The Healing Circle Book Chapter Blog Chapter 14: Cathy – Learning to Listen to Myself

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Read Chapter Fourteen:  Cathy – Learning to Listen to Myself

Watch the Video:  Healing Meditation – scroll down to bottom of the page to the audio meditation Alchemy of the Heart

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Blog by Dr. Timothy Walker

Cathy:  Learning to Listen to Myself

I am contemplating chapter 14 Cathy – Learning to Listen to Myself while on a break at a professional retreat in the country.  The retreat is about “Somatic Experiencing”, a therapeutic system designed to facilitate the body’s natural ability to heal itself, especially from the after effects of trauma. Contemplating her story in this context I am struck with the lessons that Cathy ascribes to her journey with cancer and the other health issues that have spun off from it. She says, “I’ve learned so much by listening to my body and listening to how I really feel – it has been an awakening.”

The body has a natural intelligence that moves us toward a wholesome state of balance, homeostasis and healing. Sometimes our notion of who we think we should be, moves our life energy out of balance. As we attempt to live up to our often unreasonable mental image of who we’d like to be, we tend to override the subtle – and then not so subtle – messages that the body sends us through our nervous system.  Training ourselves in paying close attention to the shifting states of body and mind awakens a new language of healing. Just as babies learn language by listening and paying attention to their caregivers, so when we listen to the body, we learn this unique vocabulary and grammar of the body. With practice this language of inner healing begins to become part of our conscious awareness as our mind and body communicate with each other, helping us to return to health and wholeness on every level.

Peter Levine who wrote a book called Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, refers to this language of connecting body and mind as “self-regulation.” A cancer diagnosis is its own kind of trauma that can trigger a stress reaction as we sense or learn about a threat to our very life. Also this kind of threat is hard to understand, hard to locate in a normal way, and we can feel helpless in knowing how to run away from it, or fight it, in order to preserve our life. Levine explains:  “Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the event itself. They arise when residual energy from the experience is not discharged from the body. This energy remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and minds.” Levine and others have studied how animals in the wild de-activate this kind of residual energy in the nervous system after experiencing a life-threatening event. Meanwhile most of us as human beings have lost conscious contact with this innate capacity to deactivate our nervous systems.

When we learn to slow down, pay attention to the present moment deliberately and listen to our own nervous system as it connects with our motor faculties, we gradually reclaim this ability. As we do, we gain more capacity and more inner resources through which to work. Learning this inner approach to working through anxiety and emotional tension in the body is complimented by learning to marshal our outer resources for support in the form of our family and friends. Learning to humbly ask for help and receive it fully with gentle gratitude is the other lesson so many people learn from living with cancer. Likewise, being assertive, taking a stand, and speaking one’s truth is a lesson many learn.  As Cathy says, “In the darkness of the hospital room, I had a breakthrough realization: I felt that nobody had listened to me for most of my life. Things had to change and I had to learn to speak up.” As I contemplate Cathy and her journey of healing I am impressed at how her openness and determination seem like a textbook case of re-framing her cancer diagnosis and her other health problems into opportunities to heal her life on every level.

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Timothy Walker Ph.D. is a mindfulness teacher and psychotherapist  living in Halifax Nova Scotia with over 30 years experience integrating mindfulness into counselling, education and healthcare. He is co-author of the The Healing Circle: integrating science, wisdom and compassion in reclaiming wholeness on the cancer journey and co-founded with Dr Rob Rutledge the Healing and Cancer Foundation. He designed and has taught with Dr. Rutledge the Skills for Healing Weekend Retreats for people living with cancer and their family members 42 times since 1999 in 20 cities across North America touching the lives of more than 1600 people. He has taught at Dalhousie University, Acadia University, and Mount St. Vincent University as well as hundreds of workshops, seminars and retreats Internationally. In his private practice, The Healing Circle, Timothy sees individuals, couples and families and welcomes distant consultations.