Kat's Cancer World

Sacred Recovery – Finding My Way Back

Kandinsky

Between the fires, the earthquakes, people being rounded up by gun point, women losing the few rights they had, and rampant racism, it feels self-indulgent, to keep posting about cancer and my healing process. But someone wrote me the other day and said, “I need to know where you are in your process, a friend of mine was just diagnosed. She wants to know if there’s life after treatment.”

I have always been obsessed with the connection between health care, politics, spirituality, and economics. Cancer has made me even more sharply aware of the intersection of all four. The only reason I was able to approach cancer the way I did was because a dear friend ponied up a sizable check. Because of those monies, I was able to create my own protocol, I was able to buy cannabis and other supplements and get acupuncture after every radiation treatment. Because of those monies I got to take the year off.

No question I have issues with the American Health Care System, but calling on Robert F Kennedy to fix it is akin to calling on Ann Coulter to lead a guided meditation, opening to energies of the cherubim and seraphim.

Caroline Kennedy warned senators today, about her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr, calling him what he is, “a predator” – “whose victims have ranged from family members to parents of sick children.” I grew up in Virginia, I have friends who witnessed Kennedy’s behavior first-hand and it supports everything she said in the interview, complete with tossing live little furry things in a blender to feed his hawk.

I will continue to post here monthly re: Cancer, because I know the information I have can be of real benefit to people who’ve just been diagnosed and are trying to figure out their treatment. I am ALSO posting daily at Political Witch on Substack. 51% of white women just voted away the reproductive freedom and sovereignty of every woman in the United States AND every girl child yet to be born. The resistance is forming.

Here is this month’s the witch is healing her cancer. x0

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It’s been a very long time since I’ve written and for those of y’all still following me, thank you. I am enormously grateful. Trying to figure out supplements and food protocols at this stage is beyond confusing. Do I stay on everything I’m taking? The expense is a bloody nightmare and I need more cannabis rather than less. If I stop taking what I’m taking will the cancer come back? Do I wean off or do I pulse the pills? I’ve added some carbs to my diet – Ezekial English muffins, the occasional baked potato, and brown rice and quinoa and every now, and when I’m taking care of Lainie I eat a graham cracker. Still quite thin, but I don’t have Cachia due to my constant monitoring and perseverance. Lainie is 93, she’s not Joan – who I loved beyond all reason and miss daily – but we get on, and that’s whats important.

Very badly depressed and mentally not quite functioning for most of November and December. I got to researching peoples’ experiences after cancer. As ever, I love that I am not terminally unique, and I am not the only one who finds herself throwing herself on the bed on a daily basis, dissolving into tears, and screaming as loud as she can into her pillow.

What is it about this culture that doesn’t want human beings sharing their true experiences and connecting over what they have in common? Why isn’t connecting over what we have in common more valuable than money? When I read of people’s experiences with standard of care on the social media pages that refuse to publish any info re: alternatives, I am horrified. Clearly, we’re programmed to look for saviors and when the saving doesn’t work, we continue to look for reasons to believe.

I needed to get the focus back on me. If I was going to have any quality of life at all, I knew I had to get out from under the sucking depression, the screeching insanity of the voices in my head, over the top rage, and the utter lack of powerlessness and disassociation I’d been feeling for over a year. I know my way around crazy. I know how to accept whatever I’m feeling in any given moment and move on. I’ve been consciously rocking the alchemical since 1992, but what I was experiencing felt way beyond my old abilities – if I was going to heal I was going to have go deeper within than I’d ever gone. I was going to have to find my way back to the moment before time began, wherein I’m floating in the lush of what is and all is possibility.

In 1981, after the birth of my son, I joined a New Age group. We were studying Hermetic Philosophy, using affirmations, and channeling. It was wonderful – and then it wasn’t because there was no room for feeling. The thrust of the teaching was you create our own reality so everything that happens to you, you create; the best of times, the worst of times and everything in between. There was no room for the darker feelings, just love and joy. I’m all for love and joy but not when its used to deny a very human, feeling response to external circumstances. The point of spirituality is to develop the humane; the humane act is what embodied spirituality looks like. The humane is of the body and unique unto human beings.

In the craft there is room for all feelings and I am fearless when it comes to walking the darker ones. I am witch, everything contains its opposite, not in terms of opposing but in terms of compliment, and I needed to find balance. I needed to be thinking about creating a new world for me, that did not rest on past real estate.

My resentment was off the charts – I’ve been working for the Goddess and the tribe of women and humanity for over 40 years and now, at 72 I’m supposed to create yet another new world!? Go fuck yourself. The voices in my head were vicious (you’re too old, writing success will never happen, you’re poor, you will be alone for the rest of your life) and so extreme the point of living was quickly being lost. Still, I’ve never been fearful of the question – why did I create this? Was I out of my fucking mind?

Every energy path in my body to anything good or positive happening was blocked and locked down. I could feel it, I could see it, and I needed to open the blocks so I could know sunshine energy again. For over a year, I consciously dissociated from everything and everyone I’ve known and held dear.

