“Excessive growth is a sin”, I heard spiritual teacher Thomas Huebl say. His words jolted in my body. In that moment Thomas lost me as a listener. In front of my inner eyes all the people emerged that I had treated with cancer in forty years of practicing. I saw all the cancers growing exponentially, falling apart and in the end killing many of the hosts.
When a healthy body cell turns cancerous, this is what happens; the cell regresses to a more undifferentiated state, becomes primitive and aggressive. The cell stops communicating with surrounding cells and with the organ and the organism it belongs to. It starts growing aggressively. Almost always this leads to pain, suffering, destruction and often to death. Some people are being saved by surgery, others survive, some maybe because of and others in spite of radiation and chemotherapy.
Many, many die.
About a third of our population is dying from cancer each year. The sheer numbers are prove that we are not dealing with an individual problem here. Cancer in its origin is not a problem of the ones that have a cancer. It is a problem of a culture, of a collective.
A little while ago I flew into Calgary. From the airplane I saw Highway 2 going south from the city center. Twenty five years ago I was standing down there outside the city limits, hitchhiking. Where there was open prairie back then, now there are miles and miles of new developments. I could not help than seeing a cancer growing wild, invading healthy tissue and seeding metastases all around.
We all believe in growth. We all want more and more, it is never enough. It is the credo of our lives, it is the basis of our economy. We worship growth. Even though every day we hear the news, see the destruction we are causing, are shocked by tornadoes, floods and droughts, yet we still keep bowing to the necessity of growth. Even if it is clear that it will lead to suffering and destruction, as long as it is possible to make a profit today, it is being done. The result is not only the destruction of the body of Grandmother Earth, it is also the destruction of our own bodies.
Our bodies are a gift of Grandmother Earth. What we do to our body, we do to Earth. What we do to Earth, we do to our body.
What goes around, comes around. The energy we send out, will come back to us. Some of it comes back to us in the moment we send it out, and some of it will reach us through a circle of consequences later. But it does come back.
As a culture we send out the energy of unrestrained growth no matter what the price is. One way in which it comes back to us is as cancer. Every person affected by cancer suffers through this unhealthy and exponential growth. Every cancer patient is a living reminder of a violation of a sacred law: “Excessive growth is a sin.” Every cancer patient is a plea to us to stop and feel what we are doing. Every cancer is a chance of waking up. If we want it or not, it is not medicine and possibly not even science that will show us a way out of this. It is our waking up of a comatose sleep, drugged by glitter of consumption and fueled by unbearable anxiety, the consequence of having lost the connection with ourselves, with the Sacred, with each other, with nature and with Earth.
May we bow down to every cancer patient and thank him/her for balancing our deviations from the Sacred Laws of Creation with their bodies. It is time that we assume responsibility for what is happening.
Poignant! The lessons abound. When will the students learn? Perhaps when we stop thinking we are the masters.
All my relations,
Brad
Oh Roland : I just got news this morning of the death of my cousin from cancer – 2 months from diagnosis to death. She is the sixth first cousin in my family who has died from cancer. When will we learn.
Dear Karin, I am so sorry to hear that. Your message touches me and with deep sadness I send a prayer your way.
Roland
Hi Roland, I agree with your comments and observations. I would like to see some useful and applicable solutions to this situations.
Hello Mary,
From what I can see and understand, we need to find the fear that drives all this growth epidemic. With finding the fear I do not mean a mental acknowledgement but a truly felt sense of it. When we share our fear with each other, when we hold each other in our fear, then the very fear will be a means of connection. Once we connect again with each other, with earth and with the Divine, our fear will shrink and transform into a deeper bond. Then we will grow again , this time not in a physical way as cells in our body or with owning things in our lives but growing in love. The remedy for the unhealthy outer growth might be our inner growth, growing together again.
Thanks for asking for a path.
Roland
Wow, Roland. This whole piece is beautifully put, and your path through especially.
Thanks,
Linda
A strong and clear message that addiction to “growth” (as if “growth” were inevitably and always “a good thing,” as we are told by economists and politicians) will kill us with cancer and many other illnesses. What is growing inside you? What is growing inside me?
Good question. What is it that we allow to grow in us? I hope that wee grow in understanding, in connecting and in sharing.
Beautifully put again, Roland, thank you.
I agree with you Roland – cancer is a disease of our culture. Thank you for this article, a good reflection.
Thank you for this thoughtful sharing. I have had breast cancer, and I have come to understand that in my experience, the cancer cells were a proliferation of a ‘ wrong message’. At a subtle level, I believed that worry and fear were helpful to me, worry and fear became familiar to me through a message I had repeated to myself over and over: I wasn’t good enough to belong and be loved. This was all just beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. I had thought that I had ‘done the work’ of loving and accepting myself (for over 35 years). But, the message of not belonging, of not being worthy of love had been planted deep in my being. This distorted message was repeated in my cells. I am grateful that my body grew a container (tumour) to hold these proliferating mutant cells before they spilled over and spread through my whole being. This is how I understand my experience at this time. And, yes, I believe that persons who experience the manifestation of cancer are showing us all that we are living according to the dictates of ‘wrong messages’ which we repeat as individuals and as a planetary community every day. In my understanding, over-growth and excessive consumption are indicative of fear, fear that we are not enough, that there is not enough (love, acceptance, money, status, etc). How do we breathe deeply into acceptance and love and trust there is enough for us all?
Thank you Solisa, for sharing your personal insights. I agree with you that underneath the need to grow is fear. I also believe that you are right, that this fear comes from not belonging. Maybe reconnecting, being a part of a community that holds us and in which we contribute our gifts might be a way of restoration.