After we published episode 98 on “Placebo Joe” Dispenza, an Australian artist named Gavin Ryan posted a comment to Facebook in response:“My wife was full of this stuff, when she stopped taking all the treatments that had finally turned her breast cancer around, right up to the day she died of it. Still fully convinced she was going to heal herself by sheer force of wishful thinking.” We reached out, and Gavin agreed to an interview.Fey was 47 years old when she died under the coconut palms and stars of Ubud, with Gavin at her side. She’d spent six years feverishly trying to keep ahead of breast cancer with alternative medicine and New Age spirituality. She received several turns of evidence-based care that had served her body well. But she would always return to the energy work, herbs, and meditations that spoke to her soul. Gavin was there with her all the way. He found himself stretched thin between advocating for treatments that worked, and honoring her need for magic. We're really grateful that he has shared this story with us.Show Notes Here's the full recording of Fey reciting "Karuna Breath."
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Episode 102.
Conspirituality, Cancer, and Compassion.
With Gavin Ryan.
After we published episode 98 on Placebo Joe Dispenza, an Australian artist named Gavin Ryan posted a comment to Facebook in response.
My wife was full of this stuff when she stopped taking all the treatments that had finally turned her breast cancer around, right up to the day she died of it.
She was still fully convinced she was going to heal herself by sheer force of wishful thinking.
We reached out, and Gavin agreed to an interview.
Faye was 47 years old when she died under the coconut palms and stars of Ubud, with Gavin at her side.
She'd spent six years feverishly trying to keep ahead of breast cancer with alternative medicine and New Age spirituality.
She had received several turns of evidence-based care that had served her body well, but she would always return to the energy work, herbs, and meditations that spoke to her soul.
Gavin was there with her all the way.
He found himself stretched thin between advocating for treatments that worked and honoring her need for magic.
We started our conversation at the very beginning with the questions, how did you and Faye meet and what was she like?
Yeah, let's see if I can get through this without losing it.
Yeah, this was 10 years ago now, was exactly, well in January 2012 we met.
I'd just moved to Bali, to Ubud.
I was living in Ubud trying to start this project of mine.
Getting my designs produced by the local craftsmen there.
And I looked around for some, for the one.
I was looking for the one, I've got to admit.
And I got lucky and of course that was through IndonesianCupid.com, which she was always very sheepish about.
I always liked to make it sound like we'd met at her yoga practice and me going out and turning up and doing yoga with her.
But no, we met through the good old internet and yeah, it didn't take long to find out she was the one.
She was really something.
Gavin was 51 at the time, from Australia.
He had two children from a prior relationship.
He came from a family of artists.
And in an email, he added that his grandparents on his mother's side were all scientists and academics in pre-war England, but also theosophists who knew Gandhi and Krishnamurti and Oppenheimer.
Faye was 40 years old and was recovering from the end of a very difficult relationship back in Jakarta, where her extended family still resided.
Part of her journey was to take a yoga teacher training, and she'd built a business teaching in several studios and retreat centers in Ubud, which is a famous spiritual tourism destination.
Some friends had gotten her into Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, and Gavin was reading it too, and they both found it very helpful.
It made sense for them to bond over the message of new beginnings without expectation.
But Gavin wasn't dogmatic about any of it.
I think different personalities get different, you know, sort of things out of different teachings.
I'm a bit sort of resistant to one-size-fits-all, you know, pronouncements from any sort of spiritual teacher because everybody's different, you know.
But she was, her big thing was compassion.
She was the most compassionate person, just like poured out of her.
She was just the Heart of gold for everybody who ever met her, you know.
And that, you know, made her, she was very soft like that and very open.
And so she was open to all sorts of stuff, quite childlike in a beautiful way, but also could veer into childish, which is what we got when it sort of got to scientific-y sort of stuff.
So Gavin and Faye met and fell in love in 2012.
But in the summer of 2013, Faye found a lump and the power of now became harder to hold on to.
They made an appointment with a specialist.
Neither of us liked him.
He was really condescending and sort of patronizing and sort of, we just, yeah, both had this aversion to his actual manner and his diagnosis and what else other options have we got?
Let's get on internet and have a look.
Here Gavin relates a moment that we're familiar with from many stories so far on the podcast.
There was something overbearing and insensitive about that first encounter.
It went too fast and it didn't seem to leave room for or even be able to see an important part of Faye's life.
