Cancer was an ultimatum from my body

IIn September 2017, due to a somewhat miraculous confluence of events, the gastro-intestinal team at NYU found a tumor the size and shape of two golf balls growing inside (and outside) of my stomach. In my first consultation with my oncologist, I’d been told, “Your prognosis is quite good. You have five to seven years.”

More than seven years later, I am here. My body is completely cancer-free, and I’m healthier and more whole than I’ve ever been in my adult life.

I often get asked how I “overcame” cancer, or how life is different now that I’m living closely with nature, or how is it that I look younger and healthier now than I did before cancer came into my life? It’s challenging for me to convey who I am now. It’s even more difficult to share the truth of what I see and feel about modern humans’ (present company included) current relationship with our Mother Earth and our Selves. I struggle to find the words to lovingly and urgently invite fellow humans to reconnect with their natural selves, and act in alignment with the more beautiful world our souls know is possible. But it’s time I embraced that struggle.

So here it is. A start. It will take me time, stumbles, and changes in direction to get it out. Thank you for sitting with me.

“What did you do?” is a question I hear a lot when folks learn that I had cancer and am now fully healthy. Often, the questioner is hoping for an answer that sounds like “I took these supplements,” “I went to see this doctor,” and “I ate these things and not those things.” And yes, I did all those things and more. But the best specific methods will vary for each person. Instead, it’s more precious to understand that cancer is the body calling for change. Real change. Not just “switch to organic oat milk and light palo santo instead of Marlboro reds” change. I mean becoming a whole, different person.

Cancer was an ultimatum from my body: If I wanted to continue living on this Earth, to have a different future than the physically dying one that I was in, I had to let my old ways die, and step into the unknown of a new Self.

That realization didn’t come all at once. I was mostly oblivious to the lesson in the first year as I scrambled to figure out the bare basics of staying alive – which hospital, which surgeon, which chemotherapy, which immunotherapy; then what foods, what formula and methods for juicing, which Western/Chinese/Ayurvedic/ Shamanic doctors. Somewhere into the second or third year of my journey, I realized that truly following my healing meant becoming a very different person. And, without knowing where this would go, I chose to embrace it.

Cancer isn’t evil. It’s a natural phenomenon where some parts of the whole become disconnected from their role in the greater organism. As a result, they pursue narrowly focused goals. They accumulate and use all the resources they can to advance these goals without regard to the deeper context in which they exist. And if this continues unchecked, it kills the larger organism and itself.

As above, so below. As within, so without. Examining my own life honestly, I realized the way I was living was very much like a cancer cell in the body of Mother Earth. Sure, at some abstract, conceptual level I told myself that I cared about the environment – all the while flushing three gallons of good drinking water into the sewer every time I had a few drips of pee; eating “food” made from industrially produced animals and plants grown in poisoned soil, served in single-use plastic containers; and impulsively getting on planes to exotic destinations to attend extravagant, wasteful weddings where I would probably have less than 20 minutes of meaningful connection with the celebrated couple. I was out of alignment with the natural flow of life on Earth and doing little to contribute to the larger system of which I was a part. No surprise, then, that the same phenomenon was happening inside my body at smaller scale.

Looking around today, humanity as a whole has clearly “lost the plot.” The way humans extract and thoughtlessly waste the precious blessings of our home world for pointless pursuits, and torture and violate our fellow Earthlings because it’s more convenient for us, is, simply put, cancerous. Researchers now expect that almost half of Americans alive today will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.

Cancer necessitates change in order to survive. Fortunately, humans are nothing if not agents of change. So I embarked on the quest to discover who I was going to be. Because just being the person that I alone wanted had led me towards an early death. I realized I had to find both personal fulfillment and alignment with the natural flow of life.

Cheah is the land steward and farmer at Wildsong Gaian Sanctuary, a regenerative food forest and nature retreat center in the Catskills.