Basic Goodness

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 day of my mastectomy approaches, I have been working with my fear of going through this surgery and I've picked up the book Shambhala: The Way of the Warrior to give me insight in developing the fearlessness of the spiritual warrior. Chogyam Trungpa says that warriorship begins with the experience of the basic goodness of life. These are quiet, simple moments, like noticing a bright color, hearing a beautiful sound, or smelling the vibrant air after a rainshower. Trungpa says we should take notice of these moments to awaken us to our own dignity and beauty.

I struggle with losing awareness of my own beauty and judging myself because I developed cancer. There's a little demon running around in my mind that says, "You are a real fuck-up. Look at what you're putting everybody through - all the worry, and the expense. With all the work you've done on yourself, you can't even figure out how to stay healthy. You're nothing but a failure."

I experience these thoughts as toxic, and when they surface, I work with them. Instead of trying to force destructive thoughts from my consciousness, I focus on opening my heart to my vulnerability and acknowledge that I'm doing the best I can with my life. Trungpa says,

A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness towards themselves, they cannot experience harmony or peace within themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is inharmonious and confused.

I believe that the inharmonious and confused energy that he's talking about is part of what creates the cancer pattern. When I meditate, I work to dissolve this self-rejection and locate what Trunga calls basic goodness inside. It's always there...I always find it. I find a way to love the difficult parts of myself, and this is basic to practicing spiritual warriorship. According to Chogyam Trungpa,

When you don't punish or condemn yourself, when you relax more and appreciate your body and mind, you begin to contact the fundamental notion of basic goodness in yourself. So it is extremely important to be willing to be open to yourself. Developing tenderness towards yourself allows you to see both your problems and your potential accurately. You don't feel that you have to ignore your problems or exaggerate your potential. This kind of gentleness towards yourself and appreciation of yourself is very necessary. It provides the ground for helping yourself and others.

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My First Chemotherapy

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.

Once I made the decision to do chemotherapy, I knew that I had to radically change my attitude towards it. My first step was to thank Spirit for the opportunity to keep my body alive, and my second was to completely accept the drugs into my body. To accomplish this nearly impossible task, I had to perform a perfect 180 degree flip from old me to new me. Old me didn't believe in Western medicine because it had failed me in the past; new me was willing to give Western medicine another chance, and to go all the way, no holds barred. Whatever I had to deal with - puking, mouth sores, nausea, hair loss, sore throat, migraines, diarrhea, fevers, secondary infections, exhaustion, heart complications - I would accept and handle.

Jeremy Geffen, M.D.

In a private consultation I had with Dr. Jeremy Geffen, author of The Journey Through Cancer, Jeremy emphasized how important it is to resolve any doubts about doing chemo before you start. He deeply believes in the body-mind connection, and feels that holding a split attitude about chemo i.e. "it's a terrible poison but there's no other chance for me," can actually worsen the side effects and lessen the chance the chemo has to be effective. Here's a quote from Jeremy's book, p. 77:

As a patient, you must at some point find a way to suspend the unceasing activity of a doubing mind. This is not to suggest that you should abandon thinking or abdicate your sovereign right to know and understand what is happening to you. However if the doubting mind is left unchecked, it can seriously undermine the treatment process.

There is a strong field of fear surrounding chemotherapy because it has sometimes brought more suffering into the cancer patient's life. If a cancer patient makes the decision to do chemotherapy, I think it's imperative to dissolve that fear in the way that's right for each individual. Some people might pray to Jesus, some might use self-hypnosis, others might engage their will. Because working with archetypes comes so naturally to me, I do meditations, visualizations and active imagination sessions with the Medicine Buddha that have helped me to accept the chemotherapy as healing balm that flows from his medicine bowl into my body. And I also imagine the great protector Mahakala absorbing any excess chemo that might cause collateral damage.

Here I am at my first chemotherapy session. My sweetheart, Ken, and my dear friend Aubrey were with me, and they both videotaped the treatment. The syringe of red liquid that you see in the foreground is adriamycin, is a very potent chemo that's nicknamed "the red devil."

Me and my new friend, "the red devil"

The first time I heard that adriamycin is nicknamed "the red devil," I felt uneasy and frightened of it. Then I remembered that I used to love Red Devils candy when I was a kid. It was hot, spicy, and tasted like cinnamon. I decided to make a conscious association in my mind between Red Devils candy and Red Devil adriamycin, and it worked! It might sound silly, but my fear of adriamycin dissolved. In Jeremy's book, he talks about how important the meanings are that we assign to different words or events. He says that "if beliefs are the 'truths' we attach to ideas and experiences in the real world, meanings are the significance we give to those ideas and experiences." These are profound words that have the potential to change our lives. For example, here are two different meanings I can assign to having cancer. I can choose to fall into a deep depression and become convinced that I am being punished by God, or I can look at my cancer as an opportunity to learn, grow, help others, and learn how to love more fully.

Sweet Aubrey and me

And believe me, I am no Pollyanna. I've experienced plenty of depression, doubt, fear and anxiety in my life. But there is something about my having cancer that has rocked my boat so dramatically that whole handfuls of my beliefs about life have been uprooted. I truly have the feeling that anything is possible. Yes, I might die, but I also might live. Yes, I have a tumor but I also am learning how to dissolve it, and not just with the chemo. Love is dissolving it. I love myself more now than ever before in my life. I love my body, my injured breast, my cellulite, my aging thighs, my wrinkles, my eyes, my bones, my fingernails...I love every little part of my body. And if you know anything about women, especially middle-aged women, that's a miracle.

My sweetheart, Ken, and me

To get back to Jeremy's book, I really recommend it. It's divided into seven sections, loosely based on the seven chakras. The first is Level One: Education and Information, in which he talks about the basic facts about cancer. Level Two is Connection with Others - we can't get through this alone. Level Three is The Body as Garden, and he discusses all sorts of adjunct holistic healing. In Level Four, Emotional Healing, is a very important one. In fact, Jeremy says, "not one single person has ever truly healed from cancer without undergoing a transformation and healing of their emotional self." Level Five is The Nature of Mind, in which concepts like "thought," "belief," "meaning," and "focus," are discussed. Level Six is Life Assessment, which asks the question, "What is the real meaning and purpose of my life?" And Level Seven is The Nature of Spirit, in which Jeremy has chosen the following quote to begin his chapter:

Whatever be the means adopted, you must at last return to the Self. So why not abide in the Self here and now?

Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879 - 1950)

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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.

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!

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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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!