Why was the tumor still growing? Why was nothing working? Not radiation, not the naturopathic treatments, not the spiritual healing, not the $30K dendritic cell vaccine, not the hypnotherapy, not the prayers, not the reiki. I could feel the anxiety and fear coursing through my entire body, consuming me. I knew I needed a way to alleviate it. 

Dr. Joe Dispenza

I remembered Jackie, my cancer sister from the Oasis of Hope clinic in Tijuana, and how she told me that she often watched Dr. Joe Dispenza on YouTube and how it made her feel better. I didn’t know much about this guy, but I decided to check him out.

Within one hour, I was hooked. Joe Dispenza was all about feeling the emotions of your future in the present. The key to healing was in producing, evoking the emotions of love, gratitude, joy, peace, wholeness, whatever emotion you would feel if you were in fact healed. It made sense to me. 

Dr. Joe Dispenza uses neuroscience to explain why and how our thoughts and feelings can contribute to your personal reality. That you’re sending your body messages with your thoughts and feelings and how to change them. If I’m stuck in a state of fear, anxiety and depression, how is my body going to produce a healing response? How do I get out of that? He prescribes meditation.

Random Stranger or Angel?

That’s when I suddenly remembered something so profound that I couldn’t believe I had forgotten. Prior to my diagnosis, back in March or April of 2018, I had been sitting on the beach, reading a book, watching the waves, bummed that I was in too much pain to surf. An older man in his sixties approached me and asked me what book I was reading. I happened to be reading the book, Ask and You Shall Receive, a spiritual text by Abraham Hicks. This sparked a powerful conversation on spirituality that lasted over an hour.

His name was Paul, and in our conversation, he told me his story, that he’d had stage 4 cancer, but when all treatments failed, he was placed on hospice care. Instead of staying home and waiting to die, he came to the beach to meditate. Eventually, he got into a state of complete surrender after meditating for hours each day. Weeks later, he was feeling so great, he went back to the doctors and they could not find a single trace of cancer in his body. At the time, I had no idea I had cancer, so all I thought was “what an amazing story.”

During our conversation, we talked on and on about meditation. I had dabbled in it myself, but would give up after a few weeks of just being “too busy.” I remember him saying “Prayer is talking to God. Meditation is listening to God. When we meditate, we can hear the divine messages come through.”

He also told me that he completely changed his life, leaving his stressful corporate job behind and now he was in the process of becoming a comedian. He invited me to an open-mic night where he’d be performing that night. Eventually we parted ways. I went back to popping pills and wondering what the heck was wrong with my back.

Trying to Find Paul

After I was diagnosed a few weeks later, I saw Paul two more times. By then I knew there was something more to that conversation. It wasn’t just a coincidence. I wanted to talk to him again, to tell him, “OMG I have cancer!” I wanted to ask him how to meditate, what kind of meditations he did, etc. I wanted his advice.

When I spotted him, I was in my neighborhood, driving by and saw him from the car as he was walking down the street. Once I realized it was him, I pulled over and ran across the street trying to find him. But I couldn’t. I walked up and down the street where I had seen him. It was as if he had disappeared.

The next time I spotted him, a few weeks later, I was at the local farmer’s market which gets pretty crowded. I saw him on the opposite side of the street, but because of all the vendors in the middle, I had to go all the way around. When I finally got to where I had seen him, I couldn’t find him anywhere. I spent the next 40 minutes looking and looking, but never found him.

Meditation: Feeling at Ease

Eventually, in the midst of the chaos of treatment options and MRI’s, I forgot about Paul. Until that day in Feb. 2019, when I started listening to Joe Dispenza, whose message was similar to Paul’s—meditation is powerful and it heals. I downloaded a few of Joe Dispenza’s guided meditations and got started. The mediations were long, about one hour, but I decided I would start doing one every morning.

I didn’t feel anything profound during the meditations, but after seven days, I felt completely at ease, as if all the fear and anxiety completely dissipated from my body. It was amazing. I no longer cared so much about what happened, about the outcome. I had this feeling that no matter what happened, everything was going to be Ok. In retrospect, I realized this was the state of surrender. 

I stuck with the mediations every morning. After several weeks, I started noticing I could take longer walks, even hikes, stand up longer, drive, and sit for longer periods of time. I started noticing my pain was dissipating, so I started to further reduce my medication. 

But I never connected feeling better physically with the meditation. I don’t know why, it just didn’t cross my mind. I think it was probably because I had started to feel better physically a few months ago when my radiation treatments had ended and because of the cannabis oil. I felt that the meditations were simply helping my mental state, putting me more at ease.

How Meditation Works to Heal

Later on, I would have the epiphany that disease is really psychological dis-ease that manifests in the body. So healing will take place when we can get our mind back to a state of being at ease, the opposite of dis-ease. And that’s what meditation does. It’s simply a tool to put our minds and nervous systems at ease.

A lot of times the psychological conflict that is causing the dis-ease to manifest physically is a result of childhood trauma buried deep in the subconscious mind and we may not even be aware of it. When we meditate, we slow our brainwaves enough to access our subconscious mind, to sit with the pain rather than avoid it. 

A Meditation Retreat?

In March of 2019, about one month after having started my daily meditation practice, I saw that Dr. Joe Dispenza had these seven-day mediation retreats that he does monthly all over the world. I checked his events calendar and saw that he had one in July of that year in Portland, Oregon, the closest location to me in San Diego.

But then I saw the price tag: $1800. By this time I had racked up so much debt from treatments and because I also hadn’t been working for 10 months, I was in a financial mess accruing over $40,000 in debt. I was still unable to drive or work. 

There’s no way I could afford to go. But then, I saw through his Facebook group which I had joined, that there’s a scholarship program that awards fully-paid scholarships to a few people for each retreat. So I applied.

I didn’t know whether I would be able to sit that long on an airplane, or if I’d be in too much pain, but I felt that because I was feeling better and better, I would be able fly and sit long enough to go by July. After submitting my application, I forgot about it.

Three months after I had started meditating, on May 1, 2019 it was time for my next MRI.

Read what happens next in My Story: Part Seven