Today in my good news e-mag I saw an article about a new cancer breakthrough where cancer cells are "re-taught" to be normal cells rather than cancerous cells. This is a huge breakthrough for many reasons but it also caused me, once again, to reflect on the deeper lessons being learned.
As humans, we appear to tend towards violence in all areas of our life. When someone is nasty to us, we often will fight back, at least verbally, or up the ante, returning evil for evil. When there are problems in the world, rather than negotiating or talking, we often jump into war, into fighting. When we have problems within ourselves, we talk about fighting - fighting the demons within or fighting the addiction, or fighting with our own anger. As I've written about many times, when someone does something wrong in our society, we "fight" or seek to harm them in return with retributive justice prison sentences, too. And with our diseases: we fight disease by trying to "kill" it.
Does it work? Not so well, in any of these situations. Might does not equal right, so our wars don't always favor the right. Those who go to a punishing prison usually end up entrenched in their lives of crime. The addictions and inner problems we fight with tend to just fight back. And even the diseases we fight by killing what is within usually do more damage to us in the end. The things we use to kill diseases kill us as well.
I actually believe that this is a metaphor for all of life: in trying to kill what we deem to be the "other", whether it is a disease or issue within us or an "enemy" without, we end up destroying or damaging ourselves as well.
There are alternatives and we are just beginning to really figure those out. Restorative justice is a much better approach in terms of our legal system, for example: bringing healing to all those involved in a situation where a crime has happened, rather than an escalating revenge/punishment. This is true in our raising of children as well: when we yell at our kids, they aren't as able to hear, to learn. But when we work with them, seeing the mistakes as invitations for learning, invitations for growth, not only is the growth more permanent and effective, but it builds their self esteem as well. If we were to learn to talk to each other rather than going to war, relationships and lives would not be torn apart or ended in the name of justice.
I loved the children's book series, "The Secrets of Droon" by Tony Abbott. One of the things I loved most about this series, was that the children were not encouraged or taught to kill the "bad guys." Instead, they were encouraged to understand them, and to grow with them so that those "bad guys" might be met with enough compassion that they would change. We have the same opportunites throughout our lives in all areas.
I've seen a person screeming at someone else about something who was met with patience and an open heart, and as a result they calmed down, were able to be rational and to have real conversations, moving from stances of enemies across a line to friends, working together to solve a problem. I saw my own son, as a kindergartener, make the decision to befriend a kid who bullied everyone. My son was able to change the stance of the other child by doing so, and as a result, the "bully" was finally able to ask for the help he needed, learning to trust that not everyone was against him, that some were truly there who would love and care for him, even when he told the truth about what had been happening in his home life.
I've also experienced people trying to fight off the grief and pain within their own hearts who, when encouraged instead to befriend that pain and grief, were able to truly work it through and therefore to let it move through them and out. It is a different way to approach our inner struggles and pain, but an effective way to really work through and come out the other side. When we fight our inner problems, the best we can hope for is to suppress them. But when we befriend our shadow side, we can learn and grow together until we are changed for the better.
This new way of approaching cancer is incredibly hopeful to me. It recognizes that change, rather than destruction, is a better way to deal with cancers of all kinds, within our bodies and within our lives.
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