12 Months (Don’t Believe It)

Windmill Chapel at Lake Shrine being hosed down.

Conflagaration! 

My partner and I watched the Palisades burn, then then other areas of Los Angeles, threatening his parents home in Granada Hills. We watched as so many of our friends were devastatingly affected.

We watched as my beloved Temple and place of worship and service, Lake Shrine, was surrounded by flames (it is, as of this writing, still standing). Long prayer and meditation, seeing all as protected, filled my time, while I sit for days without power here in Idyllwild, itself in a severe fire risk zone. 

The idea of demolition, attrition - of the leveling of circumstances and destruction of the worldly - resonated profoundly within my Soul. And, chemo is less than a week away. 

I always get depressed before disasters. In 1989, I was contemplating suicide the very instant the Loma Prieta earthquake struck…and, I was suddenly afraid for my life. I ended up attempting suicide a few months later, however, the beginning of a long period of recovery and resurrection. Did I ever mention how many miracles I’ve had in my life? Oh boy, where can I start…!

I was low, very low, after this Christmas, and into the New Year, completely confused by recurring patterns of financial desperation, and exhausted after a month of daily hyperthermia treatments. 

Now, watching friends who have lost everything, perspective again comes back in. 

At this point, all the doctors say something different. They are evenly split on my doing chemo, and I keep postponing it, hoping my number will go down. I hired an energy healer with dwindling finances (desperation or smart intuition?), continue with the supplements and infusions when I can afford them, put into place my friend Alaya’s recommendations, and began attending 12 step meetings focused on food and money.

It’s as hard as it’s ever been. What was needed is a complete overhaul of my patterned thoughts and responses.

Enter: The Document.

As you see, this time honored method of retraining the brain to an “ideal scene” version of yourself, a latent possibility you both memorize, say out loud, and even more importantly, FEEL as being true, is a huge healing tool. 

Remission can occur if you connect with possibilities within “the Quantum Field” (as Dr. Joe Dispenza terms it), or with Spirit (as some would say) - the healed version of yourself exists, beyond life and death even, this seeming paradox one of many paradoxes that so often point the way to Great Truth. 

I understood, in the course of deep meditation, that sending Love to all of my body cells, all the time, is deep and required medicine. I have friends beg me not to do chemo, others telling me it will be no big deal, and this potential confusion is a Great Test for me. 

Ultimately, there are no right or wrong decisions. Each decision will bring a result, but I will learn what I need to learn, in the great spread of Eternity. God is holding me always, my Masters watch over me and love me unconditionally. All is Well.

News! I will be developing and launching my first Radical Remissions workshop, customized with my other trainings, in Spring! Spread the word to those you love, and contact me to share your own story.

13 Months (don’t believe it)

Coaching Under The Machine

Here’s what I think. When you really get into the truth of it all, the world starts chatting you up.

A song will come on that provides a perfect insight. Somebody will say something that will demonstrate something uniquely in your favor. A written phrase on a menu will remind you of an important commitment. A gift will come at a time and place that provides a special message.

You realize: Let Life Lead You.

You are in tune with a love that loves you back, so hard. And you just pray, pray, pray you can love the world at the same level as that love…that love…just pouring in.

And in this magical flow state, it’s none of my business, ultimately, whether I live or die. 

THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CHANGED

This is how it happened for me. 

Meditating, yoga, my practice. Barefoot in the grass. And then, just like that: “Divine Mother, I am now entirely yours.”

I felt, finally, that I no longer had attachment to anything that was not the will of God. I felt, finally, an immense freedom and a humble devotion. 

It didn't last more than a few minutes, but it was there - the seed was planted. It was now my job to care for that seed, to water it, to love it. This is where I must learn to live. 

I pray: let me live only to serve. The timeline is Yours - the beginning, and the end. . 

WHAT’S UP, CANCER BOY?

The numbers are rising. Uh oh. Chemo starts Monday. And…it’s starting to get a little tricky. Chemo is not considered as effective as it is for other cancers. Pluvicto is better but not yet approved before chemo. What to do?

Dozens of people have ventured advice and information, which I love. Not all of it is relevant, but good stuff gets through, and we put it into place. 

The money is a big part of this all, and a great lesson in working less but working smarter, and asking for help. Cancer takes a LOT of time out of each day. 

