Finding Your Destiny

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Welcome back. I am so delighted you're here. I'm your host, Dawson Church, and I love sharing these interviews, these insights with you. Because you never know when something you see and hear here is going to make that difference. That just rocks your world. Rocks your life, gives you the tools to turn your challenges into your opportunities. So I'm so happy you're here and I know you will get insights, remarkable insights from today's guest. His name is Nathan Crane. Nathan is a natural health researcher and a certified holistic cancer coach.

He is an award winning author. He is also the producer of the documentary film Cancer The Integrative Perspective. He's received numerous awards, including the accolade 2020 Outstanding Achievement Humanitarian Award and the Outstanding Community Service Award from the California Senate. His website is becomingcancerfree.com Nathan, it's a joy to welcome you here today. Thanks for being with us. Dawson, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for putting on this really important event. You know, this is a topic that is definitely near and dear to my heart.

And I think it's critically important that we all understand at a deeper level, the traumas in our lives of childhood, adverse events and how these things can actually directly contribute to something like a cancer diagnosis, and then what we can actually do about it to empower ourselves to to heal and to thrive. So, honored that you've included me and and really happy to go deep into this topic today. I will cover all those points in the course of the next while. let's begin with just your personal story.

How you got into this. Yeah. So, you know, the short version is I went through a lot of my own traumas and childhood adverse events growing up as a teenager in Belgrade, in Bozeman, Montana. Ended up homeless at 15, kicked out of the house addicted to drugs and alcohol. My parents separated, divorced when I was about 12 years old. That was, you know, part of what kind of kicked some of these things off. But I was really already surrounded by, you know, drugs and alcohol and bad behavior as early as nine, ten years old, started smoking cigarets, experimenting with, you know, different kinds of substances, started drinking at 12 years old, smoking weed and, you know, by 15 full blown addict, alcoholic, drug addict, hard drugs, two packs of cigarets a day and living out of my car, living under park benches, living on friends couches.

and really was headed for death. I was headed for six feet underground. Or prison. And really, nobody thought I was going to make it to 18 years old. I had some really beautiful people come into my life. I moved in with them. My best friends, family took me in to live with them for a while, while he was actually away at a military camp, kind of a boot camp, trying to get his life in order. And they took me in as kind of a, you know, adopted son under their wing. And they're beautiful people, spiritual people.

very loving and kind, vegetarian, cared about humanity. And I just started absorbing a lot of the love and energy and experience from them and asking lots of questions. We talk about Buddhism and we talk about Jesus, and we talk about meditation, and we talk about classical music is different between classical music and baroque music. And we just have all these beautiful. And, you know, and I loved it. I mean, here I'm a 16, 16, 17, I think I was about 17 at the time. And yeah, I'd be out partying and getting in trouble with the police and arrested and house arrest and all this stuff.

And then I'd come back to them and stay with them for a while and just soak up all this positivity and, yeah, going through all these traumas along the way, near-death experiences until I finally had a really big eye opening moment, in time, where I saw a potential vision of the future for myself that actually gave me a sense of hope. And shortly after that, my best friend and I, he came back from military camp. He said, I'm moving to California. I said, I'm going with you. So we packed everything up in my car, drove down to San Diego, basically ran out of gas there, and, you know, started my life over, at 18 years old.

That was in 2005. So since then, I've been just deeply committed and passionate to, number one,

Nathan's Early Trauma and Turning Point 4:42

healing myself, healing my traumas, improving my health, learning everything about health and healing as possible, but experimenting with all these different traditions and experiences and and spiritual practices and mental emotional healing practices, for going on almost two decades now. And so, you know, that's just become a big part of my life, who I am. And now I get to share that with my two beautiful children and my wife. And, you know, over and help millions of people around the world. cancer came along the way, where my passion really transitioned to cancer because of my grandfather.

And I watched the suffering he went through in 2013. Not from the cancer specifically, but from the treatment he was receiving and not knowing any other alternative solutions. And I watched him whittle away and die very quickly. Unfortunately, from really what I believe, the chemotherapy radiation, destroyed him. And so he died in 2013. And since then, for the past decade, I've been highly involved in cancer research, natural cancer research, producing, many summits, documentaries, books, some of these things that you've announced, in the introduction and have just been very passionate about empowering people to learn not only how to prevent a cancer diagnosis, but if you have cancer, what can you do to help your body heal itself and thrive?

Because that's really what our bodies want to do. They want to heal. They want to. They want to thrive. They want to repair. They want to rejuvenate. We just have to give them the right environment so that they can do that. Absolutely. And we'll talk about that environment both in terms of physical support, emotional support and spiritual support. And I want to go back to that moment when you had that epiphany of your life could be different. But before we do that, I want to just turn for a moment and I want to talk to all of those community members who are here right now and reflect on one thing that we're learning here with Nathan, and that is the importance of modeling.

Modeling is what we see outside of ourselves in the behavior of others. And you're growing up when you're a child, when you're 2 or 3, four years old, your brain is primarily in a state of slow and super learning brainwaves, seeing a lot of theta and delta waves in your brain at those early ages before the age of five, you're soaking information in from the environment. You are a super learning machine, and the modeling you get from people in your community, your aunts, your uncles, your parents, friends, all of those in your extended family that is being learned not at the level of concepts.

