Spirit Hands

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

A few days after the biopsy, my surgeon, Dr. Johs, called and let us know that I did have stage 3, grade 3 adenocarcenoma of the breast, and they wanted me in the office right away to ramp up our offense strategy. In these two weeks between my diagnosis and my talk with Walden, I was so weakened by my cancer that I often floated into a dreamy, otherworldly state, and was drifting magnetically towards the other side. I felt one foot tip-toeing on earth and the other tip-toeing in heaven. Focusing on the practical realities of my situation was very difficult for me. For instance, I could barely tolerate listening to my surgeon, who is a very kind and gifted man, as he explained the results of my core biopsy. Thankfully, my partner, Ken, and my soul sister, Pat, were with me during that important consultation, asking lots of questions and taking notes. As I sat there with my stomach quaking and my attention fading in and out, the doctor took out a pen and drew a cutaway sketch of a breast to show how milk duct cancer develops. Even though I greatly appreciated the doctor's care and concern for me, the last thing I wanted to look at was a drawing of my diseased breast. Wishing that I were anywhere else but in that room, I leaned back and took in a deep breath. Suddenly, I felt two spirit hands land gently on my shoulders, and a wave of relaxation flowed through my body. Then tender, motherly energy streamed into me, and I felt wrapped in a blanket of love. This event marked the beginning of the internal part of my healing journey, which has continued to unfold in remarkable ways.

That evening, I could still feel the loving hands of my motherly spirit guide lightly resting on my shoulders. As an explorer of psychospiritual realms for many years, I have learned how to attune to other levels of consciousness, so I relaxed my mind, opened my senses, and asked to see an image of her. I saw the face of a middle-aged native American woman, and when I asked her name, she said, "Mother." Then I felt myself drift into a confined space that smelled like smoke and sweat, and I heard moans of pain. Suddenly, I dropped into the body of a young native American woman writhing in the throes of a breech childbirth. My head was being stroked by my mother's warm, capable hands, and when I looked up, I recognized her as the spirit guide that had been comforting me all day. When death finally came, my soul left my body in a state of deep grief, and I was left with a distinct impression of my full breasts, swollen with milk that would never nourish my child. As I emerged from my trancelike state, I felt a synchronistic connection between the stagnant, souring breasts of this young woman's corpse and the stagnant, toxic tissue of my milk duct cancer.

This sort of experience is spoken of in many healing traditions. Native people might call it a shamanistic vision, Carl Jung might have called it an exercise in active imagination, and a hypno-therapist might call it a past life regression. However it's categorized, an inner sojourn like this offers rich, psychospiritual content that can be plumbed for meaning and brought to a state of acceptance, wholeness and completion. To me, this experience had the flavor of a past incarnation, but whether or not I really was this woman in another life, I knew that she represented a part of my psyche that needed healing. The next day, during a walk in the Rocky Mountain foothills near my home, I felt the calm, peaceful presence of Mother, my spirit guide, and I was moved to do some inner work. After summoning the energetic presence of the young, grieving Native American woman, I imagined her permeated with acceptance and love. Then I visualized her expressing the milk that her body had created, spraying it onto the earth like a goddess feeding all of life with the sweet nectar of the Divine Mother, and I visualized myself expressing toxins from my own stricken breast, which the earth was able to accept and transform into compost. My final step was to imagine both of us filled with radiant white light that dissolved the remains of noxious, stagnated grief.

Sky Women - Moment in Flight by Bruce King

This inner sojourn relieved some of the leaden weight bearing down on my heart, but I could feel many more knots in my psyche that needed untangling. It was then that another blessing emerged from the source of divine love that has impelled me on this journey. Her name is Devi, and not only is she my dear friend and soul sister, she is also a masterful body-centered psychotherapist who volunteered to guide me through the terrain of my unconscious. When we had our first session a few days later, I told her about Mother, my Native American guide, and about my inner connection to the young woman who died in childbirth. Devi helped me to release my connection with her grief by asking her guides to lead her soul to a place of healing in the spirit world. As I watched her go off with her spirit helpers and fade into a field of loving light, I felt immediate relief.

