It’s here! “The Breakfast Mix,” the first in the series of downloadable audio classes on dance for natural pain relief, is now available for purchase through our online store.

While we make sure that the technical aspects work properly, we’re offering 15% off the purchase price. If you encounter a glitch when downloading the class, please let us know, and we’ll make sure you get it, delivered directly to your email address. If you pre-ordered the class, you can expect it sometime in the coming week, with the goal of getting it to you by the end of this week. Thanks for your interest in the Dancing with Pain method, and be sure to spread the word!

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Strawberries in particular are good for fighting cancer, because they are raw and have antioxidants in addition to vitamins. But wait! They not only have natural sugar, which cancer cells live on, but they also are a goitrogen – one of the fruits/veggies that impede normal thyroid function.

Broccoli is essential for fighting cancer. High-end supplement companies make broccoli supplements for this very reason. But wait! Don’t eat broccoli raw, because it also is a goitrogen. Cook it, because cooking deactivates the thingamadookee that makes goitrogens impede normal thyroid function.

Raw foods rock, but cooking tomatoes releases an essential nutrient you can’t get from raw tomatoes.

Vegan eating avoids toxins, but raw dairy and pasture-raised meats provide essential nutrients and enzymes that one specifically needs to fight cancer.

Wild caught Alaskan salmon is essential for Omega-3 fatty acids, which help fight cancer. But wait! Fish has mercury toxins!

As my Eastern European Jewish counterparts would say, OY!

What to eat raw? What to juice? What to cook? Go vegan? Eat meat? Fish? Eggs? Dairy?

I’m so confused and exhausted from running around doing the right thing. Wait! Stress encourages the growth of cancer! Now I’m stressed that I’m stressed. Sigh.

I wish I didn’t have to think so much about my food. I mean, I’m eons away from pigging out on ice cream and spicy curly fries. Seriously. Do I really have to put this much thought into whether to eat organic plain yogurt with fresh organic mixed berries or to opt for a spinach salad instead? >Thunk to head< I forgot. Spinach is a goitrogen. So yogurt it is.

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When someone goes to the doctor to get help for a condition, and the doctor treats that person as a hypochondriac and ridicules that person and dismisses that person with nothing more than a pat on the head or a prescription for Valium; and when said patient has the courage and self-respect to go to another doctor and another, and keeps getting the same treatment, there are people who assume something is wrong with that patient. These kind of people start with the presupposition that doctors are good, that doctors are smart, that the medical system is there to help and heal people. Rather than allowing for the possibility that this patient’s experience throws into question such assumptions, they cling to the assumptions and judge the world from that viewpoint – effectively adding insult to injury and causing additional suffering to the victim.

These kinds of people are the status quo. They think they are the smart people, but they are the dumb people. They think that because something never happened to them, then there is something is wrong with everyone it happened to. When in fact something is wrong with that thinking.

The intelligent approach to life is to be actively engaged in it. To witness, to evaluate, to question, to give the benefit of the doubt to the explorer – ie, the one on the battlefield, having an experience and reporting back.

When I share my life’s story with the world – the ups and, mostly, because I’m processing through it, the downs, I am doing a service to humanity. I am offering you information and insight. I am offering all of us another perspective. An inside lens into a world that maybe you haven’t stepped into. As I knew when I was a child, and as I said way back then, “Truth lies in the details.” Details come from people actively involved in the nitty-gritty of a situation. They come from the child who is in the abusive family and sees the intricate details of the fabric of that family system. They come from the person who is vulnerable and seeks help from others – those who are positioned to help such people.

I once read a quote that was fucking awesome:

When you have everything, you know what you are made of. When you have nothing, you know what your friends are made of.

There are a MILLION variables in life. None of us, praise be the Lord, are exact replicas of each other, no matter how similar we may seem. That is the genius of life. Just because you were able to rise above a situation does not mean that someone else can do it and that that person is an extra super deluxe flawed human being for not rising above. It means that you were graced with the intelligence or resources or timing or a host of other factors that enabled you to rise up.

The greatest judge of character, in my opinion, is not whether you can rise above the bad, or whether you never experienced bad at all. It’s whether you will offer someone in the dumps your love and offer your hand. It’s whether you will use your power, privilege, and intelligence to help someone else rise above the bad.

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• carrots
• fresh dill
• spring onions
• raw broccoli
• kiwi

After chopping or pulverizing everything, I added flax oil, lemon juice, vinegar, and salt.

Yummmmmmy!!!!!!!!!!

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But then tonight, when I declined going to the art festival in town, I did it in a very conscious and positive way. What was more important to me tonight was shopping for awesome raw organic food, experimenting with cooking the food in delicious ways, cleaning my house, dancing, meditating, and otherwise grounding.