There is a “standard of care” most physicians are obligated to follow for insurance purposes, but this isn’t always what your entire medical team thinks is best. It’s complicated, and it’s complicated in different ways for different people. 

The pain in my body; this is new. I have a strategy…every time I feel a twinge, I send love and gratitude that this pain represents healing. Thank you, pain, for your message and your teachings.

Another insurance coverage win: daily hyperthermia treatments. If I can manage to keep up with affording the infusions and supplements, combined with chemo and hyperthermia, this month could be the definitive moment in my healing.

REVELATION: MY GIFT TO YOU.

So, from now on, it’s all about YOU. I have received so much, and it’s your turn.

Every one of you will receive a call, text or email from me, inviting you to connect with me for a half hour over the holidays and on into 2025, if you wish. Let’s do this. I have lots of time lying in my treatment machines, and driving to and from them. 

LEGACY.

December is also the month I need to generate the most money for treatment. With my desire to have my legacy be one of service, I created this online course for all to enjoy. 

Then, let’s book our call. I want to talk with as many of you as possible in the next few months. 

Do you know someone who could benefit from what I offer? (Yes, I have a new website.)

A LESSON: THE CANCER PARADOX

Tell those you love: the decisions that you are required to make, decisions that can seem to be life or death,  benefit from you being a “difficult patient” A patient who challenges, asks questions, does his own research, and is proactive in research and lifestyle. 

I ask so many questions; doctors have been, more than once, increasingly curt. I stick with the patient ones, like my old friend Dr. Twardowski, who actually likes that I am bringing in new studies to review. 

There may also be a killer stress state that runs you without you even knowing it. 

I actually blew up yesterday to an online community member in a way I haven’t done in years. I lost my shit, and then spent the rest of the night in retreat from reality with food and TV, hiding from whatever horrible emotion I would have done well to just feel. “I forgive myself for judging myself as…” The next day, I resolved to repair and do better. I can do hard. Except when I can’t…and everything changes.

Ultimately, my cancer journey benefits from living into a great paradox: being highly engaged in creating and believing myself as healed, while being in complete surrender to whatever happens. 

When the stakes are life and death, this game is being played at a whole other level emotionally and intellectually, but spiritually, you are always just fine.

15 Months. 14 Months (don’t believe it)

Pre-election Halloween, 2025. I am the Future, my face is a mirror and I offer Hope.

In this new “19 Months” update, I cover the last two months with a blog that is split into two sections - Illusion and Reality. 

The question is: which will you read first?

ILLUSION

Lately I feel like I have been placed in a class with a whole bunch of advanced students - despite being ill-equipped to keep up with them.

This summer we had spent so much money, time and effort to get me to Canada and Dr. Joe’s event - and yet my numbers are still rising. 

I was also feeling that the demands of supporting this healing seemed at cross purposes with not only earning money, but creating a financial future. In particular, video editing, traditionally a sedentary, EMF saturated lifestyle, was becoming more difficult, and seemed to set off food cravings I didn’t have when I worked on stuff I liked.  

And the US election seemed to (hopefully temporarily) pulverize my mostly progressive community - very few work emails were coming in. 

I knew that this was a magnificent opportunity to create conversations and foster outreach. But why wasn’t my will responding to this? 

It felt like a perfect storm was brewing, and knowing intellectually that it held both challenge and opportunity didn’t always translate into creating the proper mindset in a brain and body that felt so very overtaxed.

I needed a new system, but felt like I was at the end of my resources.

My wonderful coaching community and other folks had opened their hearts and poured out their support, and I was incredibly grateful; but during the last few months, I couldn’t help but feel they were trying to finance a sinking ship. 

Despite my focus on creating a healing mindset by using all my training of the last 10 years, the cumulative effect of ongoing medication felt like an oppressive weight on my shoulders. The incredibly strict lifestyle interventions held their own challenges. I often felt I simply couldn’t achieve this protocol to my complete satisfaction, and this could create a pattern of shame and guilt when things didn’t go as perfectly as I would have wished. 

What I heard in my head: “How dare you fail when so many people have supported you?” 

It was like I knew, absolutely, what I needed to do, but no longer had the stuff to make it happen. 

I said yes to another round of chemical castration (Lupron injection), even while the doctors said it wasn’t working as much (they still said take it). I said yes to adding in chemotherapy, beginning November 26th. I spent hours a day researching doctors and treatments and possibly alternatives to this, but the numbers suggesting being proactive. 