Then I worked with the part of me that didn't want to go down the torturous road of chemo, mastectomy and radiation. My conversation with Walden hadn't happened yet, and I was still struggling with the decision to fight for my life. Here is a quote from my journal entry on that day:

I do not hate my cancer. Even as it claws at my flesh, I am able to accept my aberrant cells as an expression of an urgent need for transformation. I am committed to healing, but I don't know what my healing will look like. Will my body survive this intense initiation? I don't know. My job is to do karmic clean-up, and whether I live or die is in the hands of Spirit. It's strange - through some miracle, I love my body more now than ever before. It's a tender deer that is enduring the flames of suffering in order to provide a ground for my soul lessons. I am reminded of these lines from Rumi: "The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire. Your essence is gold hidden in dust. To reveal its splendor, you need to burn in the fire of love." My soul asks, Do you live in the center of love, Ria? Are you love itself? No, not yet? Then sit in the temple of fire and let it consume you until you know that you are love. Cancer is the center of the flames. Life devouring life. Some inner fire is raging, and must be quenched with the liquid gold of divine consciousness. And where does the divine resonate within the continuum of life? It is everywhere, within and without. It vibrates the silvery threads of light that hold together the web. The seed of my cancer is a divine ache crying out for the healing touch of love.

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The Place of Great Changes

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

As the aberrant cells in my breast coalesced into life-threatening tumors, the shamanic spirit bird sank her talons into my flesh and carried me off to the Place of Great Changes. Nothing in my life will ever be the same. My body has been deeply weakened by my cancer, and will be forever transformed by the fiery forces of chemotherapy, mastectomy and radiation. Although I have been blessed with access to the spiritual realms, I wrestle with fears about walking down this path of suffering. The day after my diagnosis, I was in a fragile emotional state, and I picked up some sticks of charcoal to try and express some of my dark feelings on paper. This is what I drew:


When my partner, Ken, saw it, he looked a little shocked and asked if I had drawn a picture of my tumor. I told him, no, that I had just opened a connection between my hand and my unconscious and had drawn an impression of my feelings. Then he got up, rummaged through some papers, and pulled out the page of my core biopsy report that showed a black and white picture of my tumor cells. My jaw dropped. It looked just like my drawing. During my core biopsy, I had avoided looking at the TV monitor that was displaying a picture of my tumor, and I hadn't even glanced at any of my medical papers. I just wasn't ready to deal with reality yet. But reality had excavated through the layers of my unconscious and emerged into plain sight through my own hand.


The archetypal realms permeate all levels of life, from the unconscious to the conscious, from energetic to cellular, from reality to the transcendent. When I picked up the piece of charcoal, I felt moved to draw a disorderly maze of tunnels that swirled chaotically around voids of white space. I was amazed to see how the impressions that surfaced from my unconscious fell into the same rhythm of my actual tumor cells, and as I paged through Joan Halifax's marvelous book on shamanism, I saw the same patterns in a drawing that was created by a Chuckchee Eskimo after emerging from a trance in which he had a vision of the Underworld.




I am so thankful for my ability to connect with the mysteries and gifts that are available to us from the psychospiritual realms. They offer us access to worlds that we have only begun to tap into, paths that will eventually lead us from the Place of Great Changes to the one Source of Consciousness.

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Shamanic Initiation

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

The embrace of the swans in Hilma Af Klimt's painting powerfully embodies the marriage of light and darkness that permeates life. We often think of light as a positive force to seek out and darkness as a negative one to avoid, but, in truth, we need to value each equally. The pulsing of light into darkness and darkness into light is the basis of creation. As I relax more and more into this basic truth, I strengthen my ability to accept and integrate whatever comes down the pike. And as I breathe into my experiences, whether dark or light, with a curious, open heart, my fear dissolves into love.