It's being learned at the level of neurons. And, you know, the firing together and wiring together. The modeling you get there is what you're going to replicate when you become older involuntarily, because your brain's wired that way. So when you're raised in a dysfunctional family, raised a dysfunctional home, seeing unhealthy behaviors, you tend to replicate those several of those listing here from Nathan's, from, the story over here that you're getting from from Nathan's childhood. Think about modeling.

What modeling were you picking up back then? What modeling are you carrying forward now and then? Most important, thinking Nathan's story about the modeling of the people you are choosing to spend time with now. Okay. Because now you can start to fire and wire different circuits in your brain by choosing different models. So before we go back and just go to that moment, Nathan's epiphany, just think about the whole idea of modeling and who are you modeling yourself on now? Make some notes about that.

I encourage you to take notes all the way through because you never know when that insight is going to be a big one for you. But give yourself that exercise of who are your models? You know, who your old models were. You know who your models are now and then. The third component is who do you want your models to be? If then some of the people that were in in in Nathan's adoptive household, where there was influence from classical composers and Jesus and Buddha and but and allowed to and all the wonderful people who've gone before, we're giving ourselves the template of healthy behaviors, healthy beliefs, a healthy lifestyle.

And so you want to look at your modeling and then what you aspire to in terms of the models to which you're you're moving. So I'm inserting that little, exercise for you here. You know, I give you homework often. I don't let you just sit there and zone out and exercise and and listen and be inspired. I want you to work. so I'm going to be stopping us frequently and having you do these exercises to apply this learning to your own life. Okay, so that said, let's go back to that moment when you had that vision of a better future.

What did that look like for you? What it feel like in your body? What happened then? Yeah, that's it's so powerful. It still sticks with me this day. And before I share that, I do want to I do want to mention, I mean, I did a, I was so bent on believing that things like music and television and these influences, external influences, actually didn't influence my character or my belief system that I had complete control over that, that I did a presentation in school, in high school that, I was proving to the class that those things actually didn't influence you in any negative way, like listening to rap music, gangster rap music, watching, you know, really terrible movies and shows and cartoons and things like that.

I believed it so strongly until I moved to San Diego, and when I had that big epiphany, I kind of changed to say it changed my whole life. And I looked up. So this was 3 or 4 years previously. I did that presentation, probably a sophomore in high school, freshman, sophomore, and then a few years later, I look at all my CDs that I'm listening to, and I looked at my life and they were exactly the same at that time, listening to all this gangster rap and all this, you know, terrible music is talking about killing and drugs and women and really derogatory ways.

And then I looked at my life and I thought, this is exactly what I've been doing in the last few years. And I literally took every CD I had and threw it in the trash. And it was such a big eye opening moment for me. and, you know, none of this was my parents fault, by the way. I mean, I know I mentioned the divorce early on, you know, my father's, you know, and our other families dealt with addiction their whole lives. That certainly had influence on me. but at the end of the day, that was, you know, my choice.

And my mom did the best she could, you know, with, with the knowledge that she had. But she didn't know how to handle me. I was so out of control. And now today, we've actually repaired those relationships. I have a great relationship with my dad, with my mom. They're both doing great and I'm so happy. But, you know, there were times there that it was very, very distressing and very challenging and I actually harbored resentment. And I'll share in a little bit how to heal that. Some of the ways that I've healed from some of these past traumas that were revolutionary in my own health and my own well-being, that anyone can implement.

So I love that you're taking action steps that people can do. I'll get some action steps as well, a little bit later on. But I want to answer your question. I was sitting on the couch in Belgrade, Montana, at, Dennis and Martina Davis's house, where I was living temporarily. I was probably 17, maybe close to 18. But we were having one of those spiritual conversations, and I don't really remember what we were talking about. I was sober, I remember that because it was really rare for me to be sober back then.

I mean, I'm, I'm very serious for the years, for a few years at a time. One day to be sober was very, very rare. And I remember being sober because I had a really clear mind and I was kind of sitting back on the couch and we were talking, and all of a sudden I had this vision as clear as day in my mind. My eyes were open, but I could see it. I could see myself on a stage in front of hundreds of people or thousands of people. I don't just a lot of people. And I was up there looking healthy and I was speaking to people.

I was sharing something, I was teaching, I was on stage and I was you know, giving this, presentation about something. And it felt good and it felt real and it felt like I was contributing in it. And I remember laying there, sitting there going, it felt so real that it just gave me a sense of hope that, wow, maybe there is something possible for me outside of this life, this current life that I'm in, which is suffering. It's pain, it's anguish, it's anger, it's resentment, it's sickness. You know, I was very unhealthy, I was skinny, I was pale, you know, all kinds of digestive issues.

I was definitely on track for a cancer diagnosis. Definitely on track for an early death or a heart attack. And I remember just being, you know, seeing myself as a healthy person on stage, helping people and all of a sudden having this sense of hope and inspiration and then that just, you know, faded away, disappeared. And I didn't think about it again until. Three years later, after I made a decision to move to San Diego and a change in my life. And I was doing better and making good decisions, still struggling with some things, you know, had relapses, things like that, but then would get back on track again.

And all of a sudden I was actually in front on a stage in front of a group of people speaking and teaching and helping people, and that just that vision came back and I just thought, oh my God, like, what an incredible thing that just happened that I literally had the same vision. And a few years later I'm doing exactly that. And then that's, you know, what's funny is speaking on stages now and teaching people at conferences, events, retreats. I've done it many, many, many times over the years, over the last 15, 16 years.

