Delia's Book

One of Delia’s great personal strengths that aided her in her career, and later in her recovery was her intuition. Intuition is our personal navigation system. How many times have we regretted it when we did not listen to a "gut feeling" about something or someone? Alternatively, we have all experienced or heard stories of people who avoided disaster or heartache by listening to an inner voice. Years ago, for example, I kept getting a strong feeling that I should visit my parents. It was early April, and I was very busy with work obligations and studying for my doctoral exams. Besides, I was due to see my parents in early July. I thought I couldn’t afford the time away my job, or the cost of the plane ticket. It made no practical sense. But, remembering what I learned about supporting intuition from Delia, I booked an airline ticket for a long weekend visit. Within a week of my visit, my father died, and I will forever treasure that last visit we had together.

Indigenous peoples have always honored intuition and even created structures to support intuition. An example would be the vision quest of the Plains Indians, where a young man was given training and then separated himself from the tribe and daily activities to await a vision that would tell his future or life purpose. Another example would be tribes that had moon lodges where women gathered together. Many indigenous peoples shared their dreams with the leaders, so they might discern the most appropriate actions for the group. These dreams might foretell locations for finding food, or suggest how to avoid danger.

Indigenous peoples valued visions, dreams, intuition and what we now call synchronicities (apparently unrelated events from which we derive a meaningful connection). They valued these activities because they were life-affirming and could mean the difference between life and death for the individual and for the group.

Since the 1500’s, the Western world has increasingly valued rational, scientific reasoning and frowned on intuition, psychic phenomena and the unexplainable. While we may or may not believe that intuition, dreams and synchronicities are communications from the spirit world, I believe that we ignore their information at our peril. The problems in our environment may well be a direct result of ignoring the aliveness of the world around us and the ways in which the world communicates with us.

Often treatment decisions that Delia made were weighted down with life and death consequences. Much of Delia’s journey was like that of a coal miner whose only source of illumination is the lamp strapped to his forehead. Although she regularly consulted doctors, researchers and other patients, ultimately, it was Delia herself that had to find her own treatment answers. Her strongest ally in her own treatment was her own intuitive navigation system. She strengthened that navigation system through active engagement in her inner life.

Intuition is a kind of a muscle that gets stronger with use. As a cancer patient, you must make daily decisions that affect the course of your treatment and the quality of your life. Some of those decisions may be as simple as whether to make a phone call now or make an appointment with a friend. You have to maximize your limited energy, so even previously-simple decisions such as these can be difficult and more complex. Intuition, or listening to that small wise voice inside of you, can help in your decision making.

The internet is an important example of the importance of intuition. You can "google" cancer and healing and find over 500,000 entries. How can you navigate through all those entries and find the information that is best for you? A scientific approach might entail looking at every entry, but that would be a wasteful use of your precious time and energy. You can narrow your search through using certain key words, but even so you will still probably have thousands of entries. If you have strong intuition, you can quickly navigate all of those choices with a felt sense that you are making the correct decision. It is often not the decisions we make, but rather our fears of making a mistake that cause us stress, and in the face of a cancer diagnosis, the stakes are high, and each decision can seem to be life-or-death.

For most people, intuition thrives in silence, in nature and in the company of animals. For others, intuition is fed by music and moving the body. Intuition also thrives with spiritual and creative activities that "shut off" the critical left brain and allow the right brain skills to be activated. Women are frequently credited with "women’s intuition" which probably comes from traditional caretaking roles, where women spent much time with young babies, causing us to become very adept at reading non-verbal cues.