Just as night is always followed by dawn, the darkest times of life offer great opportunities for spiritual breakthrough. But before we can become spiritually enlightened, we must learn to value and pay homage to the darkness. I have cancer. I am profoundly wounded. I literally carry death over my heart. I am in awe of this destructive force that has amplified my awareness and transformed my mundane existence into the stuff of myth. My cancer is the teacher that is transporting me to powerful realms of transformation. In Joan Halifax's book, Shaman, The Wounded Healer, she speaks of the shaman's call to power, an ordeal that takes us down into the realm of chaos, where energy is wild, disorderly and untransformed. This ordeal challenges the initiate to "tap into the net of power" and gain the mastery that allows for "the reversal of death, the transformation of form, and the transcendence of time and space." Everyone has the potential to gain this level of mastery. To attain it, we must surrender to the wound that has rent us open, willingly submit to our journey through the Underworld, and open our heart to what our soul wants us to learn. Here is how a Native American elder from the San Juan Pueblo eloquently explains the process:

What I am trying to say is hard to tell and hard to understand unless you have been yourself at the edge of the Deep Canyon and have come back unharmed. Maybe it all depends on something within yourself - whether you are trying to see the Watersnake or the sacred Cornflower, whether you go out to meet death or to Seek Life. It is like this: as long as you stay within the realm of the great Cloudbeings, you may indeed walk at the very edge of the Deep Canyon and not be harmed. You will be protected by the rainbow and the Great Ones. You will have no reason to worry and no reason to be sad. You may fight the witches, and if you meet them with a heart that does not tremble, the fight will make you stronger. It will help you to attain your goal in life; it will give you strength to help others, to be loved and liked, and to seek Life.

Shamanic cultures often depict spirit animals as messengers from the Underworld or as abductors that kidnap human souls into the Underworld. This is an Inunnit Eskimo stonecut of a predatory bird that's carrying off an unsuspecting soul into the chaotic depths for his initiation.

I find great comfort in the wisdom of the ancient shamanic cultures. Their teachings offer profound depths of meaning to abductees like myself as well as a spiritual pathway through the fires of our ordeals. In homage to the shamanistic traditions, I have written this poem describing my abduction into the nether realms:

Ashen Moment

Last night, Mother Spider
nested in my breast.
Kissing my eyes,
crooning soft, dark lullabies,
she embraced my heart
within her lacy, lethal web.
Dreaming my death dance,
Mother Crow visits
to pluck my hair,
stealing ease
and vanity
for herself.
Plummeting through
black hole after black hole,
unwinding lifetime
after lifetime,
Mother Snake uncoils,
red as blood.

In this dusk,
this ashen moment,
bouquets of hope
lie strewn along
the ground
and I am lost,
unbound,
loosed in time,
helpless as a
wounded dove.

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Soul Guidance

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

When I called Walden at our appointed time, he said, "Okay, Ria, so tell me what's happening." I told him that I had advanced breast cancer, and I had to make a decision about whether to submit to Western medical treatments or to pursue alternative healing methods. His immediate response was, "Why, you do both, of course. You know, very few people die of breast cancer these days." Then I sort of whined, "But I'm so tired of suffering. I've had chronic problems with my health, and this feels like too much to take. I don't want to lose my breast. I'm just not sure that I want to live any more." He said, "I know how you feel. I've just been through open heart surgery. If it weren't for my partner, my dog and my work, I wouldn't be so happy about being here. But souls don't come here for a vacation. We come to grow and learn through life's challenges. Whether we like it or not, suffering is a powerful teacher. Ria, you need to accept what's happening and surrender to this part of your life's journey. When you emerge from this initiation, you are going to be a completely different person."

Walden's Enchanted Cottage

Although I had been avoiding a proactive stance in dealing with my cancer, Walden's words resonated deeply with truths that I hold within my own heart. In fact, I've been working on a manuscript about inner alchemy, the art of transforming the lead of suffering into the gold of compassion, and just the night before, I had come across this passage that I wrote about a year ago:

To help us accept loss, illness, or any intense challenge, we are called upon to sacrifice our image of what we wanted our life to be. To sacrifice means, "to make sacred." The real magic of inner alchemy requires that we willingly offer in sacrifice that which has been taken from us. How do we do this? By accepting our wound, by releasing who or what we have lost, by flowing with the unfathomable forces of fate instead of fighting against them, and by surrendering whatever hardens our heart - our resentments, our anger, our envy, our regrets, our self-righteousness, our perfectionism, our pretensions, our desire for revenge, our denial of forgiveness, our refusal to accept what is - to the flames of transformation.