Still, I continued a time consuming but rewarding diet and exercise regime. I continued to navigate and make decisions on the huge amount of information out there about what to do (one expert often contradicting the next). And: I was doing A LOT of alternative treatments simultaneously. Thousands of dollars worth.

Perhaps most frustrating of all, meditation (the most important part of my day), began to become harder. OK: cancer can take away sex, food, career, spare time - but please don’t affect my connection with God!

And then, the election: a political event that seemed to me to eradicate global hope for the future. Even with the scope of my current challenges, this factor seemed to profoundly diminish all of my optimism. It felt like I had been trying to navigate a bewilderingly advanced maze a little beyond my abilities…and then having a hammer smash down upon the entire experiment. 

My financial situation, after spending all that money on naturopathic and integrative treatment, seemed the biggest stressor of all. To get to Canada and Colorado, I raised about 60% through donations, but also had to pre-sell a lot of work to clients, which I spent the last two months trying to get on top of. The most recent fundraiser allowed me several infusions and a few months of supplements…but not a lot of new work was coming in.

This felt like A LOT of overwhelm. It was leaving me with a brain that was regressing towards being very proficient at creating unhelpful thoughts. In short: a head full of raging nonsense.

REALITY

I have heard that folks stepping up to new challenges in their lives often experience a surge in circumstantial difficulties. Almost like a gauntlet has been thrown down: “You want the good stuff? Here’s how to earn it.”

My own coach, my USM education, Devon Bandison’s Game Changers, Carolyn Freyer-Jones coaching, my Radical Remissions and 3 Principles coaching community, and my Self-Realization Fellowship community had become the perfect expression of Divine Love in my life. After I recommitted to my own spiritual practice with a new level of practice and holistic integration, I experienced some wonderful new results, despite my racing, foggy brain. 

I felt Canada and Colorado occurred strategically to prepare me for this maelstrom. As low as I had gotten lately, the peace and healing within, and the hope born of these experiences, had been blessing me every day and every minute. 

I enjoyed two meditation retreats these last months, including time with wonderful SRF monks who modeled a deeply rewarding inner life beyond mental turmoil. Truly all of my training and interventions have blessed me beyond measure. 

As my beloved friend Bill Pettit says, “Nothing broken, never lacking!”. 

Yes, I often do not feel physically, mentally, emotionally or energetically at my best. And with every thought that comes into my head, I continually transform these thoughts into thoughts supporting physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. This is the actual and true nature of Reality (capital “R”), and the source of all healing. Yes, there is a lot of opportunity to release the rage, frustration and terror (floating around the country now like a cloud) that may find it’s home in my hapless brain. I am just the man for the job.

I pray for knowledge of what I can control, and the serenity to accept what I can’t control. I create from the capital “I”, not the small “i”. Beyond my subconscious addictions and attachment to old patterns (the temporary and temporal karma of this life), the gorgeous expression of love in my life - through community, my beloved Mark, and family and friends - continue to lift me up when I am at my very lowest. 

My intention is now to create programs, similar to those I have trained in, to support both healing individuals - and those called to a new level of spiritual leadership and social activism in 2025. These programs leverage upset / disease as a call to action, while seeking to negate the “toxic certainty” that has a stranglehold now on our culture (and that I myself have felt - you really do coach what you wish to create within yourself!).

I feel the effects of these completions in my bones - as I feel the Divine Light of perfect health within!

16 Months (don’t believe it)

My Healing Cabin in Canada.

REBIRTH

Every step was just plain sacred, a foot into the future, into the mystic, as Van Morrison might say. The Canadian woods and lakes nurturing me, the Healed Healer, the dreamer, the body in search of a miracle. 

So much space for meditation and prayer. Green silence, area aria, depth explosions in my gratified soul.

The days count down, homesick sometimes, but never, ever wanting it to end. So slow. I’m home in my body. Rebirth.

I knew what this experience was all about. Life had risen, on a crest of Grace and Generosity, to land me at The Healing Oasis in Canada, through fundraising and advanced sales for my professional services (how to deliver professionally on these commitments? Next blog!). Here I was: the opportunity to unplug and heal in a cancer treatment center in British Columbia. Hyperthermia treatments and infusions, farm to table chef prepared meals, a private lake, a cabin in the woods.