That's my favorite thing to do. I love it, you know? It's like, I love helping people, I love serving, I love inspiring, I love sharing positive messages. And, you know, we just did a conference here in Jacksonville a couple months ago, and you know, I hosted the whole thing was was just there in my element on stage serving and helping and inspiring people. And, you know, had I not taken that opportunity when life knocked on my door and said, here's a chance for you to leave all this shit behind and start your life over and begin on a new path.

Yeah, you don't know what you're doing, where you're going. You don't know if you're gonna have support. It's scary. Don't know anything about it. But you know, there's a chance it could be better than what you're doing now. Had I not taken the chance and said yes when I had that opportunity, I would not be here today. And that's what I want people to take away from that message. Right? Is the opportunity is always there knocking on your door to be better at any area of your life? It's just we have to open that door and step into the unknown and be willing to walk into that with a sense of openness and curiosity, to be able to experience the goodness that's available on the other side of that door.

So your past does not have to become your future. You have the chance to interrupt the process and then choose that new future of yourself. And so this again, is a great moment for us all to be reflecting, to be journaling, and to be thinking about places where you're just repeating that same old, same old, same old pattern, even repeating, and that you don't see the possibility of change. So open yourself to that new discovery. No, it's possible to change. Nathan changed that way. He was able to have that new vision.

You're able to have that new vision. And there are all kinds of ways you can you can shift and catalyze those new visions.

Modeling, Vision, and Choosing a New Path 16:48

So having the vision is one thing, and then you catalyze them by moving toward them in practical ways, which we'll talk about later, too. So I want to shift over here and talk about your grandfather. I know that one of the things we have to be very careful of in the natural health world is the way we talk about cancer, because, of all the major diagnoses, that's the one where there's a very, established, set of interests that big pharma companies, the whole medical treatment system and people get in trouble for even offering or presenting the possibility of, natural techniques and new therapies.

We have to be very careful about that, too, in psychology, in the field that I spend most of my time in. And so, but I just remember I had so many friends who have used natural methods for it, for cancer. And, what has struck me so forcibly is the difference in access. And I have some friends who are, really affluent and really knowledgeable. They can pick up the phone and they can talk to the surgeon general. I mean, they're there there are few people I know, and that, that, that, that, that social, economic, strata.

And what happens is they get fantastic care. They get this, this range of natural and conventional medicine. They get well-informed care, they get scientifically proven strategies. they get all kinds of treatments that are available in other parts of the world and not available in the US, and they generally get better. And then I see people in my world who don't have access that way. And I watch several friends over the years, Nathan. And I'm almost always getting getting the point of, I don't want to cry thinking about this.

And I remember just one, one friend or husband that got cut throat cancer. And, I said, would you be open to checking out some natural remedies? And you said, no, I have a great doctor at Kaiser and he knows what he's doing. We'll follow all of this to his feet and program. And so, I just watched over the next couple of years as he just went through the whole usual rigmarole, another, another friend of mine got something called cholangiocarcinoma, which has a 100% fatality rate, usually in about six months.

By the time it's, it's built cancer. By the time it's diagnosed, your terminal, there is, there is is if you just look at that bottom line, you'll see there is no there's no light at the end of the tunnel after that diagnosis. And and, and yet sometimes, surgeons are, operating on them, knowing there's no hope of recovery. They're getting these, these painful treatments that degrade their, their quality of life. And so, like that friend of mine with throat cancer, just watching them suffer and die horrible deaths is just so profound, disturbing to me.

And so, you know, I don't want to sound as though I that can work and can be the right, the right solution for, for some people. But, there are so many options there. And you want to familiarize yourself with a whole range of options and then find a, a solution that works for you. So when you talk about your grandma, your grandfather and I can tell you there was emotion behind you say he just got chemotherapy and radiation. I think for many of us who watched friends and loved ones die after getting conventional treatments, there is that sense of of just sadness, anger, grief, loss that they didn't get access to.

All the things we know are possible. 100%. I remember sitting next to him in Arizona after he was diagnosed. He'd been going through treatment and sitting next to him in a chair and seeing his hair had fallen out. He was in tremendous pain. Getting up, walking to the bathroom was just unbelievably painful, and it was 20ft away. And I remember sitting talking with him, and by this point I had 7 or 8 years kind of in the natural health world and spiritual world experimentation. But I didn't know anything about cancer.

And sitting there, I knew there had to be other things he could be doing. I knew there had to be natural solutions he could be doing to maybe help him, to maybe support his treatment, to maybe help improve his immune system. But I didn't know any of them. I, I wasn't confident in it. I didn't know what cause cancer. I didn't know the research behind it. I didn't know how to help the body fight cancer. And so I sat there helpless and hopeless, like most people do when dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

Because unfortunately, number one, in this society, we're not trained and even the conventional oncologists are not trained in what causes cancer. so we don't really know, as a general population number two then, not really sure that much about it. And how to help somebody dealing with it. And so that makes it awkward. And what most of us think cancer is, is you lose your hair, you get sick, you get weak. Maybe you survive, but very likely you're going to die. Because we've all seen that. Everybody here has seen it.

I've seen it with, friends. I've seen it with family. Right. And that's what I used to think cancer was. But the deeper and so sitting there, seeing him go through this feeling helpless, feeling hopeless, leaving, going home, and then him passing away shortly after that, I just had this fire inside me that said, I'm going to learn everything I can about cancer. What causes it, why our body makes cancer. I'm going to go interview every top functional medical doctor, naturopathic oncologist, traditional Chinese medicine, the top people in the world and learn about it and help.