I remember that my best friend once said that whatever she was doing, she took on the attitude that it was exactly what she needed to be doing, so she embraced it whole-heartedly. Similarly, tonight I realized that there’s a reason I’ve been a bit of a homebody in the past months: I have a lot on my plate, and my #1 priorities have been healing my body and expanding my business. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

In the 1990s, I had a friend whose roommate had huge college loans. So she worked two or three jobs for a couple of years – with no social life whatsoever. But you know what? Two years later, she was debt free and able to live her life in a carefree way. Judaism teaches that it is better to walk the path that is rocky at first but smooth down the road, than to walk that path that is smooth at first, but rocky down the road.

So while it seems contrary to my innate social and curious nature, I’m embracing my homebody ways. I feel veryomfortable and happy in the life I’ve created for myself. I love where I live; I exercise in nature every day and see beautiful sunsets; I eat awesome food; I’m always increasing and implementing my knowledge about self-healing — becoming more informed and empowered every day; I’m meeting extraordinary people though my work – all of whom also on a self-healing journey; and, well, I’m tickled pink with where I am.

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1. We all have cancer cells in our bodies. Our bodies are wired to fight these cancer cells through our immune system, most notably, through our liver, which purifies the body by eliminating toxins.

2. If we develop “cancer” per se, then something is out of whack with our immune system – which needs a high dose injection of immune activation (the equivalent of those paddle thingamadoogees that are used to bring back to life someone whose heart rate went flat after a cardiac arrest).

3. Here are some of the things that are helpful for activating the immune system:

Pure diet:
There is conflicting research into what the optimal diet consists of, but it seems that it should have any of the following elements – organic; raw OR raw-heavy; vegan OR plant-emphasized with raw dairy and/or organic, pasture-raised meat thrown in for good measure; sweetener-free (of all sorts); gluten-free; soy-free; and no frying except with coconut oil or butter, to avoid free radicals. Also eat low-sugar fruits, like berries and kiwi, and avoid high-sugar fruits, like bananas and dates.

Juicing:
Juice many times a day, using fresh organic greens – spinach, kale, chard, broccoli, celery, cucumber, etc. Minimize or do not use fruits or carrots, to keep the sugar content low.

Vegetables:
Emphasize raw, cruciferous veggies.

Supplements:
Take supplements tailored to the specific cancer, including but not limited to detox support packets that promote bile in the liver. Some people use coffee enemas to cleanse the liver and promote bile.

Sweat:
Move the body to activate the lymphatic system, which drains toxins. Jump on a trampoline, which apparently is especially good for activating the lymphatic system. Sweat in a dry sauna.

Dry brush:
Use a natural fiber brush or loopah sponge to dry-brush the skin – activating the body’s detoxification process, by eliminating dead skin cells.

Soak in Epsom salts:
Add Epsom salts to a hot bath. The salts pull toxins from the body.

Elimination of coffee:
Coffee is acidic, and the objective is to make the body as alkaline as possible, because cancer apparently can’t live in alkaline environments. So stop drinking coffee or any caffeine substances.

IV injections
This is the one thing I have not yet tried, but I have heard from various reputable sources – including people who have healed naturally from cancer – that IV infusions of Vitamin C are very helpful in fighting cancer.

It took a whole lot of research and processing to discern the useful information out there from the crap floating around. It also is super time consuming to engage all these methods on a daily basis — especially considering not only the time involved in cooking fresh nutritious meals, but also the time involved in cleaning up after oneself, three times a day. Then there’s the fact that it’s a pain in the ass to take some supplements on an empty stomach but others on a full stomach, to take up to 10 supplements a day, some a few times a day, and to drink liquids that make you want to puke. Did I mention the lethargy and moodiness – including severe depression – that came with the elimination of coffee? It’s been rough.

Then there’s all the anxiety that comes along with a massive increase in my health-related expenses (food bill alone has tripled) and a massive decrease in the amount of time I can work each day – leading to a constant struggle to meet basic living expenses. Without my drugs of choice (coffee, chocolate) as coping mechanisms, well, it’s a wicked-demanding lifestyle.

Every day I go through a mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional gymnasium. And after over a year of this discipline, with eight months super-duper-never-futzing-even-once hardcore, I’m exhausted. Among other things, this lifestyle is quite alienating. I can’t go out and enjoy meals with friends, for example, because I don’t live near even one organic restaurant, never mind all my other dietary requirements. I can’t eat at friends’ homes. I can’t even drink anything, unless they have purified water and organic herbal teas.

Today I was coming down really hard on myself. I had three chocolate peanut butter cups (organic) and drank a bottle of sparkling apple cider (also organic). In my world, that’s the equivalent of downing a box of donuts, eating five slices of pizza, and drinking a liter of soda. I was feeling like a complete miserable failure, because while I have been doing some things consistently and other things inconsistently, I can’t seem to do all of it all the time these days.