And, right after seven days of Dr. Joe Dispenza! Welcome to your meditation retreat in the Canadian woods. Now: practice.

Listen! Can you hear me sobbing deeply, allowing some buried trauma to sing it’s song in my newly stripped down soul? Without work, internet, without comfort eating, alone so much, with God, meditation and my thoughts, and the emotions would come like lava from a Hawaiian volcano, glowing, molten and inexorable. I often couldn’t tell if it was joy or sorrow, but it felt just perfect all the same. 

Climbing a nearby mountain. Diving into lakes and rivers. The treatments were five days a week, I tolerated them well. Hiking through forests, loons and kestrels, dragonflies and bullfrogs. I’m so far from home, and so deeply home in my healing heart.

There were seven of us, healing together. Some were in more pain than others, most were over 70, and at first I was lonely for more youth (and versions of me), but the loneliness was a sublime healing factor, my soul naked as pain, deep solitude glowing from my cleansed cells. 

Am I going to die? What has my life been? What is happening now, in this moment, this fear, this courage, flashing back and forth, my life so near and dear, and please please don’t let it go, please don’t take it from me. 

I swam in the misty mornings with my nurse, and I bonded with the chickens and goats, and just gave up the outside world for a bit. 

RE-BERTH

After three weeks, I had lost 20 pounds, and felt pristine. Yes, there was still pain in my bones, but I said this to myself: that pain was my body healing! Healing often evolves through pain to dissolve disease. The doctor at the Oasis told me for a few months my tests might be elevated, but they would go down. 

Comfortable with uncertainty? You better be. 

I wasn’t prepared for my entry back into LA. I grabbed comfort food again, I didn’t know how not to, and to begin doing work that was waiting for me (a smiling, sleeping bear). I started “going fast” again (no Shannon no!) as I tried to conquer challenges that only seemed to have grown while I was away. OK Shannon, remember what you learned, slow down. Put it all into place in the great reality hologram, and feel what’s real, and not that distracting void - a void that called to be filled with food, with media, with _______. 

Listen: I also received from unexpected places. A fundraiser was the highlight of everything. All of my teachers, clients and coach mentors came together to raise money for me. When I saw the event banner Aila Coats designed: these kind, wise faces - I felt so honored and loved. 

I began preparing the healthy food, doing the meditations, and integrating the lifestyle I learned into my SoCal existence. I loved my life so much. 

Life, Love & God: won’t you give me the time, more time more time, to create this mysterious new Shannon?

Inspired by the inner gatefold photo of the Joni Mitchell album "For The Roses"

17 Months (don’t believe it)

Silent as angels. 

Suddenly there were eight people around me. Lying on the floor wrapped in a blanket, waiting for my Coherence Healing, I couldn’t help but feel vulnerable and a little abashed, not knowing what was going to happen.

There was talk of interdimensional beings. Dead relatives. 

But mostly, lots and lots of science and research, delivered over the weeklong Dr. Joe Dispenza Advanced Retreat, along with 20+ hours of guided meditations.

What happened then was powerful, remarkable…tectonic, life-changing.

But let me go back and explain something first. Have you grasped the numerical concept of these blogs? 

17 Months. (don’t believe it!)

We are counting down a medical prognosis the doctor gave me at the beginning of May, 2024. A new blog each month. Did you catch that the subcaption was “Don’t Believe it?”?

We will continue counting down, month by month, until we reach 0. 

And then we reverse. As I head into longevity. 

The Quantum Field.

Lots and lots of data appears to be proving that these meditations, healings and retreats are creating spontaneous remissions, through generating powerful healing molecules and proteins into the meditator’s body. 

How does this happen? 

The essence of what we learned and experienced was that meditation will connect you with the quantum field, where there is nothing but frequency and vibration. Feeling your own powerful vibration of a created future can manifest this in “3D” reality “if there is a match in the field”.  3D reality: holograph, essentially - physics. 

You begin to recognize that your brain’s self-sustaining neural patterning keeps you in the same body and mind that created an issue; you must recreate yourself entirely to manifest what is required to manifest and live into your joyfully felt future. 

Oh, this is still such a simplification! The magic is in the collective and committed practice. 

Launch!

My beloved Mark and I built the rocket, and asked for the fuel. Loving angels appeared. Donations came in. I created a customized gratitude video for each donor. These communications made my cells sparkle with joy. 