And he just said, oh well you will do this and you will do that and you know double mastectomy and no we can't do insentinal node biopsies because that's not what we do in Indonesia and so we'll be chopping out all your lymph nodes and you know and we went yeah right.
And so we came home and just sort of did our usual Google thing and came up with all this bloody, you can imagine, all the stuff you guys talk about, all the same players.
They were all still doing it back then.
So a brusque encounter pushed them towards Dr. Google and Facebook.
book.
And Gavin found that Cancer Cure Internet favoured the wishful and those who could monetise wishes.
Whenever he heard about a promising alternative treatment, he'd go looking for personal testimonials both for and against.
Now, the miracle stories were easy to find, but the failures were nowhere to be seen.
If you got forensic about it, you could follow a person's progress over months through various Facebook groups to track how their supposed miracle panned out.
And, if they weren't too embarrassed to post it, you might find the full reality check, where the winning message ultimately lost out to the cold light of day.
But until you got there, Essiac Tea was excellent for breast cancer, and Graviola, and a whole raft of alternative medicine and spiritual healing ideas that eventually filled their lives.
As for the same players Gavin refers to, a lot of it was just content, and so much of it, it all blurs together for him now.
He does remember the book You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, content from David Avocado-Wolf, who, by the way, went full QAnon in 2020.
Maybe it was writing about miracle mushrooms and herbs.
There was stuff from Joe Dispenza.
And they drank alkaline water purchased through the Kangen multi-level marketing scheme.
Essays by Joe Merkula, who was named in 2021 as a top spreader of vaccine disinformation, and also the doxploitation film by Ty and Charlene Bollinger, The Truth About Cancer.
They subscribed to Gaia TV for a while.
She read books by the boomer cult leader Osho, known as Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh.
And she also hoovered up material by Anita Morjani, who claimed that she had cured her cancer after a near-death experience.
The common denominator to all of this material was that it held out a sense of possibility and empowerment.
That specialist they went to first was just too certain about this mystery.
But of course, walking out of his office left another mystery open.
And if we'd done what he said, probably be fine now.
Who knows?
She had triple positive breast cancer, which is estrogen, progesterone, and her tube status was all positive.
And that is something that actually is some, you know, the mainstream medicine has stuff that works for that for a lot of people, especially if you get it early.
So, yeah.
At that initial stage, you're having a crucial meeting, and the condition is treatable, and the meeting doesn't go well, and you find your own materials.
And, you know, as soon as we got on Google, there were so many people saying, oh yeah, cancer, that's easily beatable with diet, or that's easily beatable with, you know, this or that herb or special thing, you know.
One part of this story that already haunts me is that even though they were sheepish about having met online, it had been kind of a miracle for Gavin and Faye to find each other that way.
But then turning to that same browser in a time of need, just how easy it was to find a jumble of earnest aspiration and hollow promises.
The internet is miracles and conspiracy theories all the way down.
One trail led them to some American guy with a bunch of clinics in Bali that Gavin described as being a real cowboy who treated cancer patients with something called black salve, which is an extremely caustic paste in use since the early 1900s, purporting to work by burning holes in the flesh.
Major medical institutions strongly recommend against it.
But it was a cathartic treatment for Fay, and very painful.
For better or worse, we took the plunge on what he was offering, even though it was just crazy really.
And Black Salve is interesting stuff.
It is pretty, it's really, really heavy.
It's a really heavy trip to go on, but it is fascinating and freaky and stuff happens.
You see things coming out, big ugly bloody hunks of what look like tumors just coming out of these holes, you know, and it's really gross.
And it's not very pleasant for the person experiencing it, but it's got this kind of cathartic kind of energy to it.
You know, you can see this stuff coming out.
We've been here before on the podcast.
I'm reminded of the spiritual surgeries of John of God, and the swirl of theatre that attended them and seemed to make them work.
That too was about extracting poison, or karma, or sin, or a negative spirit.
But this was something different, in which it seems Faye was meant to know that it was working because it was so painful.
With John of God, people regularly said they didn't even feel the blade.
He appeared to scrape across their eyeball.
But with Black Sav, the gore is real.
And it eats a fucking great hole in you.
And the theory is that the blood, it's got this blood root in it, which is one of those sort of herbal Components of SACT, anyway it's a sort of North American herb that draws the cancer back to the hole and in theory it just all gets pulled back to the hole and just falls out and that's what it appears to do.
And you're only supposed to do one at a time.
He had about 10 of them going at once and that was just over the top.
