Adaptability is the most successful strategy used in the entire spectrum of nature to survive.

From the life of bacteria to cells or highly complex humans, it is through adaptability that life finds a way to overcome challenges and to survive, and live vividly and successfully.

Adaptability means that you change your behavior adequately to the circumstances.

“If life gives you lemons, make lemonade” expresses it in very simple words.

My thoughts and insights that I share with you in this essay are about the important changes you need to do in your life and especially in your mind to adapt, when cancer became a fact in your life and “cures” seem impossible.

What are these important changes you need to make, especially in your mind?

The day you learn from your doctor or a medical examination that you have one or more metastases from a cancerous lump in your body, your life changes significantly and it will never be the same as is was before.

I write this for you so you can understand what happens in your mind, your brain and your immune system after such an event and to react to the news you learned in an optimal manner so you can regain your physical, emotional and mental power and use it for your healing journey.

You probably asked your doctor for your prognosis and a cure of your condition and your doctor's answer might have been that the prognosis is uncertain and that there is no cure for your condition available. How does your conscious and your subconscious mind react to this information?

Is it really true that metastasized organ cancer (in other words, all cancer that are not liquid, like blood cancer of derive from blood cells like lymphomas) is a non-curable condition?

The answer is: Yes and no! This question is complex and deserves a deeper look.

And that is why you need to understand the following facts about cancer-biology, neuro-psychology, psycho-immunology and the nature of the human brain and it's connection to our immune system.

It is quite a complex topic we have to go through together. Are you ready?

What is the “cure of cancer”?

The word “cure” is a difficult one when it comes to metastasized (spread, stage 3 or 4) cancer.

Instead of “cure” oncologists speak about remission, when the tumors shrink and no new tumors grow between two radiology scans, or complete remission, when all visible tumor signs disappear. An important question is, of course, how long the remission will last, and this reflects the risk of recurrences and the lack of a “cure” in the meaning that the disease is gone once and for all.

Reference: Use of the Word “Cure” in Oncology, JOURNAL OF ONCOLOGY PRACTICE, VOL. 9, ISSUE 4 2013, By Kenneth Miller, MD, Joseph H. Abraham, ScD, MS, Lori Rhodes, and Rachel RobertsSinai Hospital of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD; and Gallaudet University, Washington, DC

Conclusion: Oncology clinicians report that patients are hesitant to ask whether they are cured, and the clinicians are hesitant to tell patients they are cured. Annual oncology follow-up was frequently endorsed, even after 20 years in remission.

Two risks and a chance

There are two risks to deal with the “lack of a cure.”

The first is, to believe that because I have an incurable disease, I will die soon and, in worst case, suffer as long as I live. This is in most cases NOT true and certainly the worst belief you can have to take care of your life and the management of your cancer condition.

The second is to merely deny your oncologist's prognosis, that you might never be free from cancer. You can either live like before without changing anything or start looking for somebody who comforts you with a “miracle cure” based on “unproven” methods. Even if this is, in many cases, much better then resignation and fear, it might not be the optimal way to improve your chances to live longer and better with a condition that western world medicine can not cure.

The third way is what I recommend to you, it's your chance. This third way looks at life as a continuous flow of energy that moves around an ideal midpoint within an optimal balance. It is never static. It is never 100% foreseeable or “safe” and “certain.” It never was from the beginning of your first in-breath the day you were born.

There were many “challenging” events in your life before and you found a way to get out of the crisis that disturbed your healthy balance. Or may be not?

From this point of view you welcome the crisis, that might be a turning point in your life.

This time, your health needs profound empowerment and you need to give it your full attention and awareness and make the changes you need to do in order to get better again.

At this point in time, the word “cure” gets a new meaning. Give it a new and better concept. I call it to thrive with cancer, or to get cancer under control by empowering yourself. That can come very close to a cure. But you have to have the courage to live with some cancer cells in your body and find a way that you and these cells can coexist in a friendly manner and for a long time to come! It is not a war that you either loose or win!