The rocket was not only aimed for Dr. Joe’s retreat in Denver, where my family lives, but for three weeks at a healing center in Canada afterwards (The Healing Oasis in B.C.). At 20K, this vetted center through my Radical Remissions community was less expensive than similar clinics in Mexico and abroad, and through my community I got a 5K scholarship. I declared bankruptcy and funneled all my own money into this launch.  As I write this, we have 3 days left and still need 1K for the final invoice. Nothing like suspense!

Healing.

During the retreat, my energy all week had been fluctuating. Before my first Coherence Healing I had experienced a lot of intense emotion…my body seemed to know what was going to happen.

As the first healing began…She Came.

I lost my mother when I was 18, and when she made her presence known, my body leapt into convulsive sobs of joy…she was there!

My body radiated from beyond, my self-consciousness gone…I wasn’t even there. 

The final two healings were supernatural. I felt waves of dull, achy, pressury energy surrounding the affected parts of my body, as tears constantly streamed down my eyes. 

My energy during the last few days of the event dropped off a cliff. Sometimes I could barely walk. 

The meditations: I was a true soldier, and brought every ounce of effort to these guided meditations, some lasting over 4 hours. Working the pineal gland, breathing, cerebro-spinal fluid rising to activate the cosmic connection, blast off! Women were shrieking, men moaning all over the auditorium of two thousand people.

I had driven earlier to Denver from Los Angeles (replacing two tires en route, but blissed by the voyage), and after the event drove to my childhood home in Grand Junction to stay with my aunt, where I am writing this now. 

Who am I? I am entirely different. 

I am now declaring myself healed. 

Why then, Canada? 

We already paid the first invoice and bought the ticket, and given this commitment, I surmise it to be a final, nourishing strategy to create my meditation lifestyle (off the grid with time to create a 2 hour a day practice), seal my body’s healing with powerful integrative practices, and reinvent myself even more completely, off the grid. 

17 Months? Ha!

A gentle request.

Will you now think of me as healed? Do as I do - think of me being here for quite awhile, and if you think of me, think of the joy I am creating by helping others heal. 

Here I am. Exploding with love. 

18 Months (don’t believe it)

How does this just happen?

Over a week ago, I noticed a few lovely purple flowers popping up in front of my mountain A-frame home in Idyllwild. I supposed they were delightful anomalies, arriving to tickle me and make me happy. Then, I looked closely. They were little orchids.

I wasn’t prepared for what the next few weeks would bring. An explosion of purple, arriving like a stupendous benediction, leaving me thunderstruck with gratitude. Suddenly my little cabin was the prettiest on our street. 

What the next few weeks would bring. Oh my God, I am so Loved. Recalibration starts…just like this.  

18 Months: Recalibration

My 19 Months blog got attention from family and friends. We all knew the playing field, prostate cancer since 2020, lots of treatment, long road, but this was some news. A 19 month medical prognosis (don’t believe it…). 

My partner Mark and I got active. Lots of appointments. Lots of reading and research. Lots of putting things into action. Stricter diet (wait for it…). Daily exercise no matter what. Finding healing options in unexpected places.

But most of all, those nine days created a bridge between a brain that ping-ponged between subdued terror and frenetic action - and a state of mind that was taking root, even more, in deep peace, joy and tranquility. 

Not in all 60 years of my rambunctious life has anything occurred that was so, well…extreme. 

What The Hell Is A Diet?

I have always been thin. I have always eaten what I want. Sweet treats equaled Mother Love for someone who lost his at 18. Yeah, my mom fed me frosted graham crackers, even as she was dying from melanoma. 

I finally stopped sugar, flour, and most dairy and most meat, no starch, no processed food. These last few weeks, I remember angrily sitting on the couch for 15 minutes, in a stew, wanting what I felt I deserved. But I didn’t. Looking in the refrigerator over and over again at nothing but fruits and vegetables. Driving to the store and staring for five minutes straight at what I wanted. But I didn’t. 

Now, I feel so clean. I’m Mighty Mouse. It’s been almost four weeks. 

Laughing Boots

During this time, creation of and daily recitation of affirmations became the power tool for my required brain reprogramming. The body and mind of a person who created an illness needs to change completely to one who heals.  

Enter Laughing Boots.

