Emmett Skiles, MA

“It was October of 1994. What started out as a weekly happy hour gathering between my friends and I, turned into the beginning of a long healing journey.”

At one point, the subject of our conversation turned to sharing stories about scars, past injuries, and other personal tragedies. I turned to my friend Kris, who happened to be a doctor, and asked him what he thought about the two lumps that I had been noticing just above my collar bone at the base of my neck. After giving it a quick feel he said, “Emmett, I want you to make an appointment with my office receptionist first thing Monday morning. It doesn’t matter what time, I’ll tell her to expect your call and to work you in because I need to give this a better look.”  By the look on his face, I could tell he was serious.

That began a series of tests and other scheduled appointments. Blood tests were in the normal ranges, other tests checked out fine and I didn’t feel sick at all.  Kris then recommended a biopsy and referred me to a specialist. The biopsy revealed that I had lymphoma, specifically, Hodgkin’s Disease. While Kris drove me home, still feeling foggy from the anesthesia, I tried to make sense of it all. “You mean I have cancer?”, I asked. He informed me that yes, it was a form of cancer, that it was treatable and for me not to worry because he would make sure that I got the best treatment and care possible.

By the next couple of days, I had made arrangements to fly from Arizona, where I lived at the time, back to Houston, where my parents lived. We determined that M.D. Anderson Cancer Center was the best option available, so I decided to stay with my parents and enter the treatment program there. Needless to say, I was terrified and just wanted to get the cancer tumors out of me as soon as possible.

After a full week of medical tests (injected dyes and nuclear substances, and scans of all kinds) my doctor gave me the sobering news that I had Stage IV Hodgkin’s Disease. Several lymph nodes were involved including a mass in the center of my chest. The doctor told me that the treatment would be twelve rounds of chemotherapy which amounted to six months in which to endure the effects of those treatments. I was devastated, but felt that I had no choice but to comply if I wanted to live.

Soon after I began the first round of chemo, I went to a local bookstore one day when I started to feel better. After all, I had so much time on my hands and rarely got out of the house when feeling sick from the chemo and I needed something to read. I stumbled upon the book, “The Celestine Prophecy” and picked it up. I had never been a particularly religious, or even a spiritual person, but something interested me enough about the book to buy it.

That was the beginning of quest for knowledge about a way of thinking that I had never been exposed to. Before I knew it, I was reading three or four books at a time on various spiritual themes. It gave me an unexpected sense of peace, and in addition to that, it was stimulating my mind. I followed up on every new thought, dream, and insight that I was having – which led me to the next subject in the readings from one book to the next. I also began having incredible conversations with others about life and what I was learning about myself.

I began to experiment with meditation. Of course, one of the features of chemo (that I was really not thrilled about) was that I should expect to lose my hair. Somehow I got the idea to use a visualization during my meditations to picture in my mind’s eye the image of the individual hairs, and then to imagine they were forming little crooked “fingers” along the hair shafts to hold on to the inside of the follicles. And as it turned out, I didn’t loose much of my hair during all the treatments.

Soon after that, my doctor and the patient advocate that I was working with couldn’t get over it.  It was just expected that I would lose all of my hair given the chemo regimen I was on.  But here I was, and no one could even tell that I had lost any of it. One of them said, “Well, whatever you’re doing… keep doing it”. I just smiled and nodded. I wasn’t comfortable telling them what I was doing because I wasn’t sure that I believed the visualizations could have been making a difference at that point.

But that little experiment got me thinking, and slowly I began to realize that I did have some power in all of this. I had been so ready to turn myself over completely to the “experts” as we are all so conditioned to do, and to assume that I was powerless in the face of the “big C” word.

During that time, I also began to keep a journal of my thoughts and feelings about my life and all the difficult things that I had been through at such a young age of twenty-nine. I began to write down all of the major events (both positive and negative experiences) that had happened in the year before. And then I wrote them down for the years before that, and kept going back year after year, as far back as I could remember.

Once that was completed, I went over my lists and saw patterns emerge. I could suddenly see that each event was a preparation for the next, and they were all related in fundamental ways. I began to ask questions in my journal about my career and life purpose since I had felt so burned out doing financial accounting to make a living. I seemed to have lost my sense of passion for everything in my life.

The most empowering questions I asked myself were: What is at the ROOT of a certain culture’s passion to express who they are as a people? What is it that motivates them to create the world’s greatest artistic and architectural achievements of all time? I realized then that I could spend the rest of my lifetime researching, traveling, and exploring the answers to those kinds of questions, and that somehow it would turn into my life’s work. I suddenly realized that I had a very good reason to live.

The next morning after my journal writing, I had a sensation that I had never felt before. I can only describe it as a rush or a “high” where I felt suddenly the most comfortable in my own skin that I had ever felt before in my life. It was a moment of such intense clarity about my life, and that it (or I) was absolutely perfect in the divine order of the universe. All the random dots in my life were being connected. A total and completely blissful feeling washed over me, wave after wave. And I immediately recognized that those brief moments marked an important milestone in my life – my own spiritual awakening.

I eventually finished all the chemo treatments and by May of 1995, I was declared cancer free. Every check-up since that time has come back normal and I have not had any further issues arise related to the cancer.

This experience changed me in many ways. I learned that my feelings, attitudes, and beliefs really do have a powerful effect on my body’s ability to heal itself and to stay healthy. Sure, I had always heard that this was true but until I faced cancer and my own mortality, I didn’t have a point of reference in which to internalize this eternal truth.

My thirst for knowledge and exploring the mind/body connection has been with me ever since that experience. And I have become extremely passionate about sharing this knowledge with others who are seeking to tap into their own inner sources of healing.

I have discovered that the key to wellness lies hidden in the stories we live and tell about our lives. The challenge, then, is to question the beliefs and assumptions that arise from those stories so that we may continually discover who we truly are. I now believe it is the action of this seeking… this exploring… that triggers the healing response within us, which brings us back to wholeness.