The vocabulary widely used in our time to describe cancer, the treatments and the outcomes of it is heavily influenced by military or war analogies. President Nixon declared the “war against cancer” in the National Cancer act of 1971. In my understanding of cancer this kind of vocabulary and the way of thinking behind it is in it's essence is totally wrong.

Cancer as a disease is caused by a loss of balance in the complex biology of our body and a treatment should consist in the recovery of balance amongst the approximately 100 trillion cells that built up our body, so that our body supports our life on Earth.

Cancer, even in a metastasized stage, is not a war and the question is not to either lose or win a battle against it. From my experience as an oncologist and treating metastasized cancer over the last 30 years, the only strategy that makes sense is to find a way to change the biological and psycho-emotional factors in your body and in your life to transform the disturbed balance that causes cancer growth into a controllable, stable life with cancer.

Modern cancer research tells us that one can find circulating cancer cells many years after a complete remission in the blood or in body tissues of the patient (“A conduit to metastasis: circulating tumor cell biology,” by Douglas S. Micalizzi, Shyamala Maheswaran and Daniel A., in Haber Genes Dev. 2017, 31:).

As long as they remain “dormant” or in a quiescent state (quiescence is the non-dividing, sleeping cell form of cancer), the disease is not active and you can live out your live.

The important message is that there is a third possibility, beyond losing or winning: to be in balance, to be in peace even with cancer. To thrive with some cancer cells or even some cancerous masses in your body, and achieve control over it, while you live out your live consciously and happily.

This is also the case in all the infections diseases. The coexistence of us humans with the bacteria and viruses or parasites that we host in our body shows that it is the balance between “ourself” and “others” in our organism that causes health, and imbalance that causes disease. We will never be free from potentially dangerous microorganisms, nor will we be 100% free from cancer cells.

To thrive with cancer means to find a way to live our lives with cancer cells that our bodies self-healing system keeps under constant control. This can get very close to a cure.

How can your brain accept this new concept of thriving with cancer and support your healing journey?

The psychological challenge with this concept is, that your brain is not used to accepting it in the first place. The alarm-center in your mid-brain, the part of your brain that is also called the limbic system or the “reptile brain,” that is called the amygdala causes a lot of emotional discomfort when it comes to life threatening news. Emotions from mild fear to massive panic are caused by amygdala activities, and it is your amygdala that is switched on as soon as you understand that your life is threatened.

Your amygdala is not used to “making friends” with the enemy, or finding a way to thrive with cancer. That is why that part of our brain is called the “reptile brain.” It wants you to kill cancer as if it was the predator that threatens your life NOW. It can drive you into acceptance of very toxic chemotherapy, believing that using this “heavy ammunition” is the only way to survive. Modern oncology has learned from decades of using “heavy chemotherapy” that toxic treatments almost never give good results long term. (The exceptions are hematological diseases like leukemia or lymphomas or testicle cancer).

Our amygdala represents the intelligence of a reptile. Reptiles react very fast to life threatening events with or fight and flight pattern. If the life threatening challenge you meet is not a wild animal or an aggressive warrior, this ancient fight and flight reaction is THE WRONG ANSWER.

Our life and the evolution of our species with the genes and behavior patterns we got from our ancestors have not taught us well enough to react in an optimal way to long term life threatening challenges. That is why we have to learn it!

The old way that your amygdala is programed for to feel safe and “normal” is to eliminate the predator. Kill it, or run away. In the case of metastasized cancer this program does not help you. It makes you fearful and weak in the long run. It does not do you a favor. In fact it can ruin your life. Modern oncology knows that single cancer cells in your blood (CTCs, or circulating cancer cells, some of them are called cancer stem cells) survive all known anti-cancer therapies.

You intelligent brain that is located in the frontal lobe behind your forehead can learn that there is a better way to go for: The control of cancer cells through your immune system and your self-healing forces.

In the same way we all live with potentially dangerous bacteria and virus in our body, that our immune systems controls in every second, we can find a way to coexist or even to thrive with cancer, using therapy methods and treatments that support our immune system and block cancer growth with less toxic methods! This is the way I recommend you to choose.

