with the viewpoint that the treatment is buying you time. Ordinarily, since there is no real cure for cancer, the unspoken assumption is that the cancer will come back – one day. The medical profession’s definition of success is five-year survival. It is a reasonable assumption therefore that all the treatment did was to address the symptoms not the cause. But that doesn’t mean you don’t tackle the root cause nor take steps to rehabilitate the immune system that the treatment trashed, after the treatment is over. If you use the time that you bought to do the radical forgiveness work and the emotional healing, and you do all you can to strengthen and nurture your immune system back to health, the chances are you won’t have a recurrence. You will have heard the loving message of your cancer and used it as a chance to heal.
Looked at this way, Radical Forgiveness is one of the best preventive systems available. Radical Forgiveness Therapy, which I created for this purpose, clears the energy in the subtle bodies long before it becomes a block in the physical body. When I help people resolve forgiveness issues by using RFT, I am not only helping them heal a wound in their subtle body, I am helping them prevent disease occurring in the physical body. I am convinced that if we keep the energy flowing in our bodies as it was designed to do, we never will get sick. Radical Forgiveness enables us to release anger, blame and resentment. It reduces our need to judge and to project the parts of ourselves that we find unacceptable onto other people. It enables us to realize that our enemies really love us (at the soul level), and that they are there purely as our teachers. Then our hearts open. It shows us how to let go of control and surrender to life in the moment so we can heal — even from cancer. Through Radical Forgiveness, our relationships improve, problems dissolve immediately, we become more loving of other people as well as of ourselves, and we raise our vibration. That’s when miracles happen.
Colin Tipping
September 1998