Life is a healing journey with or without cancer. For those who face the disease, the experience often requires new internal aspects of self with transformation. For most, the healing process requires time, new knowledge, insights, actions, and change. The threat from cancer can be a motivator. Chaos can push people into faster and fuller processes. Challenges become opportunities.

In her book Woman As Healer through some extensive analysis of personal power health and healing, my good friend Jeanne Achterberg, PhD believes that a balanced view of healing features eight concepts.

1. Healing is a lifelong journey toward wholeness.

2. Healing is remembering what has been forgotten about connection, and unity and interdependence among all things living and nonliving.

3. Healing is embracing what is most feared.

4. Healing is opening what has been closed, softening what has hardened into obstruction.

5. Healing is entering into the transcendent, timeless moment when one experiences the divine.

6. Healing is creativity and passion and love.

7. Healing is seeking and expressing self in its fullness, its light and shadow, its male and female.

8. Healing is listening to trust life.

What resonates with you? Where are you focused with your healing? What do you need to change? Ask the questions. Listen for answers. Then pursue new knowledge, insights, actions, and change.

Change can affect you on a cellular level. Change can influence your DNA.

Over the last 15 plus years after diagnosed with a brain tumor, my healing includes concepts of what Dr. Achterberg emphasizes as core components. From age 24 entering the cancer world to my current age of 39, my healing path involved forwards and backwards, highs and lows, clarity and confusion. My journey continues and with transformation right now. As I grow more with all parts of my healing self, I perceive the necessity to create integration with embodiment.

The healing journey invites more depth to who you really are. Internal alignment—with energy balanced, in motion, and rhythms into your true levels of self—has the capacity to further emerge. Through the arrival, new doorways appear to bring you home.

You can explore more integrative cancer care for the whole person information about mind healing and spiritual healing related to aspects of Dr. Achterberg’s balanced view of healing concepts, plus the entire physical body, social, and environmental health.