That’s when I decided to ease up on myself. Instead of fresh veggies all the time, which involve washing, chopping, and cleaning up, I’m going to let myself buy frozen veggies, pre-washed, pre-packaged salad greens, and – gasp! – canned beans. All organic and otherwise “up to code,” of course. I might also let myself juice eight glasses in the morning, and store the juice in a glass container during the day, so that I can cut down on the amount of times I’m washing veggies and cleaning up the damn juicer.

Anyhow, that’s where I’m at right now. I’m recommitting to my lifestyle, patting myself on the back for the gargantuan changes I’ve made over the past year (the hardest by far being eliminating coffee, after 15 years of drinking it every single day), and doing what I can. Because it’s better to do it 80% consistently than to burn out on 100% and give up altogether.

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The deference cost me. One of my most debilitating injuries, in fact, came at the hands of a chiropractor, just a few months after I’d taken my first healing dance steps. Even then, following that traumatic incident, I persisted in turning to doctors, physical therapists, personal trainers, and yoga teachers, in search of the person who could heal me.

“Loolwa,” my mother said repeatedly, “Dance!” But, you know, that was Mom telling me I could heal myself. As far as I was concerned, my healing would come through the hands of a formally-trained healthcare professional. Dance, though effective every single time in reducing or eliminating my pain, was too out there to be real. I chalked up the transformations to coincidence or, at best, I saw dance as a way to get myself well enough to find the real practitioner and start the real healing.

I have asked a number of holistic health practitioners why they think it took me years to trust the reality of my experience, instead of seeing it as a freak occurrence each and every single time it happened. Integrative medicine leader Andrew Weil, MD, replied that American health care “has us all dependent on high-tech solutions” and that as a result, Americans have little confidence in their body’s ability to restore health. Dr. Simon and pain specialist James Dillard, MD, DC, CAc, both responded that we are conditioned to defer to doctors as the ultimate authority figure, and that our deference is exacerbated when we are sick, frightened, and in need of help.

Fortunately my mom persisted in getting me to recognize my self-healing abilities. One day, I was sharing the frustration, the outright desperation, that I was experiencing in looking for a practitioner who could understand and hold the space for all my different needs and philosophies about healing. “Loolwa,” my mom said evenly. “You are the healer you have been seeking. Dance.” Somehow, that time, my mom’s words sank in. And so I began to dance regularly.

Over the next couple of years, a whole-body transformation snuck up on me: Suddenly I would realize I was lifting heavy bags. Or holding several things in my hands, while turning the keys in the door. Or scrubbing the tub. Basic things I had not been able to do for years.

When I first started dancing every day, I regularly woke up with pain levels somewhere between a 7-9, danced the pain down to a 2-3, went to sleep after a pretty good day, then woke up right back where I’d started – in horrific levels of pain. While I was frustrated that the dance effect didn’t seem to stick overnight, I felt grateful to have a tool to get through each day with minimal discomfort. Over the months , however, the intensity of morning pain lessened. And lessened. Until there was hardly any pain. And then no pain.

Drawing from this intuitive and transformational experience, I developed a dance method that organically blends movement, breath work, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, and energy work. Most of what I teach in my dance classes came to me during inspired moments of my own healing journey – particularly in my living room dance sessions. (I always dance with a notebook and pen at hand!)

Since teaching others this approach to dance, I have come to learn that it does not discriminate between causes of pain. Students with arthritis, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), migraines, lupus, degenerative disc disease, poorly-healed injuries, and myofascial pain have reported dramatically increased mobility, significantly lowered pain, or altogether eliminated pain at the end of a one-hour dance session. It is not uncommon to see expressions of shock at the end of a dance class – the same kind of disbelief I myself felt in the early years.

I want to share the unbelievable experience of stepping through a dance portal to spontaneous healing. Not only have informal trials demonstrated that this method has a 96% rate of efficacy, but it also can be done in the comfort of one’s living room or bed. Wearing ratty-tatty PJs. On a really bad hair day. For free. That last part is especially good news for those of us who have burned a big fat hole in our pockets — front-line casualties of our  crazy  healthcare system.

For all these reasons, I launched Dancing with Pain®. Through this company, I am developing a line of natural pain relief products and services – including live and multimedia dance classes, lifestyle management workshops, practitioner training seminars, and inspirational merchandise. My ultimate goal is to create the Dancing with Pain® Institute, providing certification programs for dance method teachers and healthcare practitioners, as well as annual conferences for the chronic pain community – patients and practitioners together, exchanging ideas and knowledge.

I know this dream will take years to achieve. But as I say in my classes: Start where you are, do what you can, and keep on keeping on.

Want to learn how to dance with your pain? Be sure to check out the Dancing with Pain store, for the “Breakfast Mix,” the first in our series of downloadable audio classes.

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Want to learn how to dance with your pain? Be sure to check out the Dancing with Pain store, for the “Breakfast Mix,” the first in our series of downloadable audio classes.

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