This new alter-ego arrived in the form of a unique affirmation. He’s the kid way back when that joked around a lot, and he was still there, waiting to turn me into a gorilla chipmunk who eats flowers, or a bad opera singer, or a cook who weeps when he sneezes.

Laughing Boots is self-named, defiant, and a detonator of seriousness bombs and anxiety mines. He mostly only comes out in private, but he is always there at parties, and had a blast during our Cards Against Humanity BBQ on the 4th. 

He is a champion of creating laughing cells in my body that drink joy and heal.  

Enter Coaching

I also knew that now was the time to ask for help seeing my blind spots (Laughing Boots imitating Mr. Magoo in the background). 

I realized that, to get me into a Healing Center, start my life-saving infusions again, keep up my expenses with the reduction of work necessary to allow the diet and lifestyle interventions prescribed to take hold, and hopefully get me into a Dr. Joe Dispenza event, we had to create a budget, and meet that goal.

And also, to release any expectations of how and in what way this would happen. 

It became clear that what would most serve me would be to begin a lot of conversations to help create the coaching and workshop series that I felt were the future I wanted to live into. My greatest gift to the world. 

It would also be necessary to ask for help. Our goal was 21K. Enter another GoFundMe.

Where Are We Now?

“Those that heal from chronic disease, no matter how advanced, had an experience where they tangibly and unmistakably felt themselves as Divine Energy. Not a belief or cognitive thought - a visceral and profound awareness.” - Deepak Chopra, as told to my friend Dr. William F. Pettit

“Shannon; I suggest that you are being called to Stillness”

These words from my friend & mentor Dr. William F. Pettit penetrated deeply. 

Dr. Bill, as I call him, was not the only one who graced me with wisdom and guidance over the last two weeks. 

Kirk Souder invited me into a powerful conversation where I saw the judgments surrounding my situation, and dissolved them into the nothingness from which they came…leaving in their place, Unbearable Light & Love. 

Stephen McGhee created an invitation to participate in a coaching experience with my tech skills, and then unleashed his extraordinary L4 program, with me on tech, as well. He also helped Mark and I launch our GoFundMe, and through work and donations beginning to come in - I began to see a future.

And finally: enter Amber Shirley, coaching powerhouse. What can I say? She is for me. The best of the best.

Kirk sent me this this morning. Surrounded by angels. I’m on to you, angels! You can drop the act. I see you!

Dear Shannon,

Wow. I am so grateful for this, and for YOU.

You are a true light in this world.

You are one of the most purely loving beings I know.

When I grow up, I want to be like Shannon. 

It’s very true. 

I am ALWAYS here for you.

In Loving,

Kirk 

19 Months (don’t believe it)

I’m not fond of Dr. Chan.

Since I was diagnosed in 2020 with a particularly medically aggressive prostate cancer, UCLA has been my primary treatment Ground Zero. 

Showing up over the years for treatment has been weird.. I graduated from film school there in 2002, an unlikely and fortuitous success story nobody saw coming (least of all myself). Only 15 people were chosen throughout the world.

AND my mom also received cancer treatment there when I was a kid in the early 80’s. A mixed tradition. 

Still, despite his UCLA pedigree, Dr. Chan does not come across as a hopeful guy. 

“It appears your cancer is becoming resistant to the hormone therapy. Our current standard of care is now chemo (I had already had surgery, daily radiation, targeted radiation, and over two years of hormone therapy). Based on our studies, the average lifespan if you do chemo is 19 months.”

When confronted with unexpected tragedy or bad news, my usual response is to become very businesslike and grumpy. I was expecting this appointment would be about me trying to get off the hormone therapy. Lupron essentially chemically castrates you, messes with your life force, and sabotages your ability to function the way Shannon likes to function. 

“And, you should continue the hormone therapy. It may not be as effective, but it will be doing something.”

Ha. 

Walking back to my happy blue Prius in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles was one of those moments where everything seemed overly real; one of those situations where the mundane act of strolling to your car will be burned on your brain forever. Snapshot: danger. 

Still in grumpy mode, my surly outlook against the onslaught of fortune was also likely the stoic Colorado boy in me. When things like this happen, I sometimes revert back to ancestral coping strategies. Mom finally died of cancer when I was 18, fighting it for years, a significant trauma in my already trauma saturated adolescence. My aunt used to tell me “Bonnie really showed me how to die”. Meaning: tough. 