Like, because it's so just out there, no diagnostic lab will let you test as you go because they just wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
And so you don't get, all you've got is his Feeling around, oh yeah there's a tumor, there's another one, oh there's another one, you know.
I better put some more of that, you know, like and there only ever was one but who knows what's really going on in the skin with that stuff and he was just such a cowboy.
But it was really painful and she, you know, had to come to terms with pain and the fact that this stuff was coming out, you could see it coming out.
You know, I guess there was some big, you know, sort of mythical poetry about that.
She was dealing with it.
She thought she was doing what she had to do to survive and it was worth it if it was having that outcome, which it seemed to be.
And so, but yeah, it was, it was extremely tough on her on occasions.
At a certain point, amidst the whirlwind of appointments and therapies and treatments, the truth became clear.
It was time to seek conventional medical help.
Gavin and Faye flew to Australia, where he helped nail down the paperwork she would need to receive care under the Universal Scheme.
The doctors listened respectfully to the story of Faye's prior treatment, and then followed through with the standard procedures, which worked out well.
She emerged from the surgery and chemotherapy with clear scans, and she continued to support her health with the things that she loved and understood.
But at this seeming upward arc of the story, Faye also expressed ambivalence with the care she had received.
Later in our conversation, Gavin said that she didn't quite want to believe that it was medical care that had put her into remission.
It's an understandable position.
It takes a lot of commitment and concentration to maintain the kinds of beliefs that Faye cherished.
So, she stuck with her program religiously.
We felt like we were in the clear, but we were just making sure by sticking to, you know, what we hoped was the right diet.
Now, alkaline diet.
Alkaline, we did alkaline water and barley actually, the Kangan water, which was, yeah.
Anyway, but we were following the Wigmore Protocol, which is a lot of wheatgrass and greens and green smoothies, massive amounts of fresh, live, raw, organic stuff, which is great.
She was really fit and healthy.
She was doing yoga.
And really enjoying Sydney.
And yeah, it was a beautiful time.
And looking after my elderly Releys and just, yeah, it's gorgeous.
Until the scan came back showing that a lesion on her rib had come up.
They got the bad news at one of her six-month checks, and the advice was to go for another round of chemotherapy.
But here the details aren't very clear for Gavin, perhaps because Faye was set on her path.
And in our interview, I started to note the plural grammar of the caregiver.
He was saying we a lot when referring to what was happening with Faye.
He had been completely absorbed as though the disease was in his body as well.
It makes sense that it would be hard for him to remember ideas and proposals that she didn't devote much time or space to.
And at this point, it's fair to ask, wasn't it clear that the conventional treatment had helped?
Was Fay's commitment to alternative medicine so powerful that even the successful treatment experience didn't really push it back?
But then Gavin said something that made it a lot clearer.
Well, you know, like as soon as it went from stage 2 to stage 4, you know, the mainstream thing is that your stage 4 is now terminal.
And whatever we do for you is only going to buy you time.
It's not going to actually turn it around.
Very unlikely to turn it around.
Uh, so, um, you know, like, uh, we'll just give you more heavier chemo and it will knock you around more.
You'll feel more like shit.
It will just create more resistant stem cells for the next time.
And eventually next time will, will be the last time.
I think what Gavin is describing here is a kind of existential brick wall that we just don't see in the yoga world or the world of alternative medicine.
And to be fair in many religious visions of the world as well, either they don't let you see it or they don't think it's there or they want to call it something else. - Yes.
It's a hard limit at the far end of a material process beyond which there is nothing for the scientist or the physician to say or do.
They roll the body away and punch the clock.
And it makes me realize that in the world I've been ensconced in for so many years, I've never heard the word terminal.
Dying is usually framed as a transition.
There are no brick walls.
There are silk curtains, gossamer strings, and the only death that is final is the event that leads a person to a deathless state.
I remember that when I studied Jyotish, otherwise known as Vedic Astrology, one of the key mantras I was taught to recite was called the Maha Mrityunjaya mantra.
And it says, Om Triambakam Yajamahe Sugandim Pushtivarnanam Urva Rukami Vabandanan Mrityor Mukshi Yamamritat.
And it translates to something like, O three-eyed lord who governs all that is sweet and fragrant, may I come to the fullness of life, and, like a swollen cucumber, drop from the vine, released from death into the nectar drop from the vine, released from death into the nectar of immortality.
I I'm imagining a Hindu oncologist who could recite this with full emotional commitment in front of the home altar or a temple, but who might feel strange reciting it at work, where the language won't fit, where it would throw up an immediate cognitive dissonance and make a person feel like she was standing in two worlds.