So if I ever have a cancer diagnosis or my family, I'll never feel that way again. I can help, I can help ourselves, and along the way, I can help others learn the same information. And so that's when I started producing the summits, the documentaries, the books, the masterclasses. I interviewed well over 400 world leading cancer experts. By this point, I have spent thousands of hours researching the peer reviewed medical literature and understand actually what causes cancer. And so we know what causes cancer.

We know that it's not something you catch or you get, we know that it's a dysfunction of the metabolism of the cell. We know that the mitochondria gets damaged and the cancer starts. The cell starts to chronically ferment and then becomes cancerous. And really, it's just trying to keep you alive. It's a cell that is trying to keep you alive. And in the process, it can kill you. Because we, keep, inputting damaging toxins and substances and stress, emotional, psychological stress in to the body, which inhibits the immune system down, regulates our immunomodulatory response and allows cancer to thrive.

And so the opposite side of that is go. Okay. So I'm going to go research and learn from, hundreds of people who have healed cancer, who they call spontaneous remissions. Spontaneous is the wrong word because it's, spontaneous when you intentionally choose very specific strategies and protocols and then your cancer goes away, 2 or 3 years later, that's not spontaneous, that's intentional. But anyway, our conventional system likes to call it spontaneous because they're not trained in how to do this.

Unless you're a functional medical doctor or an integrative medical doctor or holistic practitioner. then you can actually learn about this. And it's in the literature, it's very clear, you know, what causes cancer and then what we can do about it. And so, you know, there's some great examples of people I met over the years. Doctor Keesha Ewers, this was an incredible is a miraculous story where she, hurt her. she told me this on an interview once, and she had never really talked about this publicly until that point.

And she shared with me publicly. She said her son was molested by the babysitter under her watch, when he was growing up. And she didn't know what happened. And she found out about it years later because her son told her. And in that moment, she was so devastated, so traumatized, emotional primarily for two. One's incredibly angry at the perpetrator, the babysitter, the two at herself for not ever being able to recognize and notice that this person that she hired to look after her kids was actually molesting her son.

And so she took that so deep internally. And within months, she grew a breast tumor. But she has been doing this work for quite a while. She's been in the natural health field for quite a while, and she knew as soon as she had that tumor, she knew what it was from. It was from her grief. It was from her her own emotional experience. And so she went to work. She went to work doing what she knows how to do, forgiving, forgiving herself, forgiving the perpetrator, doing deep, deep forgiveness and healing work.

And within three months, that tumor was gone. Now, I'm not saying that's the case for every single person, but we do know stress, psychological stress, childhood adverse events, and emotional traumas directly impact the body's ability to remove cancer cells. Cancer is a very natural process, right? Our cells are being damaged 24 over seven mitochondria being damaged were bombarded by more toxins, more stress, more damaging things to the cells today than ever before. I have cancer cells inside me.

You have inside you. It's totally natural. And when we have a fully functioning immune system like Doctor Thomas Loney says in my documentary, he says there is a cure for cancer. It's called the immune system. And when you have a fully functioning immune system, you don't have to worry about a cancer diagnosis because that's what it does. It produces natural killer cells and T cells and B cells goes out, and literally destroys, eliminates, removes these cancer cells from our bodies. But when we are bombarded by excessive amounts of chronic stress, by these underlying childhood adverse events that we haven't healed by these traumatic experiences and grief and shame and self-doubt and guilt and these things that we hold on to, fears and anger, resentment that we hold on to every single day we are literally now regulating our immune system, in a sympathetic nervous system response and not allowing our body to do what it's designed to do, which is clean up these cancer cells.

And so when you're like that for five years, ten years, 15, 20 years, the likelihood of having a cancer diagnosis is obviously going to increase. Versus the other side of that coin is we have the power to self-regulate our nervous system. We can up regulate our parasympathetic nervous system through means. Things that you teach Dawson through EFT, through meditation, through what I love to do everyday qigong practices, energy healing, gratitude practices, forgiveness practices. The more that we can activate a parasympathetic nervous system response.

And this is in the literature, we can upgrade later our immune system and with a fully functioning immune system, as Doctor Lodhi says, then we don't have to worry about cancer diagnosis. Now, that's true for prevention as much as it is for a stage for cancer diagnosis. Now you have stage four. It's metastasized and spread throughout the body. It is significantly harder to put that into remission because you already have the cancer that's kind of grown out of control, but it's not impossible. It's totally possible.

And there's thousands of cases of these so-called spontaneous remissions

Cancer, Trauma, and the Role of Stress 28:30

where people implemented a very specific set of strategies. And one of those is, mentioned emotional healing to where their cancer went into complete remission. And so back to your point. You mentioned earlier, I'm not against conventional medicine. you know, the largest study ever done on chemotherapy that looked at, hundreds of thousands of people from the United States and Australia, looked at chemotherapy against a 22 adult malignancies. increasing five year survival rate. So they wanted to see, you know, is it actually increasing five year survival rate. And if so, what percentage?

They found when grouped among the 22 adult malignancies. And it only improved five year survival rate by 2.3%. some of those cancers had a 0% improvement and yet is still the most commonly prescribed, treatment that you're going to receive from an oncologist. But even so, I'm still not against it. Testicular cancer, for example, has a 50% improvement. So some cancers do better, others do significantly worse. But the key for what I tell the cancer clients that we work with is educate yourself, learn the core root causes of what causes cancer, and then what you can do to empower your body.

