The importance of following one’s intuition keeps landing in front of me from different sources. In the last two years, Terri Tate and I have been teaching a workshop called Trusting Your Inner Guidance. Our focus has been on the significance of intuition, especially in making treatment decisions, and learning ways of accessing that deep inner knowing.

I just finished reading Cancer and the New Biology of Water, by Thomas Cowan, MD, and was surprised to find the value of intuition mentioned in that context. He talks about the difference between knowing and deciding. “Deciding often comes about through fear, fear of not making a living, being alone, or that if you don’t do conventional therapy you will die. Knowing comes from a place of freedom, a place in which you know that the choice you make could be no other.”

I find myself again in a situation of making a decision about treatment for progression of cancer. I have been here many times in the past 30 years and I would think it would get easier, but I still have to work at not making a decision out of the fear that if I don’t do conventional therapy I will die. If that hasn’t happened in 30 years, why would it happen now? But the fear is still there.

I was reading this book predominantly because of the third section, which is a basic cancer therapy framework. He gives very specific recommendations for things that people can do themselves to “treat” cancer. His goal is “to empower people and to provide individuals with low-cost options that can be used safely and effectively at home.”

I have followed Dr. Cowan’s protocols in the past with great success, so I am very interested in what he has learned recently. This book just came out in late 2019 and has some new recommendations that I will follow.

But what surprised me was his suggestion to follow your intuition. He tells the story about a doctor friend of his who asked his new cancer patients to gather information from as many different types of practitioners as possible, and then to take at least a week to meditate or pray about their course of action.

“The information gathering was a way to connect with the patient’s deciding activity, centered in the brain. Once they had done this, they could go deeper and connect with their inner path, a process more connected with their heart. It was his experience that patients who chose therapy, whichever one they chose, had better outcomes when the choice came from the heart. Making heart-centered choices is when the miracles tend to happen.”

In the Trusting Your Inner Guidance workshop, we talked about the pathway between the heart and the head, and learned that 90% of the traffic on this path went from the heart to the head. Only 10% went from the head to the heart. We clearly have a lot of information in our hearts that many of us ignore when we are deciding or “thinking” about a problem.

To quote Dr. Cowan again, “Rather than attempting to eradicate disease, what is urgently needed is for us to wake up, to recognize the energetic and spiritual nature of our being, and let this awakening reorganize, rearrange, and heal our physical organism.”

This feels like I’ve come full circle, back to the Teilhard de Chardin quote that was so meaningful to me in the beginning of my healing journey. “You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.”

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