The language of terminal is an honest use of language from the oncologist.
But it might also point to an intolerable answer.
Now, a materialist like myself would say, well, what else could be said?
But for those who have been steeped in New Age spirituality, they might not hear honesty in this language at all.
They might hear nihilism in it, or over-determination at the very least, and certainly they might hear cruelty.
I can almost hear an inner voice rebel.
You don't know me.
You don't know what I can survive.
You don't know how unstoppable my river of life is.
You can turn to the scriptures for language beyond what doctors can offer.
But also to the internet, where there are no boundaries, where you are free to believe.
You've got this chorus of voices on the other end of the internet all telling you that don't believe that stuff, we've got this miracle thing here that's going to fix you up, or, you know, like, it's, ah, God, you know, we've just been through two years of it over COVID, you know, it was my first taste of all that, I guess.
You know, I was much more amenable to that thinking.
And when COVID came around, I was much less amenable to it by then too, you know, having been through what I'd just been through with Fay, with the cancer, you know.
We all want to, we all believe what we want to believe, you know, like, that's one thing that informs my entire view of humanity is that we all believe what we want to believe.
So, what do we believe?
Yeah, there's so much less faith in sort of reason, rationality, science now.
There's so many people who are just retreating from that and or have never been, you know, in my wife's case, she never was sort of acquainted with that way of thinking particularly.
Her schooling was pretty low on all those fundamentals that we take for granted and so she's wide open to, you know, magical stuff.
I asked Gavin if it grew difficult for him to accept her views and the impact they may have had on her survival.
And if it did grow difficult, it did so slowly, taking several years to show that their concentration on alternative methods wasn't going to win the day in the end.
Meanwhile, her yoga friends rallied around her, encouraging every step, sharing miracle stories with her.
And Faye found a curious way of taking care of them as well.
She would tell them that she was healing, she was cured.
Anybody that met Faye usually adored her within about 10 minutes because she just was just the most radiant feminine divine you'd ever come across.
But she would get into really beautiful, she'd really touch people deeply you know like they'd just Feel her energy and want more of it.
What she gave people at her yoga classes were not fabulous yoga, it was her.
They came back because of her.
And so, you know, if she told people about what she was doing, she had this like really infectious communication of how full of life she was and, you know, just this childlike wonder at the world.
It's a beautiful thing.
She wanted to have them share in what had seemed to be working for her.
Most of the time she didn't say, oh, I'm healed.
Although towards the end, when she most obviously wasn't, she was saying that.
Because, you know, the whole Headspace had shifted.
She'd slipped further into this parallel universe of all this, you know, the dispenser and the, you know, the hay house and the crystals and the energy healing and all that.
She was radiant.
She was more radiant.
The more frail she got physically, the more she sort of just was amazing.
She was just amazing.
Problem was, it was completely illusory.
I asked if these feelings, which it sounds like she worked so hard to maintain, ever slipped as her health became more precarious.
Gavin said that there were some very dark nights, including one in which she had what sounded like a near-death experience similar to what one of her favourite authors had described.
She just woke up in the middle of the night.
She'd had this dream where she'd died and left her body and gone up this toddler of light and had looked back at me and said, it's not yet, it's too early.
But she woke me up in the middle of the night just totally like in this, just how do I explain it?
Yeah, really intense, really intense.
But she'd realised that death was not this big thing to fear.
So the beauty was that when she finally did go, there was no battle.
She knew she was going to a better place and it was all okay.
I think it was intense for her at that time, but later on she found it quite comforting.
It was a real Anita Morjani sort of thing.
That's what she'd been primed for with Anita Morjani's experience, as she told it.
And so, yeah, she took it right on.
I think it's worth pausing here to consider what Faye took on as Gavin describes it.
Now I'm not sure what Faye was reading from Anita Morjani, but I looked up her first and most popular book, which is called Dying to Be Me, and I was very moved by the opening.
So I'll read it here.
Now, she starts in the midst of her near-death experience, which came after living with cancer for four years.
And the other bit of context that I think is important is that Morjani is, like Faye was, a global citizen.
She describes herself as coming from, as her bio note says, quote, a traditional Hindu family residing in a largely Chinese and British society.
She had been pushed and pulled by cultural and religious customs since she had been a little girl, unquote.
What happened to her in the hospital that night gave her a more universalist perspective.