The NEW NORMAL - adapt to the new reality

If your amygdala is like a “smoke-” or emergency detector, that protects you from possible “fire hazards,” telling you when there is “smoke” in the air, you need to recalibrate your “emergency detector” when you live close to “open fire” in a “smoky” area, in other words, when cancer is a part of your body.

You need to find a NEW NORMAL that accepts the fact, that cancer cells are around, with a long term concept of living together with “a few” cancer-cells. This kind of “uncertainty” needs to be accepted by your “danger-detector,” and become a part of the new normal life, that will never be again like before. The sooner you accept it, the better you will cope with your condition, your “prognosis” and your life.

This recalibration will take time and needs practice to be implemented in your brain and your psyche. And you need to learn the language, that your amygdala speaks and understands. Clinical hypnosis uses communication techniques that bridge the way from your conscious mind to your subconscious limbic system where your amygdala operates.

How can you “speak” with your subconscious, with your amygdala?

At this point you need to know that we have not only “one” brain and “one” personality that rules our life, but that we have at least three parts of the brain that try to co-work more or less efficiently and several of sub-personalities or ego-states that contribute to what we call our “personality.” Depending on the quality of what we experience, the one or the other part of our brain or ego-states are activated and dominate our behavior.

The three parts of the brain that evolution gave us are: the conscious part mostly located in the frontal lobe, the midbrain that includes the limbic system and the amygdala, and the brain stem, where the most archaic and basic instincts or behavior patterns are at home.

Your challenge is, that the cancerous condition you live with and the uncertainty of your future and the prognosis of your condition switches on your flight and fight pattern located in your amygdala. The risks are high that this pattern puts you in constant fear and stress in many situations for the rest of your life if you don't change it actively.

Most patients I have talked with know exactly what that is. You feel an aching sensation somewhere in your body and immediately the thought pops up in your mind that this is a symptom from cancer. This can easily become a vicious circle the longer you feel it and follow your “emergency detector / amygdala” voice to either get this sensation out of your body by eliminating it physically NOW, or by running away. It is easy to understand that neither signal works in this situation. You cannot “cut” out the pain NOW and you can't run away from it.

You can't get a CT scan every time something aches in your body to rule out what the cause is.

That's why we have to understand it first and then change it.

The third reaction to stress is to freeze. Long ago when we couldn't escape from a "saber-tooth tiger” (the archetypal aggressor in former times) because it was too strong to fight and too close to outrun, we pretended to be dead by ”freezing.” While this was a good strategy some thousand years ago when the danger was a wild animal, an aggressive neighbor or a deadly war, it is a very bad strategy when the threat is a chronic disease.

This third reaction would be to totally ignore the signal from our body and move on as if nothing had happened. Or to pass out, to dissociate and feel numb, paralyzed or depressed.

I once met a couple that told me the following story: They were sitting in a hospital waiting area when the stressed doctor came to meet them, telling the following words: “We found that your lump is cancer, it has metastasized and there is no cure for you. We put you on our schedule for chemotherapy and you will start next Monday.” This message hit the waiting couple like a lightning out of the blue. Their reaction was typical for an immediate stress reaction forced by their amygdala: The patient collapsed on the spot, fainted, following the “freeze” pattern. The husband run out of the hospital in total panic and collapsed on the hospital court. Despite their academic background as highly intelligent people born in the 20th century, the archaic evolutionary behavior pattern had overruled all they had learned in their lives.

If you want to recalibrate your stress-signal organ in your limbic system, the amygdala, you can use the following strategies: It is called “Inner Life Training” or ILT.

I recommend that you practice this combination of breathing and visualization techniques together with affirmations, in a way that is like an inner conversation.

You, your true self, your inner wisdom, talks to your subconscious all the way down to your amygdala, your inner stress-processing unit, in order to get the optimal reaction from your brain and your body that supports your healing.

