Healing With Imagery, Creativity and Meaning

Michael Lerner, PhD

You are following your doctor's recommendations for cancer treatment. Now, you are ready to work on healing – to restore wholeness to your mind and spirit. Where do you begin? The paths to healing are unique for each of us. What works for one person may not for another.

Still, there are some universal points to consider as you undertake this important task. I think of healing, particularly at the psychological and spiritual level, as closely related to three other concepts: imagery, creativity, and meaning.

Imagery: Thinking Outside the Box

Imagery, in the words of Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program and author of Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal, is the language of the unconscious. It is not just about visual imagery, such as healthy cells gobbling up diseased cancer cells, in the style of PacMan. Many people with cancer try such stereotypical visual imagery. If they cannot do it, they conclude they are no good at imagery exercises.

My friend and colleague Martin Rossman, MD, is one of the best teachers of the uses of imagery in healing. He taught me to ask this simple question of people who have given up on imagery: "If you think you are no good at imagery, tell me: do you know how to worry?"

If you know how to worry, Rossman points out, then you are good at imagery. Worry, after all, is the imagining of all things that can possibly go wrong -- a very powerful form of imagery. So the only question is, do you want to restrict your powerful skills at imagery to worrying? Or would you rather explore other, positive dimensions of the ways in which your unconscious communicates with you?

Imagery can come in many forms. It does not have to be visual. Imagery can be just as powerful experienced through sound, touch, taste, smell, or simply a sense of knowing or intuition. Imagery can come to us in dreams, in writing, in art, in silence, in sudden moments of clarity, in the gradual dawning of realizations, and in almost every other possible way.

Creativity Needs An Outlet

Closely related to imagery is the second concept that helps clarify the nature of healing: creativity. There is a great poem by W.H. Auden about a country physician who returns home after treating an older woman with cancer. Sitting at the kitchen table, the doctor muses:

Cancer is a curious thing.

Childless women get it,

And men when they retire.

It's as though they needed an outlet

For that foiled creative fire.

I quote this not to approve of Auden's views about who gets cancer. What I find interesting is the connection the poet draws between cancer and creativity. I have known many people with cancer who have also suggested this connection when I asked them, "To what do you attribute your cancer?" In addition to mentioning genes, luck, lifestyle, chemicals, and other factors, these people often name a great loss or disappointment in work or in love. This loss has left them feeling somehow deflected from their life path or purpose.

It's as though they needed an outlet

For that foiled creative fire.

One of the words for cancer, "neoplasm," literally means new growth. Metaphorically, if our continuing growth in a creative sense is somehow deflected, that energy might somehow surface as a new growth of a cancer. Of course, this is not literally true. Still, many people with cancer partly ascribe their disease to a deflection from their life purpose.

The healing process can be seen as the search to reconnect with our inner creative healing force -- for recovering our relationship with that creative fire. The value of creative work in healing from cancer should not be underestimated. Too many adults have come to forget or even to fear the creative force in their lives. When we lose our outlets for our creative fire, this loss is no small thing. Part of your own healing may come from reconnecting with this enormous power inside yourself.

Meaning and Survival

The third realm of inner work deeply connected with healing is the exploration of meaning in our lives. In his book Man's Quest for Meaning, Victor Frankl describes the essence of the relationship between healing and meaning. Frankl was a Jewish psychoanalyst who became a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. During this time, he looked closely at the prisoners who managed to survive, both physically and psychologically, under their extreme and traumatic conditions.

Do you think it was the strongest that survived? Frankl found that those who survived were not necessarily the strongest. The survivors did, however, have some core of meaning that made living worthwhile. As Nietzsche put it, "Those who have a why to live can bear most any how." This core of meaning differed from person to person.

Eli Wiesel, the great Jewish writer who also lived through a harrowing experience in Nazi concentration camps, reported the same thing. The people with a deep core of meaning – a compelling reason to live -- survived physically and psychologically. He and his father stayed alive, for example, trying to take care of each other. When his father died, Wiesel went through the worst of his camp experience.

For Wiesel the core of meaning was not to abandon his father. For other people, it was a deep belief in God. Even when camp inmates simply could not survive physically, this core of inner meaning gave them a capacity to face death and unimaginable suffering. This inner resource was fundamental to their spirit – and something the Nazis could neither reach nor destroy.

Larry LeShan, a cancer psychotherapist who wrote the seminal books You Can Fight for Your Life and Cancer as a Turning Point, has worked with thousands of people with cancer. He reports that those who do best, physically as well as psychologically, are those who use cancer as a turning point to discover what LeShan calls "their own unique song." They have found their own unique core of meaning with which to face the experience of the disease.

Many traditions recognize a simple but profound truth about life. There is what happens to us in life, and there is our response to it. We may not be able to change what happens to us in life. But we can control our response. The great religious, spiritual, psychological and philosophical traditions all address our choices in recognizing and choosing our responses to life's events. These traditions teach us the capacity to grow in wisdom and compassion. In this way, we can respond from the deepest place in ourselves to whatever life brings us.

As a final note, this article focuses on the psychological and spiritual dimensions of healing, which affects quality of life, prevention of cancer recurrence and life extension. Of course, there are also many physical approaches to healing, such as diet and exercise, progressive deep relaxation, massage, yoga or qi gong or other mind-body disciplines. These physical approaches to healing can enhance psychological and spiritual well-being, just as psychological and spiritual healing can have profound physical effects on healing.

Our capacity to choose wisely and compassionately, with a sense of our own uniqueness and our own destiny, is what choices in healing are all about. To understand the nature of healing is to understand the greatest wisdom about how to live.

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Michael Lerner is president and co-founder of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, Calif. He is also president and co-founder of the Smith Farm Center for the Healing Arts in Washington, D.C. He is co-founder of the Commonweal and Smith Farm Cancer Help Programs, which offer week-long residential retreats for people with cancer.

Reviewed by:

John Durant, MD, Medical Advisory Board

Barbara Given, PhD, RN, Medical Advisory Board

David Heber, MD, PhD, UCLA School of Public Health