From Dec 2009 – June 2010, I pursued my dream of launching Dancing with Pain. At the beginning of my journey, I was terrified of numbers. A few months into it, I was cranking out business plans and cash flow projections in my sleep. I poured every last dime I had into the endeavor, and then some. It paid off. Just as all my utilities bills were coming in red, I received a bank loan, and in July, I formally launched the company. I was, well, dancing with happiness.

So many people had risen to the occasion to make the launch happen – photographers, videographers, graphic artists, web techs, business advisors, and even a few national corporations who donated or heavily discounted their time, talent, products, and services. They all believed in my vision, and I was deeply honored and grateful. Dancing with Pain got all kinds of local and national media attention, and in mid-August, when I attended an event for venture capitalists, I was approached by a woman who was very interested in the company and knew someone who might like to bankroll it. It was a critical time when I had to keep moving forward at a fast clip, so as to make the company financially viable before the funding ran out.

Then: Crash. Huge, heavy steel objects being tossed from the second story landing into the steel dumpster below, right outside my apartment window. The horrific, never-ending pain in my ears, the extreme sensitivity to everything from cars to dishes to voices to eggshells. The inability to rest, because the construction and painting continued in the apartment below. The hotel bills. The days and weeks of lost work. The cost of hiring people and equipment to pack, haul, ship, and unpack, moving my ass to a new location. The assault on my bicycle. The two assaults on my car. The manager of the old apartment building threatening to sue me.

The new apartment not. working. out. My life revolving around the garbage dumpster across the parking lot — wondering when the next person will slam their trash in the bin. Ever-present anxiety. The injury being restimulated and restimulated, over and over. The grounds keeper and grounds manager outright hating me for requesting accommodation. The never-ending punishment for being disabled. The constant anxiety requesting accommodation anyhow, fighting the good fight.

The money: Gone. Stuck in a situation jeopardizing my physical health and mental sanity. How does one pull oneself out from under the avalanche without a bulldozer. With just a miniature pail and shovel. The kindness of a client offering an advance. The move. The tree-cutting, door banging, leaf-blowing, lawn-mowing assault on my ears. The most horrific pain since the initial injury. The terror of uncertainty, the lip service but lack of responsiveness to my accommodation requests. Things moving moving moving demanding demanding me unable. to. catch. up. Bills unpaid. Collection agencies calling. Credit taking a nosedive.

Unable to respond. Resources gone. Limited options working because of disability. But disability status falling through every possible crack of a system that only recognizes extreme circumstance. Punished for self-care. Nodule on thyroid gland. Biopsy up ahead. Old landlord back in action. Threatening to sue. Dismissing the reality as my life spins out of control because of it. Money money money money. His humanity missing from the page of his email. My father emails, with his impossible twisted barricade. Someone who hurt emails when the sting of her words had just finally faded. I. Can’t. Cope.

Judgment. Asking for money is taboo. Being down is not good business. Honesty is professional suicide. But the rent is due. Health insurance. Phone bill. Basics for getting back on my feet. How can I get back on my feet when I can’t afford to. Where is the end of this tunnel.

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I want to thank everyone who has responded to my recent post about the goiter and biopsy up ahead. Looks like I was given some misinformation that scared the bejesus out of me unnecessarily.

I am deeply grateful for the healing thoughts, prayers, and energy being sent my way. Before I go to sleep tonight, I will channel all this positivity into my body and into my goiter, that it may shrink and release to the universe any toxins, as healthy spiritual mulch, and that it may over time altogether disappear.

This experience, plus some recent encounters, got me thinking more about my diet again. I’m considering trying the vegan thing, at least for a little bit, to see how I end up feeling. Yikes. I will miss my cow milk lattes terribly.

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Last week, I got an ultrasound, to check out a goiter and see if there was any imbalance in my thyroid. This morning, before I was properly caffeinated, I might add, I called to find out the address for my gyno appointment. While I had the administrator on the line, I asked about the results of my ultrasound.

The administrator began reading to me from the letter my doctor had written but not yet sent. Uh oh, I thought. This can’t be good. The letter informed me that I had heterogeneous thyroid, with a nodule on the left dominant gland, and that I would need to schedule an appointment with endocrinology for follow-up.

“Endocrinology? Um, you mean cancer specialists?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. “So there’s a possibility it’s cancerous?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied.

Oh.

The next available endocrinology appointment was two weeks out, and the ones after were up to a month out. Agony.

I pressed for an immediate appointment. “I can’t deal with waiting for two weeks to find out if this is cancerous,” I pleaded. To her credit, the receptionist poked around at various locations until she came up with a winner. “Can you come today?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, knowing I’d bolt anywhere at any time and cancel anything to get this over with.

An anxious day.

I don’t feel comfortable getting into too much detail at this time, but suffice it to say this: I’m getting a biopsy, and regardless of the outcome, I’m not opting for surgery. For starters, surgery means taking out the entire thyroid, which means being on medications all day every day forever and ever and ever.

Through my teens and early 20s, I was on four medications that I had to take four times a day, for multiple respiratory conditions. Through mental determination and physical discipline, I intuitively and single-handedly got myself off all the medications within a two-year period. I don’t intend to go back on meds and be dependent on them for the rest of my life.

Second, a vocal nerve runs dangerously close to the thyroid. One wrong slip, and that’s it for my voice. No thanks. You take my voice, I’m going with it.