And there are things you can do, like fasting. And this is proven in the literature. You can fast for 24 to 48 hours before and after chemotherapy, which will significantly enhance the effectiveness of it and reduce the toxicity on your body. So the things you can do is called integrative medicine, where you're working with natural medicine and conventional medicine to make it more effective. You can do things like insulin potentiation therapy, iPPt, which is low dose chemo coupled with insulin to specifically target just the cancer cells.

Now, most conventional oncologists don't do that or even know about it yet, but you can find this from integrative oncologists if you need to get that tumor shrunk and down a bit because it's such a problem right. But the other thing it's really interesting is you can live 20, 30, 40 years with a cancer diagnosis and still live a completely normal life. If it doesn't grow out of control, if it doesn't block your intestines, for example, or isn't pressing against your brain stem, you can live a long, normal, you know, somewhat healthy life.

Even with the cancer diagnosis, we know it can take anywhere from 5 to 20 years before the cancer is even recognizable in your body. So it's been growing for a long time. And I tell people that, number one, so you have hope. But number two, you keep diving deeper into looking at the different solutions you have. It's very rare that you have a cancer diagnosis. They give you a prognosis, let's say, you know, two months or two years, whatever it might be. You still have time to get additional opinions, to look at alternative solutions, to look into mental emotional healing and see how these things can support you.

But there's always hope. There's always solutions. And as long as you know that, then you can be more empowered to take control of your health. Yeah. And, I know that just looking at emotions and cancer, it's so interesting. One of the studies that first alerted me to this was done, shortly after 2000 and published, like this book in my book, The Genie in Your Genes. However, the study and it found that, certain types of cancer cells have adrenaline receptors on their cell membranes, and adrenaline is the main stress hormone.

Master hormone for stress is cortisol. It's a very, it's just kind of a slow acting master hormone. It triggers a lot of downstream stream hormones and and genes, but, norepinephrine adrenaline is a fast acting neurochemical. And this study literally found receptors on, cell membranes for adrenaline. And the adrenaline was literally feeding cancer cells. So, that was the first big indication I had that, stress could directly have an effect on on cancer. I did one study which looked at, molecule called immunoglobulin and with a group of colleagues.

I did the study. We were looking at people doing a weeklong EFT tapping. And, meditation course at a retreat center. And we measured many different metrics blood pressure, heart rate variability, all kinds of psychological metrics as well. Before and after just one week of doing acupressure, tapping EFT and meditation. And we were were fairly, we were really interested in cortisol. And so we found that cortisol dropped in that week 37%. And that's a big drop in baseline cortisol. But immune markers, we were just blown away when the results came back in the lab were used.

They rose by 113% over a doubling of immune markers in the in the bodies of these people at this one week retreat. So we were just completely, blown away by that. The results of that study, what is being published in a top peer reviewed journal called the Journal of Integrative Medicine. And, it just opened my eyes to the speed with which our body improves when we reduce stress. I have no, I didn't study that kind of rapid response was possible. So, I really want you to take Nathan's words to heart here.

If you have the diagnosis, if somebody does a diagnosis and maybe it's stage zero or stage one, or it may be stage four. I've interviewed cancer patients, and Nathan's work does the same thing who are at stage four, and they are determined to shift their reality. And they do, and their bodies respond. So, just really, really know that what he's saying here that even at advanced stages, it's still possible for shifts to happen again. There are no promises here. Everyone's different. some people, for example, when I'm doing training for people in psychology, I say talk to the person top of them.

Train that medicate meditative at all possible, and let it be their choice. Because cancer for some people is just their their ticket out. so we don't make any kind of, promises. We don't say that, that things are happy a certain way. My mother, for example, died of cancer, and I just was really, at peace with that because she had a lot of challenges in her life. And again, that was her ticket out of out of a, a pretty difficult life. And so, so, again, you respect where the patient is, where the person is at, let it be up to them.

But if they're determined, if they really want to it again, studies show that that determination plays a huge role and know that your body is capable of really rapid shifts. Where do you apply the kinds of techniques that that they that's talking about? Here are the range of things that this is mentioning, a whole range of things that are some of them, a diet base of them are emotional, some are spiritual. You want to bring it all into that, into that, that process. I want to talk about one thing now for a few moments, that I think is is really traumatic for many people, Nathan.

And in psychology it's sometimes called diagnosis shock. It's that moment when you're in your doctor's office, usually because the diagnosis is almost always delivered in person. You've had some tests, you have not feeling well. You're there in your doctor's office and your doctor's office. A doctor's office is or the environment you're in and your doctor says the C word. That's a profoundly traumatic moment for many people. Talk about that for a while. In the many conversations I've had with cancer conquerors, people who I call conquerors of cancer, who have reversed cancer, these these, spontaneous remissions that they call them.

And I've asked them that same question, what was that experience like? And they all say the exact same thing. Most of them say the exact same thing sitting in that chair, hearing the words, you have cancer. From that moment, it's almost as if they enter a tunnel. And the words that come after are like Charlie Brown saying womp womp womp womp womp. It's very hard to it just it's so shocking. It's so psychologically, emotionally shocking for most people that they literally go into that just tunnel where we've all been there in a stressful situation or a time when you've been very, very shocked about something or you just can't believe and all of a sudden, you know, very, very scared, for example, or you go into that tunnel where it's just like you kind of lose connection with the reality around you.

