Over my 30-plus years as a physician in the field of integrative medicine, my patients have given me the gift of supporting them during their most vulnerable times, opening up their lives, and putting their trust in me. Through my experiences with them, I have come to believe that there is always a pathway for healing because we have choices. And if we do not see a path, we forge one.
Among the many patients I’ve had the privilege to treat, some stand out for the profound impact and lessons they impart. One such story is Rachel’s, whose journey exemplifies the transformative power and healing that lies within each of us when we start living from the heart.
Rachel was a dedicated meditator and lived an exemplary life of health. Despite her healthy lifestyle and commitment to meditation and mind-body practices, she developed aggressive cancer in her 30s that manifested in the center of her chest (an area symbolizing the heart in Chinese medicine) and spread to her neck.
Due to the seriousness and aggressiveness of the cancer and her young age, she received an experimental chemotherapy protocol that was multiple times stronger than the standard chemotherapy regimen. I supported her through the chemotherapy process and its debilitating and life-threatening side effects that nearly killed her. When it was finished, the treatment was deemed a success. Her cancer was gone.
I continued to treat Rachel, and about a year after she completed her chemotherapy treatments, I saw her at a meditation retreat center. She had just returned from her follow-up CT scan and visit with her oncologist. She hugged me and shared the news with great joy: “My scans are clear!” But for some reason, the words I heard were, “My cancer is back.” It was odd, but I dismissed it.
The next day, Rachel woke up with a huge mass on the right side of her neck. The cancer was back, full-blown. And this time around, with her type of cancer and the chemotherapy she had already received, the probability of responding to another round of chemotherapy was extremely low.
I instructed Rachel to leave the retreat center as soon as possible to see her oncologist for an urgent evaluation. Rachel got into her car and drove away from the retreat on the same dirt road she had traveled many times when going home. It was a desolate road, and she usually coasted through a lonely intersection and turned left onto the highway on the way out. This time, however, she stopped.
The usual left turn would take her to the regular road home, back to her regular life, a life dedicated to the discipline of spiritual practice and meditation. But if she turned right, it would take her to the town where she attended college years ago. The place where her jubilant girlfriends, creativity, music, dancing, and carefree life once was—a marked contrast to where she was at that junction, sitting in her car.
Rachel sat in her car at the intersection, the sun slipping beneath the mountains behind her. Instead of turning left as she had done so many times before, she turned right, and she didn’t look back. She camped for several days in nature in an area close to her college town before heading home.
Rachel made a radical change in her life, the kind of change that permeates down to the cellular level. All of us expected her to return to the retreat center shortly thereafter, but she never did. She separated from her partner, left her home, and changed practically every aspect of her life. She exchanged discipline and rigidity for creativity, flow, and movement.
Rachel connected with her heart and followed its lead, transforming her life. I supported her process with acupuncture and herbs, and during those first weeks of her new life, her cancer disappeared, never to return. By opening her heart and changing her life, she dissolved the habits that nourished and sustained her cancer, allowing it to simply dissipate. It all began when she turned right instead of left, when she took a different route and created a new path. She is still healthy today, 25 years later.