When I read that passage, I realized that I had written those words to my future self. In fact, my entire manuscript was like a message in a bottle that had unexpectedly washed up onto my own shores. Let me be clear: it wasn't like I wasn't practicing what I was preaching. I have been brought to my knees countless times in my life, and I've learned how to surrender to my fate and carry on with a resilient spirit. But cancer? On top of everything else? That was just over the top. My inner adolescent had announced, "Sorry, but I don't want to play anymore. And you can't make me."

But during the eighteen minutes that I spoke with Walden, my resistant, adolescent self surrendered to the more mature, wise part of me. In some mysterious way, my conversation with him implemented a constructive shift in the very foundation of my being. Although I was speaking to a man whom I had never met, a part of me recognized Walden, and I felt like I was at the receiving end of an empathetic reprimand from one of my soul teachers. It was as if I had fallen asleep in class, and he woke me up with a gentle rap on my knuckles with his ruler. As I listened to his words, I realized that it was my responsibility to accept the challenges of my situation, and to do whatever I could to heal physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. At the end of our talk, Walden asked me to email him periodically to let him know how I was doing. I thanked him, and after hanging up, I sat motionless for a few minutes trying to absorb what had just happened. Was it possible that my attitude had suddenly flipped 180 degrees? Intuitively, I knew that yes, it was. The tectonic plates of my psyche had suddenly, unalterably, shifted. In a deep, quiet place inside, I knew that I was going to go through the entire firestorm of the Western cure. In those life-changing eighteen minutes, I had surrendered to my fate and agreed to endure the tortures of purgatory in order to give my tender, wounded body a chance to survive.

Walden never asked for my Visa number. He had spoken to me from a generous place of true compassion as a friend, brother and teacher offering loving support to a pilgrim who is treading a dangerous path through the Valley of Death, and I will be forever grateful to him.

Later that evening, a number of projects came to me that felt like assignments, and this spiritual breast cancer blog was the first one. Then I closed my eyes and contemplated the creative power that weaves together opposing forces like light and darkness, health and disease, purity and poison, joy and suffering, and birth and death into an enigmatic Gordian's Knot, I was reminded of a magnificent painting by Hilma Af Klimt, an early 20th century artist whose refulgent work communicates the essence of the mystical experience. My favorite of her paintings depicts two intertwined swans, one black and one white, whose sensuous, ceremonial embrace beautifully embodies the mysterious, sublime and paradoxical fusion of two opposites into a united whole.

Final Picture From the Swan Series by Hilma Af Klimt 1915

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The Journey Begins

I look behind and after

and find that all is right;

in my deepest sorrows

there is a soul of light.

Vivekananda

I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer on January 12, 2009. I had known about the tumor for a while, but it had been misdiagnosed via two thermograms as benign. As a health conscious, alternative-minded person, I didn't want to expose myself to the radiation of mammograms, so when I found out about thermograms, I put my trust in them. Bad idea. My surgeon later told me that the location of my tumor, which is over my heart, is a weak spot for thermograms because the heat generated by the heart can confuse the test's interpretation. When the lump adhered to my muscle and started to hurt (a lot), I went in for a check-up. The physician's assistant examined my breast, and as I watched her face tighten with concern, I knew I was in trouble. She squeezed me in for an emergency core biopsy two days later, and as the surgeon and the radiologist worked on me, they spoke in somber, hushed tones that oozed with compassion. Anyone who has watched a doctor show on TV would know that what they were really saying was, "Sorry, but you are totally screwed."

Allow me to back up a bit. Several months before, an odd thing had happened. After swallowing a mouthful of scrambled eggs at breakfast, the blood drained from my head, my heart seemed to stop, and I almost fainted; from that moment on, I felt sort of slippery, as if my soul had begun to separate from my body. I remember saying to a friend, "I don't really understand why, but I feel like I'm dying."

As a professional astrologer, I knew that I was in a challenging period called a Saturn return that wasn't about to end any time soon. I also knew that my Saturn return was a very difficult one because of certain planetary configurations, and I suddenly found myself wondering if I would survive it. I decided to talk to another astrologer in order to get a second, hopefully more optimistic, opinion. I don't usually consult other astrologers, so I googled around until I came upon the website of an astrologer named Walden Welch, and I intuitively knew he was the man I wanted to talk to. He had been clairvoyant since birth, and his charming features made him look like he had just emerged from Lorien Forest, the realm of the Elves in Lord of the Rings.