And for some people, it is deeply traumatizing, as traumatizing as a childhood adverse event. And that is its own problem by itself. because now you need to heal that trauma as well. The prognosis is probably. The worst thing a doctor could give a patient, in my opinion, because the prognosis is based on averages and norm based on the data that they have with the treatments that they have. And so, so the diagnosis is one shock for a lot of patients. The prognosis is another shock. And that's what gets them into taking action to dive into the treatment without knowing anything about it, not knowing anything about the outcomes they don't ask any questions very often about, you know, what are my odds if I do this chemotherapy for six months or 12 months of radiation and surgery, what am I odds of actually overcoming this?

And doctor might say 8%, but most patients don't actually ask that question because they are in that shock state. So the prognosis is what I call the fake expiration date. When that doctor tells you you've got six months left to live. If you don't take action right now, you know, the Cancer conquer is one thing they all have in common is they never fully accepted that prognosis date. They never fully accepted that fake expiration date. They heard that and they went home and they didn't take action right away.

And in life, very often you want to take action. You know, I like Tony Robbins talks about, you know, if you want to change something, take massive action. This is the one time in your life you don't want to take action right away. This is a one time in your life you want to go home and sit with this for days. Meditate on it, reflect. Let your let your nervous system actually get into a state of equanimity. Do some meditation, some guided meditation. Do some tapping. Do some of your feet. Talk with a coach. Get on a phone.

Talk through that experience before you make any decisions. Because that prognosis in that and this is true for any any health circumstance that you're dealing with, right? That health circumstance, if it's a chronic health condition, has been building for a long time. So before you dive into any action out of fear, as we know, most fear based actions usually don't lead to good results. You know, unless it's a life or death in the moment. Got to save my child from this burning car, right? You're going to bust through that windshield.

You're gonna cut yourself up. You can save the child. That's. That's what our sympathetic nervous system is meant to do. To save our life or save somebody else's life in that immediate terrorizing life and death situation. But for something like a chronic health condition, we react the same way. Is it? Oh, you need to do chemotherapy. Radiation is dead. And you're just like, okay, I'll do it. Sign me up. You're in there on Friday and you're going and you don't know anything about it. Go home, meditate, take a few days, call a find a functional medicine doctor, a cancer doctor.

Com great place to find functional medical doctors. Get a second opinion. Get a third opinion. Take your time. Get to a state of calmness and then make a decision from there. The ones who have overcome cancer, that's exactly what they've done. Or a great story, from is actually is is just went live on my podcast recently. this gentleman who, lives in Texas now, he was diagnosed and, you know, he went into his car and he just went home on his way home and just broke down crying, just bawling, just sitting there and just, you know, let it all out.

Everything that he had in that doctor's appointment, he went and parked and just, crying, crying, crying so much until he got to a point in himself where all of a sudden his mindset changed. And he said, you know what? No, I don't accept this. I'm going to beat this. I'm going to do everything I can. And that mindset shift was the beginning of an incredible series of miraculous events that people would say, you know, God put this in your life in exactly this sequence. The universe came support. Your angels were there because then somebody came literally days later and gave him a macrobiotic diet book of somebody who healed their cancer on a macrobiotic diet, and he received it, and he decided to do it.

You know, somebody else came and gave him another book, and somebody else did these miracle things. And then he was open and ready to learn and trying new things and juicing and vegetarian diet and healing emotions and all these things until this cancer went away. And now here is 20 something, 30 years later, still cancer free, because he made that decision in that moment. I want to live as you said. It. Cancer is a ticket out for some people there. So they've lived such a hard life to have so much trauma, or they're in pain, or they're in their 80s and they're just kind of done with life ready to go.

And they say, you know, what is my time now? That's okay. That's different. Right? Accepting the end of your life and not wanting to fight for any reason. That's okay. But if you still have a reason to live, you can find a reason to live. That's actually one of the 12, patterns of exceptional healing that was studied by Doctor Diane Perlman and colleagues when they looked at, hundreds or thousands of cases of these so-called spontaneous remissions. What did these people have in common?

Diagnosis Shock and Taking Control 43:00

One of them was a strong reason to live. Another one of the 12 was, an expression of emotions, just like a gentleman when his car just broke down. Bawling is being able to express your emotions, to feel them to to release them, to share them and not bottle them and hold them inside and deny what you're feeling. another one of the 12 was the acceptance of the diagnosis. So now the acceptance of the prognosis, acceptance of the diagnosis, saying, I accept this, this is what I have. I'm not going to deny, I'm not going to make, I'm not going to blame anybody for it.

I'm not going to, you know, judge myself or anybody else. This is what I'm dealing with right now. I accept this fully. And then number two, this is the same thing that one of the 12, the the patient, the spontaneous remissions patient had in common was they rejected the prognosis as we talked about. And then number three, they had an active participation and initiative in their own healing process. So that's if you can start to encompass some of those qualities, whether it's cancer or anything else, you're going to be significantly more likely to be successful than otherwise.

I think that's actually a great prescription for any trauma in our lives. Any shattering experience could be a divorce, could be your mortgage, be underwater, could be, personal tragedy, a loss. It could be a job you cherish that goes away. big financial disaster. There. All kinds of things that you can apply. Those. Those kinds, principles to a strong reason to live. You focus on what reasons you have to have a wonderful life and move forward with your life, not just on the thing that has been, happening that's caused you such a shock.

