So, we don’t want to get lost in all this fabulous spiritual stuff and forget our story of me getting inflammatory breast cancer! Right? There I was with the diagnosis, and I decided to start fasting.
Fasting to survive cancer has some really good scientific proof behind it right now. This relates to life itself. We think of cancer as this an insanely powerful being that takes over us, starts growing in your body, and nothing’s going to get it to stop. But really, when you look at cancer cells themselves, they’re very weak and they’re very fragile.
Cancer cells don’t handle stress well. So, they have a hard time surviving the stress that fasting causes. What happens in fasting is that your body shuts down many functions to help you get through the fast. Right? Cancer cells are out of control, but they’re not robust. The body stops feeding unnecessary cells the starvation process. Not good news for cancer.
So, me, in my wisdom… I decided that if I was going to fast, I was going to do it really, really well. I wanted to attach it psychologically as well as physicallly.
Two things were happening at the time. A whole bunch of my family came to be with me and support me. They were feeling guilty about eating while I starved. The same way we feel guilty about taking a drink when we’re around an alcoholic who has quit drinking.
I was also thinking about what I had read about fasting putting stress on the cancer cells, how cancel cells have a hard time surviving starvation. I wanted to make sure that my starvation was done to the fullest possible extent.
First, I was on a water fast because doing any sort of juice would put sugar into my body. I went 100% water. I decided we might as well add a mental element to it as well. I told my family that I needed to not only fast, but I needed to convince my body that it’s starving and that there is a terrible, horrible crisis going on. I decided I needed to beg for food, and be told no. To simulate the worse possible situation.
I figured that unless I was really begging for food my body might not deprive those cancer cells of life. I didn’t want to fast in a meditative, joyous state. That wouldn’t feel like a crises. I wanted my body to think it was starving to death.
They went along with me. My poor family!
So, I begged everyone for food, and they all shouted, “No” at me. “You can’t have any.” It was really funny. I probably defeated the whole process because we laughed too much.
My poor little grandson was like, two and a half. He didn’t understand the joke, and he didn’t understand what was going on. There I was begging for food. Everyone is shouting, “No!” at me. I just remember the poor little guy. He finally comes up to me with his cookie and he’s like, “Here, you can have my cookie!” Which is big for a little kid, right? They’re the ones who are always begging for stuff. He was giving me his precious cookie! In the end, that kind of thing is healing in itself.
But the funniest thing of all was a time my husband and I went to the grocery store. We had to buy something. Right as you come up to the checkout was a cooler that had frozen ice cream bars in it. I started begging Wayne for the ice cream bars. “Please let me have an ice cream bar, please.”
He looks at me and says, “No! You can’t have an ice cream bar.”
I kept begging, “Please, I want one so bad. I’m so hungry!”
He looks at me and says, “No. You can’t have one. I fed you last week.”
You should have seen the looks on the faces of everybody standing there in line.
Probably I did the whole thing wrong. We had so much fun that it didn’t really create the effect of feeling like I was starving myself to death… because it was just too funny. And, mostly, we’re really lucky that they didn’t call the wife abuse cops on us.
Independence and Indifference
So, in our last chapter, we were talking about the Sufi heart with wings. The wings represent independence and indifference. We were also talking about Native societies. One of the things that I’ve heard from my native wisdom keepers is that they say that the elders held the wisdom in the tibe. These awake, self realized elders engaged happily with everybody else. They always had a beautiful, lighthearted, laughing relationship with life itself.
Spirituality doesn’t have to be serious and dramatic in any way. As a matter of fact, it’s probably better if it isn’t. Just think about what we’re trying to do. You’re trying to get rid of the ego, of the nafs, right? Get rid of this thing that feels like it has captured your consciousness. It feels like a cancer. Like something outside of you that has taken over your heart, taken over your mind, so that you don’t know who you are underneath it.
We need to starve these nafs the same way I was trying to starve the cancer. Laughter is the best way to do it. Sitting still and trying to hide from it is not going to be as beneficial as fooling it.
One of the easiest ways to fool it is with lightheartedness and laughter.