Walden Welch

We had a pleasant conversation on the phone and he told me to email him my birth info the next day. After doing that, I didn't hear from him. Then I waited a week and emailed him again. When I still didn't hear from him, I knew that his lack of response wasn't due to some glitch in my gmail. I said to myself, "Well, either he's dying or I'm dying." To test out my theory, I had a friend send him an email. When he responded to her the next day, I knew that I was the one who was dying and he probably didn't want to be the one to break the news. I felt a mixture of curiosity and dread about trying to contact him again.

During this period of time, I went to a service for a friend who had just died of breast cancer. Susan Edwards was a well loved member of the Boulder community, a witty, brilliant writer and metaphysician who had been a disciple of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and a close associate of Allen Ginsberg. Her memoir of Ginsberg is entitled The Wild West Wind.

Susan Edwards

Many Boulderites are spiritually eclectic people who participate in a melange of ceremonies ranging from Tibetan Buddhist rituals to Sunday services at Unity Church to Hindu chanting to Passover Seders. Susan's service was held at the shrine room of Karma Dzong, the building that houses the Boulder Shambhala Meditation Center. After removing my shoes, I padded into the stunning, richly colored shrine room adorned with ornate carvings, bronze statues of Tibetan Buddhist deities and powerful sacred paintings. The large space was filling quickly with people who had come to say goodbye to Susan, and my partner, Ken, and I happened to land in two seats that were directly in front of her body. In the Buddhist tradition, corpses are not embalmed before cremation, and I occasionally discerned a sour, musky scent as the odor of Susan's decomposing body mingled with the sandalwood incense that was burning on the altar above her. While contemplating her lifeless form, I thought about this unique, remarkable woman who'd had a way of peering into our souls and deftly pruning our tangled inner gardens with a few well chosen words. As I thanked Susan for her trickster wisdom, her compassion, and her wry, Mona Lisa smile, I silently concurred with her decision to eschew Western medicine in her journey through breast cancer. Even though we had lost her, I understood Susan's decision not to suffer the slash and burn methods of chemotherapy, mastectomy and radiation, and I knew I would have chosen the same path.

A short while later, the day of my doctor's appointment arrived. Even though signs and portents of death seemed to be hovering all around me, I had felt sure that my tumor was benign and I was absolutely shocked when I found out that I had cancer. My first thoughts were that I was going to make the same choices that Susan had, and that I would probably die. After many years of coping with chronic health problems, I didn't feel that I had it in me to endure the torturous rituals of Western medicine's cancer treatments. I went through the MRI, PET and CT scans in a daze. The results showed that my cancer was in several lymph glands, in my skin, and that it had adhered to my muscle, but the good news was that no other tumors were present in my body. The fact that it had not metastasized put me in stage three. If I had been in stage four, with tumors elsewhere in my body, my condition would not have been considered curable. But with intensive chemotherapy, a mastectomy and radiation, I had a good chance for a cure. Of course, my partner, my sister and my best friends wanted me to fight, but they had all seen me suffer with health problems for years and they understood my reluctance to enter a gory battle for my life. A good friend of mine who is an excellent therapist offered to work with me, and for two weeks I explored an inner dialogue between the part of me that refused to take a warrior's stance against my disease and the part of me that wanted to live. Ironically, the part that was refusing to fight was winning.

That was when I decided to email Walden one more time. I told him that I now knew that I was dying of cancer, and my guess was that he had intuited my dire straits but hadn't wanted to break the news. Then I said that I was working to gain clarity in my mind and my heart, and that I would appreciate receiving his counsel; but I also said I would completely understand if he chose not to work with me, and that if I didn't receive a response to this email, I would not bother him again. He emailed me the following morning, and we set up an appointment that lasted eighteen minutes and changed the course of my life.

I would love to hear from you. To leave a comment about this posting, scroll down and type inside the white box below the heading, POST A COMMENT. Underneath the white box, it says Comment as: with a white bar that says Ria Moran (Google). Click the arrows on the right and a dropdown menu will appear. Choose name/URL and type in your name. The URL is not necessary. Or, if you wish, you may choose to leave a comment anonymously. Then click Post Comment in the next white box and your comment will be published. Thank you!