As we move from accepting our fate to taking the future into our own hands and adopting a willingness to stretch beyond conventionality, we may find ourselves coming to appreciate the spiritual qualities of life and the creative power at our disposal. This is the story of one person who has done just that:

                             REMISSION FROM CANCER

Fourteen years ago I was diagnosed with an incurable lymph cancer. My doctors used chemotherapy, radiation and surgeries to fight my tumors and other cancer cells. As Dr. Bernie Seigel urges in LOVE, MEDICINE AND MIRACLES, I complied with my doctors' conventional treatment methods while at the same time exploring and utilizing alternative therapies. Many were physical remedies: mega-doses of vitamin C; Ann Wigmore's living foods diet, including wheatgrass Essiac; daily health club workouts; even urine therapy.

My hospital system, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, was the world's leader in the nutritional care of cancer patients, and pointed out that 40% of cancer fatalities are actually precipitated by malnutrition. So they put me on a preventative regimen of nutrients and supplements, including selenium, a number one tumor fighter. And they stressed that "cancer is a sugar-feeder": cancer cells are nourished best by refined white sugar.

But more powerful than these physical strategies, I felt, was the power of mind to effect a disease process—for ill, or for good. I even sensed that the real power behind my physical therapies, both conventional and alternative, was my will to live. I had made a clear and passionate decision from the start that I wanted to live. And this choice led me to explore those parts of myself that did not want to live, the "helpless and hopeless" feelings often characteristic of cancer patients well before the onset of their disease.

Thus I employed many techniques to mobilize my mind and spirit in behalf of wellness—including, of course, prayer, and even hypnotically-reinforced affirmations. One of the most powerful methods I used was Dr. Carl Simonton's daily visualization technique: in a meditative state, seeing in my creative mind's eye an animated force for healing eliminating the cancer. In my visualization this continually-repeated scene involved an indomitable husky dog chasing a stealthy little Mafia-like character out of my body.

With such methods I filled my mind with signs and symbols of recovery and health drawn from many sources—from my dreams and music, to continual reading of inspiring literature, and more. And my wife, Mary, walked with me every step of the way, an inexpressible blessing. As A COURSE IN MIRACLES instructs, we enter heaven two by two, not alone. The COURSE also challenged me with its firm position that both illness and healing are a decision we make, a plan we lay.

It has now been six years since I have had any tumors or other cancer indicators. I am tremendously grateful for the new life and changed perspective which my cancer experience has given me. I see as never before the power of our beliefs and feelings, both positive and negative, to bring about what we experience. And I have discovered in a new way that what we truly desire, what we firmly choose to have and be, will ultimately come about.

DM of McDowell, VA           E-mail the author