In the dream, there was no air and I was standing alongside a giant wall of darkness. I touched it, it felt synthetic and dead, like covid. There was no air. I woke up terrified and shook for two days. Walking the dark has never frightened me, but the dark in the dream did; this dark was going to kill me. It was revealed during meditation that I’d been shown the shadow of the collective unconscious,.

I re-read the books that changed me, books with information that freed me to grow along the lines of soul. There is a constant re-alignment to soul and soul purpose throughout your life. The books included: The Spiral Dance, The Women Who Run With The Wolves, Women’s Myths and Secrets, The Power of the Witch, Celtic Woman’s Spirituality, Be A Goddess.

I read The wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, which everyone over 40 should read immediately. I read Eckhard Tolle’s the Power Now, which has some wonderful insights into brain as tormentor and the pain body. I have always had issues with All Is Mind. Tolle says All Is Beingness. One of the first workshops I ever taught back in the day in Brooklyn, was called, Strengthen the Beingness. The more I consciously commit to the beckoning healing, the more synchronicity I’m experiencing. Syncronicity is not an unusual experience for me or for anyone walking the path of consciousness, but as you get older it’s much, much deeper. A stronger grip per se on what is and what can be; a final culling of the unnecessary.

My identity, as I knew and trusted it to be, was thoroughly erased by Cancer. How was I supposed to get out from the underground and walking the planet again? My brother, who has been a god through this whole thing, gifted me a writing workshop with Dani Shapiro at Kripalu and an Airbnb in which to stay. I was conditioned and programmed to believe I’d no value unless I was helping others so usually when I go to something like this, I know everyone by the time I leave and I’ve helped them rearrange their lives. Not this time. I was there for writing. I wasn’t there to help those who felt left out, feel part of and I wasn’t there to make friends. I was there for my craft. I was there as one among many and all I could think about was a line from The Wild Edge of Sorrow: “We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us, it is truly an emotion that rises from the soul…” I’m still grappling with how much of healing and recovery needs grief to get there. I was so jangled over taking myself seriously as a writer, I was shaking.

Omigoddess, it was cold, and my GPS doesn’t always love me, and the walk from the parking lot to the entrance of the building had my teeth chattering, and there was no witch energy at all and the food sucked and I could only get coffee downstairs and I had to pay for it. Tea was free; of course it was. But oh, what an experience! I stayed present throughout, and boy was it awkward. There were 160 women there and 300 following the workshop online. 90% had never been to Kripalu before, and most of the women I spoke with weren’t writers, but felt they had a book inside them. Back in the day I would have said tell me the book you have inside you. That I simply nodded and kept the focus on me was a first for me and I didn’t die!

No computers, no cell phones, we wrote by hand, in journals, Dani gave us two invaluable exercises with which we were encouraged to experiment. The class broke apart into groups, worked/wrote with prompts, and then we read the writing aloud to those in the group. For me to read something unfinished, not perfect, out loud in front of strangers, was yet another first and I didn’t die!

I was so proud of myself. The whole way home from Great Barrington I was yelling – I DID IT!!! I DID IT!!! AND I DIDN’T DIE!!

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I’ve been using different modalities, that I’ve taught and worked with before, to open rivers of feel good in my being. Tapping, affirmations, chanting, meditating. I change words around so the exercise is more effective for me – I love self-talk – honestly feeling whatever the feeling is and moving through it without denial or judgement and jotting it down. I point blank refuse to deny any of my feelings, and I point blank refuse to judge them as negative or wrong. All feelings have right use, you just have to sit with them till you know what it is.

I have the distinct feeling of being out of the game and I’m ready to accept and explore that. In your 60’s you’ll feel the push, by your 70’s it’s a whole other country. Tolle talks about NOT building an identity, an entire world, out of your wounds. I agree and have been engaged in some extraordinarily rigorous self-honestly, rooted in loving me more, not less. It’s decidedly not rooted in fixing or making myself a better person. I’m already a good person and life is not a self-improvement exercise and we’re not here to be working on ourselves all the god-damn time. It’s way more fun to find your g-spot, which will probably do more for you/me/and everyone else, than reliving and wrestling an aspect of your personal trauma into the ground for the umpteenth millioneth time, thus guaranteeing more and similar trauma from said wound. We all need way more fun.

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It’s an internal time – wintering – and outside my window the snow is coming down and my car is covered with ice once again. Space heater is humming in my bedroom, the cats are purring, sandalwood is wafting, and the candles are lit on the small altar I set up. The room where the big altar is gets too damn cold. I went for a long walk Sunday, it was only 33 degrees and I wanted to get outside and breathe fresh air before the frigid hits. It was a gray day, a snowflake here, ice mounting there, and everything looked dead: the mountains, the trees, the bushes, and the shrubs, all dead. I smiled.

Nothing’s dead, all that glorious life is simply underground taking a little rest in the heart of the Lady. Just like me. It's good to be a witch. And it’s good to know - The People United, Can Never Be Divided.

Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools. Kat x0x0x0