Strategic Discipline Blog

My doctor may not have been in the best position to judge what I should do (Remember this if you’re confronted with your feelings vs. a doctor’s diagnosis). Her assessment would remain accurate unless I discovered how to improve my meditation. In the meditation, immediately after her judgment, I felt I uncovered the way through this. Putting it into practice when I got back to the hospital would be evidential proof.

This completes Chapter 1 of Cancer Cured. (See CANCER CURED – What do You Feed? And CANCER CURED - Fear Not - TURNING POINT For previous segments of Chapter I)

Recommitting to Meditation

I can already feel more distance and separation between Michelle and me. Michelle rarely shares her emotions and due to my focus on getting better, I have not had time to think about it. Perhaps she is preparing for the worst and having it all end closer to home would be easier for her to handle. Or perhaps, as someone shared with me, the ordeal mentally is harder on the spouse not afflicted. Life goes on for them with many more challenges without their partner's help.   The focus is not on them. It’s all about the care, condition, and hope for their partner in the hospital.

For me, nothing has changed since the visit with Dr. Begum, except for how earnestly I approach my meditation. I am not worried. In Brian Tracy’s Psychology of Achievement audio series, there is a definition of worry that has stayed with me: “Worry is a sustained form of FEAR caused by indecision.”

I’d made my decision early on. I believed meditation would provide my solution. I believe in a Creator who loves me more than I love myself. To worry about the outcome would be emotionally upsetting and prevent the outcome I desired. It would be bowing in homage to a God of Fear!

Although my meditation hasn’t produced a significant sign at this point, I believe I need to follow the process better, be more efficient, and get in tune with Dispenza’s system. Then the event will occur!

The very next morning, I returned to the hospital in Iowa City. Waking up in your own home after spending nearly all the last five months in a hospital room is more than comforting. To know I must go back to the hospital, especially with the diagnosis Dr. Begum offered, might appear dispiriting. Yet, I don’t feel distressed, depressed, or even upset. My mind is set on achieving a different result from my meditation. I wake up more determined and committed than ever.

Mortal Fear

When you are faced with mortality, hurt beyond anything you’ve ever imagined, it’s difficult to understand how impossible it is to be without fear. Pain compounds the fear. Imagine throwing up, being so sick it hurts even to lay down and do nothing. Pain consumes you. It reduces your defenses; it makes you feel defeated. Pain can be demoralizing. And prolonged treatment can drain your natural emotional reserves. As General George Patton once said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

On some level, I recognize that to be a “coward” in the face of cancer is to die, so I don’t allow myself to give into fear. I never let myself believe I am going to die.

If you ask me why, I’m not sure. If you can be fortunate with less than a 2% chance to survive, I believe I am. Many people are sick beyond recovery. Perhaps my naivete blocks much of the fear from consuming me. Or maybe it’s my optimistic nature?

I also recall a quote from Brian Tracy, “Worry is a negative goal setting.” Once I’ve decided to create a dashboard of activities to heal myself– meditate, exercise, make affirmations, and focus on everything that I can control to conquer cancer–I find a new focus.

When I first discovered I had cancer I was emotionally distraught. Yes, I was defeated, depressed, and anxious. Yet I don’t stay there. It takes me only a day or two to take the scourging weapon out of my hands and begin to focus on how I can turn this into a positive. I’ve been blessed, or perhaps cursed, with the ability to see the good in everything and everyone.

It is unquenchable hope, this faith constitutes the last half of the Stockdale Paradox. It sustains me. I truly believe I will prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, I would not want to trade.

I’ve often entered my meditations being upset, breathing heavily, and feeling stressed over some incident or an unresolved conflict I am wrestling with. When I get pneumonia, which happens immediately after I return to the hospital preparing for the clinical trial, it is difficult to hold my breath, which makes me increasingly anxious. It’s harder to achieve a meditative state of stillness when you are sick, anxious, or congested, and when simply taking a deep breath is difficult.

Yet when you relax and focus on breathing, take deep cleansing breaths to relieve your tension, eventually a sense of calmness overtakes you. You become peaceful, and serene, placing your cares in the Creator’s hands, releasing all tension.

For that reason alone, meditation is infinitely therapeutic.

Attitude Adjustment

It flows much deeper than this. If we truly believe in a loving, caring God who loves us much more than we love ourselves, then it is our responsibility to discover where the good is in our affliction.

This affirmation from Emmet Fox’s The Ten Commandments - The Master Key to Life provides me with hope: Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you. If you put your condemnation upon anything in life, it will hit back at you and hurt you. If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it.

If an all-caring, omniscient God brings life-threatening cancer into your life, there must be some greater good He intends to serve with it, I reason. Finding the answer is my responsibility, I tell myself. I need to find the answer.

This concludes CANCER CURED Chapter 1. Chapter II Life Insurance is next

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Challenge your team, your business, yourself. I’m Doug Wick, here to challenge, inspire, and ignite purpose and passion in your business!  

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

Chapter I explored where I was 5 months into my journey with cancer. Chapter II explores where and how it began, revealing the discouragement, disappointment, and dissolution I felt upon discovering I had Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Next blog shared the first segment of Chapter II – Life Insurance  

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

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NEXT BLOG – CANCER CURED CHAPTER II – Life Insurance