snpmurray's Full Review: Lawrence Leshan - Cancer As a Turning Point: A Han...
There is no surer demonstration of the mind body connection than the mortality statistics for the widowed. A devastating, often life shattering event, being widowed can leave people without a context for their lives. Without such context, the raison d'etre for selfhood can be lost completely.
The widowed population has a cancer mortality rate astronomically higher than the general population.
As do retirees. And this is not related in any way to their age at retirement. Those forcibly retired from all work in their forties are as highly afflicted with terminal cancer as those who are retired in their seventies when other factors are accounted for.
These observations delineate what was common knowledge in the nineteenth century amongst oncologists. Despair and lack of hope are life-threatening diminishments to the immune apparatus of the human body. Philosophy, psychology and immunology are intricately intertwined.
The advent of radio and chemotherapy, dramatically reducing “downstream” or after-the-fact reduction in death from cancer drowned out attention to “upstream” observation…reducing the factors leading to cancer in the first place.
Along came Lawrence LeShan. Working originally thirty years ago in a poorly funded private fellowship, LeShan began to explore these links. LeShan is (and has been for fifty years) a clinical and research psychologist. He began, upon discovering these connections, to work with those with terminal cancers. LeShan tried to help them realign, before they died, any personal angst and despairs that may have helped put them in that spot in the first place. That way, at least, they could have a more meaningful and fulfilling life until that final day.
To LeShan’s and everyone else’s surprise, a large percentage of his clients, upon successfully realigning their lives, went into remission. Seemingly, long after traditional medical science had given up on fighting a cancer, the body and mind in unison could still do so.
“Cancer as a Turning Point” is both descriptive of LeShan’s discovery, illustrative of the lives it has changed, and instructive on how to implement such changes in one’s own life, before ones life is lost. Both literally and figuratively.
The fulcrum of LeShan’s therapy is to have clients answer the questions “what would make you jump out of bed excited to face the day, and what would make you happy to get into bed and retire peaceably to sleep?”
It will surprise no Westerner to be told that an astonishing number of people cannot answer those questions, or if they can, never actually do those things. Between supposed duties, guilt, and assumptions about one’s own self worth, many of us bury our true selves. Many people consider that if they were truly themselves, they would be rejected by family, society and friends.
Many of LeShan’s clients discover that this self-illusion is based only on a very limited imagination of what society family and friendship can be composed of. To chronically bury the self leads to despair. Even marginal improvements in self expression revitalize the entire system to where the necessary leap of faith into selfhood can be accomplished.
Throughout this moving and enlightening book LeShan illustrates how touching one’s inner self and improving self-expression can be accomplished.
This book was written with the cancer community in mind primarily..those who have a cancer, their families, and the professionals that work with them toward cure. It is nonetheless true that this book and its important messages are applicable to just about anyone.
If you believe that your life will pass without crushing defeats, searing heartbreaks or other calamities, I wish that for you, but it is neither the common human experience, nor possibly even the full one. The message here is that you must be ready to face who you are before there will be a “you” who can effectively move through anything life brings. Even cancer.
The book concludes with a long set of exercises. Mostly of these exercises are “let us imagine”-type thought experiments, designed to illicit your true feelings about certain things you probably think about very little…like writing a letter to your younger self from your deathbed…what would you tell them? That kind of thing. Completion of the exercises, inevitably, is going to leave you with a ream of papers you will need some time to contemplate. That operation of contemplation will be the greatest and most valuable thing you may have got from a book in some time.
Widely considered the father of mind-body therapy, LeShan has spent more than 35 years working with cancer patients. In this book, he presents 29 exer...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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