And perhaps most importantly, I believe in the power of self-healing. Dance. Guided imagery. Meditation. Raw whole foods (possibly, heh, vegan). So I’m using my blog to reach out and ask for your prayers, your love, your support, your healing energy, and your guidance, to help me get through this period more vibrantly alive and healthy than ever before. I believe that with the love and support of good, nurturing people, I will prevail – together, we will prevail.

If you are part of a prayer circle, please pray for me. If you dance, please send some of your beautiful dance love my way. If you make music or paint or do any other artsy activity, please have me in your thoughts during your creative process. If you know meditation techniques for healing cancer, please write to me about them. If you know books that recommend the best diet for eliminating cancer, please send me the titles.

Gd/dess willing, this nodule is benign. Regardless, I’m going in prepared. 

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Loolwa Khazzoom: What is the line between magical thinking about one’s spiritual prowess, vs. the act of truly manifesting change through intention, energy, and spirit?

Larry Dossey: I think that spiritual maturity is a very real phenomenon. There are certainly people who are at different points in their spiritual paths, in their spiritual maturation.  Discernment is the word that always comes up in spiritual work. Certainly, people can fall into ego inflation, arrogance, selfishness, and when they do that, they can fall into aggrandized perceptions of themselves and their power.

I think that as long individuals look to the welfare of other people and not to themselves, they usually will be on pretty safe grounds. As long as something is done out of an instinct and motivation of love, compassion and empathy, and the welfare of someone else, that is a pretty safe place to be. I think it is pretty simple. 

I really take issue with all these folks who are running around pronouncing the magic in The Secret, the “Law of Attraction” and so on. That just covers up selfishness.

LK: OMG I love you. This is so my soapbox. Please continue.

LD: Is it really good for people, the culture, the planet, the society, and the earth in general for everyone to have a million-dollar-a-year income, three houses, and an Olympic-size swimming pool in their backyards? Most of the people who are latching onto this Law of Attraction are self-oriented people, who I think are narrow-minded and often quite arrogant. I just really have trouble with that whole idea, and it gets back to what I am saying: If you do something for someone else, not for yourself, and if you do it out of love and compassion, that is a pretty good way to stay safe on how to use your intentions, wishes, wants, and will. 

LK: I have seen The Law of Attraction used against me, and I have seen it used against friends of mine who are really doing valiant, heroic efforts to heal. They are getting hit in the face with this “you have attracted it to you” crap. One of the things that I have always felt is that there are so many factors going on. Yes, there is the piece of what can I do, what is in my control, what can I shift – whether attitude or action. But there is a whole lot of stuff that is out of my control, and I am willing to accept that. I am willing to accept that there is an extent to which I have no power over things outside of me, and all I can do is optimize my response to them. Can you please talk about that, because this thinking in the spiritual movement really irks me.

LD: I think it has absolutely gone wacko. It begins with a brilliant insight that we are responsible for a lot of what happens to us. But this brilliant insight then goes off to ridiculous extremes. So we start out by saying that we are responsible for what happens to us to some extent and then wind up saying that we have caused everything that happens to us. That is irrational. That simply is not logical. 

Three years ago, I was thrown from a horse for the first time in my life and ended up breaking my back — way up in the remote, primitive areas in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. Many of my friends said, “You caused this yourself, you know, carrying too much load. You are trying to do too much. You broke your back. The horse was just trying to be there.” Give me a break. How do they know what spooked the horse? Where they there? The arguments fall apart when you unpack them. 

I have a friend who has chemical sensitivity. Some of her friends did this Law of Attraction number on her, and it just flattened her. It is really a blame-the-victim type of attack. So I called up the friend who dumped on this dear woman. “There are several thousand chemicals in the environment,” I said, “so I assume that when you told my friend she caused this herself, you have personal knowledge that she did not come into contact with any of these substances that cause chemical sensitivity, right? You have that information?”

The woman was speechless. Then I told her, “Without basic information like that, how can you be so judgmental?” The conversation ended with this woman getting angry at me as well as at my friend. I just get so tired of the stupidity that is inherent in this overall point of view. It’s silly. It’s also irrational and inhumane. 

LK: Thank you. I have told people who have pulled this stuff on me, “You know, this is emotional violence.  Given what I have been through, and given that I am doing everything in my power to heal, and given that I have been really hurt by a healthcare system that is rotten at its core, your pulling that crap on me is emotional violence. I don’t have enough stuff to deal with? Now I have to deal with the stress of you telling me that this is all my fault?”

LD: I would eliminate those people from your life.

LK: Oh I have.

LD: Good. Enough said. You get my drift. I would just say to you, you go girl! I think you are right on target.

LK: Why do you think it is taking off?  Why do you think the Law of Attraction is so huge now, and that people are calling it science?

LD: It is bogus science. It is not even worth dignifying with the term “science.” Look at the phenomenon of distance healing: There is some science for you. That science is valid. Studies on distance healing indicate that we can participate in creating reality, because our intentions, thoughts, wishes, and prayers affect reality. We have hundreds of studies to prove this.

We cannot be the sole architect of whatever happens to us. We can, however, influence what happens – both to other people and to ourselves. Reality-creation is a mutual effort. We participate in each other’s reality. In the same sense, we are partly responsible for what gets attracted to other people.

Larry Dossey, MD is a physician of internal medicine and a NY Times bestselling author, who has written numerous books anchoring the holistic health movement in the world of science. He is the executive editor of the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine; he is the former Chief of Staff of Medicine at Dallas Hospital; and he is the former co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions at the Office of Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes Of Health.

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