So, as you're listening, think about your tragedies. And they may not be cancer. Maybe they're one of the other things I mentioned. Maybe there's something I didn't mention. How can you apply these principles to that big loss in your life? How do you find your strong reason to move forward in your life? Not just a little reason, but a reason so compelling. It drives you, it motivates you, it propels you toward positive action. That expressing your emotions and emotional expression here, as Nathan said, doesn't mean that you're just expressing every emotion all the time.

But when you're feeling those strong emotions, then if you don't acknowledge them and you don't express them, they remain bottled up inside you. And they cause all kinds of problems with your body that dissociate. You can set in, denial can set in and, okay, you know, when you're when you're sitting on big negative emotions, you know, your body doesn't feel good, so it's important to express them. This is also where things like tapping come in. Because if you're doing that inner tapping, then you are releasing the emotion.

If you're doing qigong, doing yoga, if you're walking barefoot in nature, any of these ways of letting those emotions really, really go. Another one he mentioned was accepting what is, this is one of those, stages of grief that lowers Krieger began talking about in the 1970s, just accepting what is. Byron? Katie talks about this in her book of that title. So just accepting what is Byron Katie says, if you argue with reality, you will lose, but only always. so don't argue with reality that this thing, this habit, it's happened.

And the starting point is to acknowledge it is a fact. But the next step that Nathan mentioned was rejecting the prognosis, not extrapolating from where you are now, not saying, well, there's this now, therefore this disaster magnifies it, and we just project this out into the future. So you reject that he reject that this is going to, limit and hobble your life into the future. And then that last one was active participation in the healing process. I'll tell you, one of the most chilling, sentences I ever heard spoken about cancer.

Nathan, this is this is around 2000, and I was in Hawaii with my wife, and we were at the beach and we just put on sunscreen, and we noticed that, woman, young woman, a pretty young woman, maybe in early 20s, was there on the beach, too. But we also noticed she was getting kind of red and she wasn't applying sunscreen. And we noticed this for a pattern with her. No sunscreen. And so, we we talked to her, we got chatting with her, and we said, well, you know, that sounds pretty arty. Worried about skin cancer.

She says, oh, by the time that catches up with me, doctors will have a pill to take it away. And I was like, no, that is not taking responsibility for your own well-being. You're just imagining someone in the future is going to have a pill for it, and you're damaging your body now, and you're handing over your future to some mythical person that you expect is going to appear. And and rescue you. You know that is not the model. You take an active participation, you ask your doctor questions. I can tell you if you have a good doctor.

They do not mind questions. They welcome questions. They welcome patients. Take responsibility. So you might feel a little bit uncertain about this, about saying to your doctor, hey, can I ask somebody, detailed questions here? If you have a good doctor, he or she is in a sit there with you and let you explore those questions. Hang out there in in your mind. So all of these are, principles of exceptional healing, not just from cancer, but their principles of exceptional healing for life's traumas, whatever they may be.

And that sets you on that path to transcendence. I like to wrap up over here with looking at spirituality and the role that spirituality plays in this, and we find that so many people, for one thing, we find the so many people who are deeply spiritual often had tremendous hardship in their past. So you look at or talk to some elevated spiritual master, you talk to some monk or some nun that is so inspiring and you think, wow, this person is living on the mountaintop. They must have had a wonderful life.

And you usually discover that they had a pretty shitty life at the very beginning. so I'd love to have you wrap up just by sharing your perspectives on the spiritual component of this and how these kinds of predators can lead us into those transcendent states. Is a great question. And there is science that backs this up, that people who have a spiritual connection, a belief in a higher power, something beyond just their physical, tangible human life tend to do better with whether it's a cancer diagnosis or really any chronic health condition.

So we know that they're assigned to supports that. But beyond that, anybody who has a spiritual practice or spiritual tradition, whether you're you're a Christian or you're Buddhist or you're Muslim or you you practice a more kind of open, universal type of spirituality, you know it to be true inside yourself. You've had the experiences where having that deep connection to source, to God, to creator, to something beyond yourself, to a higher purpose in life, you feel more empowered. You feel more supported.

You feel guided to find the right solutions for yourself. And so I encourage people tap into that, tap into that more than ever. Whenever you're dealing with cancer diagnosis or any chronic health condition for that matter, tap into that daily. Tap into it in the morning when you're waking up, tap into it into a daily practice. Tap into it in your meditations. Bring that spiritual aspect of life into your life even more often. I'll give you a really powerful story. Doctor Veronique Dasani, who's kind of a good friend of mine.

Over the years, I've done many interviews of her sharing her cancer healing story. She was first diagnosed with cancer, and she developed a natural plan to reverse that cancer and included diet and lifestyle changes, getting the toxins out of her food, water and air. It included a little bit of emotional healing, a little bit of meditation, but that wasn't a big a big focus. It included eating, you know, a plant, strong diet, a lot of fresh, healthy, you know, vegetables and juices could exercise.

And yes, her cancer went away. Then she got really busy with her work and she got stressed in life and she was overloaded. And this was going on for years. She was, not getting enough sleep. She was really stressed out all the time, and she was just having a lot of kind of emotional stress from, from the job that she was doing and the work she was doing. And,

Spirituality, Meaning, and Healing 52:30

cancer came back and it came back with a vengeance. And this time she knew she knew that she had to spend more time on the emotional component and on the self healing and self-love component, on the spiritual component. And so what she did, she started meditating, started meditating in-depth every day, sometimes more than 1 or 2 hours a day. And she's really focused on her spiritual health and mental emotional health. And to me, those two are very, you know, intertwined, right? The more spiritually connected we are, the happier we are.