Stress and fear, induced by your amygdala, blocks your immune-system and many important functions of your self healing capacity. Stress and fear are emergency reactions to get you out of a dangerous situation within seconds or minutes. The fact that you live with cancer can easily cause you to get hung up in this stress and fear reaction. In every second while you are in inner stress or fear or both, your brain produces chemical signals that block your immune-system and your self-healing. This is why you need to stop it as soon as possible and start to create the chemical signals in your brain that support your immune system, deepen your breath, empower your digestion and your blood flow, balance your pH level in your body, and stimulate your detoxification. All these very important physiological reactions are impaired as long as the stress hormones rule your biology and your life.

Find or create time in your every day life where you work actively with ILT exercises for at least 10 min at the time, at least 3 times a day. After more then 25 years in oncology I can assure you that this is an essential part of the changes you need to do in order to live longer and better, no matter in what stage of your cancer condition you are at the moment.

This is an outline of how you can practice ILT.

Sit down comfortably on a chair with upright chest and your legs and arms uncrossed, parallel and, if you want, your palms turned upward, resting on your thighs.

Feel the earth underneath your feet, feel the weight of your body resting on the chair.

Feel your breath.

Breathe a little deeper and a little slower.

Use your belly muscles to breathe, feel how your belly pops out a little bit while you breathe in, and how your belly contracts while you breathe out.

Let your shoulders be relaxed while you breathe, breathe only with your belly.

Breathe slowly.

You can slow down your breath by breathing out through a slight resistance that you make with your lips. Or by breathing out through only one nostril, holding the other nostril with your pointing finger (alternate nostril breathing, a technique used in Yoga).

Slow breathing is a very effective way to switch off the production of stress hormones within minutes and to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your vegetative nervous system that stand for self-healing, recovery, good digestion, muscular relaxation and good feelings.

After a few minutes of conscious slow breathing you can focus your mind on an affirmation that you like to practice.

Affirmations are inner words or thoughts, that create good feelings, give you hope and are based on truth and compassion. Affirmations work the strongest when we focus our mind on them and repeat them slowly over and over again, giving the words a special “color or imagined light energy” and combine them with a soft bodily (somatic) sensation as for instance a gentle touch.

These are examples for affirmations, that everybody can use:

Inner Life Training affirmation:

I feel my body, resting safely on this chair.

I feel my breath and enjoy breathing deeply and slowly and how it helps my body to heal.

I allow myself to feel good right now and let go of all the tensions, the fear, the worries that I had in the past. (breathe out the past, breathe in the NOW!)

I feel the power of life in my heart.

I feel grateful for the gift of life that moves my heart in this very moment.

I now choose to focus on the power of life that I feel in my heart and that flows from my heart out to my entire body.

Putting gently your hand on your heart:

I feel the warmth of my palm and the movements of my heart, that is the center of life in my body. I focus on this power that I feel deep inside myself, give it my favorite healing color and let it flow through my entire body.

Together with my breath I feel the power of self-healing, the power in my immune-system in my blood that I allow to be strong again, helping me to take good care of my health, my body and myself.

I feel strong reasons for living my life.

Another way to practice ILT is when you have pain, either physical or emotional pain.

Use the following steps:

1. Feel the pain and find out what it is about. Where in your body do you feel it?
2. What emotions are connected with the pain? Describe them.
3. Focus on that spot in your body where you feel the pain the most. Dare to feel it really really intensively. Go to that spot in your body where you feel it intensively and then do the ILT affirmation exercise above. Breathe through that spot in your body where you feel the pain the most. Feel and see with your “inner eye” how that spot gets softer and softer, lighter and lighter to more you breathe through it.
4. Transform that spot in your inner imagination and give it a purpose or a name. You can call it your healing spot, that reminds you to do the ILT exercises from time to time. Give thanks.
5. Use non-judgmental terms when you do affirmations. Use terms that describe, express acceptance or even thankfulness in your affirmations and avoid judgments by all means.

Using the knowledge about your inherited stress patterns and how to change them into an optimal cancer coping strategy will make your life more enjoyable, reduce fear and stress and certainly give you a longer and better quality of life.

Your subconsciousness will slowly but safely allow the new normal and reduce the stress signals every time you practice ILT. The NEW NORMAL will become a new and healthy mindset after a period of practicing and give you the best mental condition to improve your health.