I didn’t tell my partner Mark for a few days. The emotions were starting to stew and ferment a bit, some anger, distraction, paralysis. I’m a slow processor. And, yeah, I’ve been navigating this for some time, but haven’t the dozens of different treatments, the barrage of supplements and lifestyle interventions, the literal thousands and thousands of dollars spent on infusions done anything?

Shall I tell you something?

I’ve become really good at cancer.

I don’t even call it cancer. I call it my diagnosis, and usually I don’t really believe it. I think of myself as healed, and try to burn channels in my brain that tell me that constantly. 

But, I cheat a little. Prostate cancer removed some of the most pleasurable things in my life (sex and food, hello), and my journey towards sensual austerity has been harder than it might be for most. Sure I can eat and have sex, but it’s not the same. I believed I was an artist in both - and now my artists’ pallet has been replaced by a broken pencil. So, if I have an artfully created Pain du Raisin, it’s my life gusto wanting to create a bit of an oasis of delight in the adult desert of duty. 

But, I don’t cheat often, I forgive myself, and I also excel. I’m a high performance coach, and Lord I’m quite spectacular. Ten years of creating content and events for the best life coaches in the world turned my brain into Super Coach. Maddeningly and tantalizingly, the only people who really know this are those I facilitate in the spiritual psychology group I run, or the relatively few I now work with as a coach. At present, I still am mostly known as the Tech Guy of the coaching community. A large part of recovery for me is getting a third act away from the computer, dear God, away from the computer, and plunging deeply into what I do best. 

Plunge. 

I recently moved to a mountain resort town above Palm Springs called Idyllwild, away from an LA that was becoming increasingly noxious and oppressive. To heal near trees, mountains, and nearby streams, to jump in to and freeze my cells back to harmony. 

And, I have an A-Frame! That little guy inside me who drew pictures of A-Frames as a kid is loving it. 

Significantly, healing from cancer is about radical transformation towards living the life you wish to live, and knowing what that is. One of the innumerable wise teachers in my life told me once that “Cancer is always about resisting something.” What in your life are you tolerating, lying to yourself about, that you really want to escape?

As I write this, one month has passed since that fateful appointment with Dr. Chan (so, I guess we’re on Month 18, right? I scoff, I tell you, I scoff!). 

I had another appointment with Dr. Beleaguered a few days ago to discuss the more definitive test, a PSMA Pet Scan result, which showed six bone metastases (over five, and they say you’re eventually a goner, it’s just a matter of time). Do chemo, he stressed, while neatly either minimizing or eliminating all of the researched options me and Mark, who was on the call, floated optimistically. 

Time for a new doctor. It’s important to have hope. Sure, I’ll probably do chemo, but I need a team that excitedly tells me about new treatments, new clinical trials, and believes in miracles. Because, I do. 

I’ve become very good at crying. I’d probably give Julianne Moore a run for her money, because I can cry quickly and easily. All this week I’ve summoned heaving sobs of wailing despair. So deeply painful, so cleansing. The trick is to allow dramatic self-pity, and after the storm, you clear everything up with the magic wand of reality. And the reality is this: it’s all happening FOR me, not TO me (thanks Byron Katie)!

And, there’s even more to cry about…woe is me! (ha ha) The good news/bad news of prostate cancer is it’s slow growing…meaning years of accumulating medical costs. A business I really believed in and thought would work went skedaddle (another factor that drove me out of high cost LA), and now bankruptcy actually seems viable. Who knew?

My brain is also not quite as sharp after years of hormone therapy. I’ve got a tricky backlog of work I’m trying to get under with the help of coaching (I’m an evangelist for coaching, can you tell?). But, I still really love running live events, and I’m still really good at it; pushing all those buttons and throwing those levers, a high wire act of neat adrenaline. 

But still, on paper, broke and sick. Would you want to be me? 

But, you should. I’m a happy, joyful soul, full of song and dance, and my superpower is a high propensity for tolerance of others and a gift for unconditional love. I rarely get triggered anymore. I meditate a lot. I’m funny, and a bit wackadoodle. I’m giddy with gratitude.

And, here’s a secret: I’m not broke or sick, because I create my future daily with the power of my mind. Shhhh!

And, I want you to hear me sing a bit before the door is, gently, terrifyingly, and oh so softly, slammed into unbearable, seductive oblivion. 

And really; who knows when that will be?