The happier we know that our immune system enhances. So it's all connected. You really can't have a spiritual practice and not have it affect your mind and emotions and physical health because it's all intertwined. As we know, all energy in the universe is all connected through, you know, quantum mechanics and quantum science. We know that this thought that I can have right now can be in another part of the world or another part of the universe instantaneously. It's not at the speed of light. It's faster speed light.

It's instantaneous because it's already there. And so when we're connecting to these spiritual traditions, I love experimenting and learning, from all spiritual traditions, whether I'm sitting and praying with Christians or I'm chanting with Harikrishna or I'm meditating with Zen Buddhist monks, I've spent the last 17 years of my life learning from many different traditions and, you know, incredible ceremonies with Native American elders and sweat lodges and and I love it because it all connects me deeper to God.

It all connects me deeper to a spiritual source beyond myself. And anybody who has that experience knows that it's empowering, it's uplifting, and it can guide you and change your course of your life for the better. If you really invited in, really call it in. And don't blame God or anybody else for your problems or what you're going through. Dr. Francisco Contreras talks about this in my film. as well. he told me years ago, he said he said, you know, it's it's, don't ask God, why me? Don't look at God and say, why do you do this to me? God?

Why me? Why is this happening to me? Look to God and say, what for? What is this for? What's the deeper reason for this? How is this going to improve me? Bring me closer to my spiritual purpose. What is this for? What's the bigger reason? The good reason that this is for. Because if you ask that question, you can always find the good reason, the righteous reason, the the spiritual reason why something that seems very bad to you is happening underneath it. I know it's not easy. I've been through some really terrible experiences.

It's not easy to, in that moment to go, yeah, what's the good out of this thing that's happening to me? But if you can sit back and actually meditate and look at that, you can always find a deeper, more powerful, beautiful, uplifting reason that that can help you transcend to a higher state of consciousness, a higher state of living, a higher spiritual purpose on the planet. And then you develop a quality, like many of the cancer thrivers people who healed cancer ten years, 15 years ago and still are thriving, where they tell me cancer was a blessing.

Cancer saved my life. Cancer made me a better a better mother. A better father made me quit my job that I hated, that was, you know, destroying me. It made me care about myself deeper, take care of my health. And I know again, a diagnosis, a prognosis or a challenge. You're going through right now. Any challenge you're going through right now is very, very hard to say. How is this a blessing? But if we can shift our mindset and it works through practice, the more we practice it with the small things, the easier it is with the big things right where we can go.

What's the blessing in this? Where is the silver lining? God universe creator, show me, guide me. What do I need to do? What do I need to learn from this? I've been through some really challenging times in my own life, and I know you know, it took me a couple weeks at a really big challenge. I had a business failure that happened, lost a tremendous amount of money. A lot of people got, you know, emotionally hurt in the process. I was devastated and traumatized and was in a in a depression in about two weeks.

I was asked that question, what's the bigger reason? Why do I need to learn from this? What do I need to do? And believe it or not, I got this insight to start running. Literally just go out and start running. And so I listen and I never ran before. And I, you know, it wasn't I hadn't ran since playing soccer or track and field from, since I was in middle school. And here I was in my 20s and go run. Okay. So I went on to trails and I just started running, jogging a mile at a time. Two miles. I work up three miles for miles, and all of a sudden I get in this meditative state and I'd have the runner's high and the endorphins, and I'd finish running and I'd have insights and ideas and I could move things forward.

I wasn't stuck anymore. I wasn't depression anymore. And all of a sudden I found solutions and was able to pick things up and get to a better place in my life, my business and and everything. And had I not sat back and go, okay, what's the blessing? This what do I need to do? Guide me to the solution? And then how do I not listen to, you know, just start running? That's the answer. It came for me. The answer that comes for you will probably be different. But if you listen to it, that's the key. Great things can happen and can pull you forward out of that challenging experience. And it's beautiful.

Dr. Veronique Desaulniers reverse that cancer that second time gave all the credit to you. Did spending a lot more time on the meditation emotional healing? Elaine Gibson, stage four cancer. Went to work, did all the things we talked about the diet and lifestyle, but started meditating two hours a day, an hour in the morning, hour in the evening in her 70s. Stage four cancer gone story after story after story, where people really focus on that spiritual aspect of their life. You see, you know, pretty incredible things can happen.

So apply this to your own life. Ask yourself the right question to get the right answer. You have to ask the right question. Don't ask of your tragedies. God, why me? Ask God what for? What a brilliant way to bring our time together to a close to challenge everyone listening now to do the exercise to reinterpret what has happened to you through that lens, which allows you to make positive meaning out of it and move to those transcendent states. They thrive, so full of joy as we wrap up our time together.

I'm so full of joy. I'm so delighted we've had a chance to explore this, even in these extreme circumstances. How asking those right questions, having the right mindset, moving in these positive directions in all these dimensions of our lives could radically shift both our outlook, our mood, and our health. Thank you for your wonderful work, and I look forward to the next iteration of what you're doing. Like just mention your website one final time. It's becomingcancerfree.com Go there, watch the movie, get involved.

Inspire yourself to that. Transcended life no matter what your circumstances. Thank you so much for being here with us and we look forward to joining you next time round. Thank you. Appreciate it.