The silver lining of cancer, if it ever comes for you, will not be something you manufactured. It won't be the reason you got sick — it isn't. And it won't be a prize handed out for suffering correctly. It will simply be something you notice, one ordinary day when you weren't looking for it, about who you've become and what you now hold close.

And if it never comes? You have lost nothing. You are not behind. You are not doing this wrong.

You are a human being, facing one of the hardest things a human being can face, exactly as you are. That has always been enough.

A Tapping practice you can do with your own two hands to resolve the two feelings that tend to show up in treatment: Helplessness and Hopelessness. They rarely announce themselves. They arrive quietly, usually late at night, and they sound something like this:

Nothing I do makes any difference.

And nothing is going to get better.

If you have surgery scheduled, you are probably discovering something that rarely gets discussed at pre-op appointments: the waiting is its own ordeal. The procedure has a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, and a care team. The three weeks before it have only you, at 2 a.m., rehearsing everything that could go wrong.

We all know that it’s important to keep our stress levels in check, but often, with the pace of life, and certainly with the onset of an illness such as cancer, that is easier said than done. If you’ve tried different ways to maintain a healthy level of stress but nothing worked, here is what I teach every one of my clients.