And just a quick note here, I am taking an editorial risk by including two longish excerpts from this highly problematic book.
But I'm doing it because I want to communicate the kind of influence that this might have had in Faye's life.
So my listening suggestion is that you imagine that, like Faye, you too are a cancer patient, and that Morjani is telling you something unique and precious about what lies ahead.
Prologue.
The day I, quote, died, unquote.
Oh, my God, I feel incredible.
I'm so free and light.
How come I'm not feeling any more pain in my body?
Where has it all gone?
Hey, why does it seem like my surroundings are moving away from me?
But I'm not scared.
Why am I not scared?
Where has my fear gone?
Oh, wow.
I can't find the fear anymore.
These were some of my thoughts as I was being rushed to the hospital.
The world around me started to appear surreal and dreamlike, and I could feel myself slip farther and farther away from consciousness and into a coma.
My organs were beginning to shut down as I succumbed to the cancer that had ravaged, no, devoured, my body for the past four years.
It was February 2nd, 2006, a day that will be etched in my memory forever as the day I, quote, died, unquote.
Although in a coma, I was acutely aware of everything that was happening around me, including the sense of urgency and emotional frenzy of my family as they rushed me to the hospital.
When we arrived, the moment the oncologist saw me, her face filled with shock.
Your wife's heart may still be beating, she told my husband Danny, but she's not really in there.
It's too late to save her.
Who is the doctor talking about?
I wondered.
I've never felt better in my life.
And why do Mom and Danny look so frightened and worried?
Mom, please don't cry.
What's wrong?
Are you crying because of me?
Don't cry!
I'm fine, really.
Dear Mama, I am.
I thought I was speaking those words aloud, but nothing came out.
I had no voice.
I wanted to hug my mother, comfort her, and tell her that I was fine, and I couldn't comprehend why I was unable to do so.
Why was my physical body not cooperating?
Why was I just lying there, lifeless and limp, when all I wanted to do was hug my beloved husband and mother, assuring them that I was fine and no longer in pain?
Look, Danny, I can move around without my wheelchair.
This feels so amazing!
And I'm not connected to the oxygen tank anymore.
Oh wow!
My breathing is no longer labored, and my skin lesions are gone.
They're no longer weeping and painful.
After four agonizing years, I'm finally healed.
I was in a state of pure joy and jubilation.
Finally, I was free from the pain caused by the cancer that had ravaged my body.
I wanted them to feel happy for me.
Why weren't they happy that my struggle was finally over?
That their struggle was over?
Why weren't they sharing my jubilation?
Couldn't they see the joy I was feeling?
Please, there must be something you can do.
Danny and my mother pleaded with the doctor.
It's only a matter of hours for her, the oncologist argued.
Why didn't your other doctor send her to us earlier?
Her organs are already shutting down, and that's why she has slipped into a coma.
She won't even make it through the night.
You're asking for the impossible.
Whatever we administer at this stage could prove too toxic and fatal for her body, as her organs aren't even functioning.
Well, maybe, Danny insisted, but I'm not giving up on her.
My husband held my limp hand tightly as I lay there, and I was aware of the combination of anguish and helplessness in his voice.
I wanted more than anything to relieve him of his suffering.
I wanted him to know how wonderful I was feeling.
But I felt helpless in trying to convey it.
Don't listen to the doctor, Danny.
Please don't listen to her.
Why is she saying that?
I'm still here.
I'm fine.
Better than fine.
In fact, I feel great!
I couldn't understand why, but I experienced what everyone was going through.
Both my family members, as well as the doctor.
I could actually feel their fear, anxiety, helplessness, and despair.
It was as though their emotions were mine.
It was as though I became them.
I'm feeling your pain, darling.
I can feel all your emotions.
Please don't cry for me.
And tell mom not to cry for me either.
Please tell her.
But as soon as I started to get emotionally attached to the drama taking place around me, I also felt myself being simultaneously pulled away, as though there were a bigger picture, a grander plan that was unfolding.
I could feel my attachment to the scene receding as I began to realize that everything was perfect and going according to plan in the greater tapestry.
It was then that the realization truly set in that I was actually dying.
Oh, I'm dying.
Is this what it feels like?
It's nothing like I ever imagined.
I feel so beautifully peaceful and calm.
And I feel healed at last.
I then understood that even if my physical body stopped, everything is still perfect in the greater tapestry of life, for we never truly die.
I was still acutely aware of every detail unfolding before me as I observed the medical team wheeling my near-lifeless body to the intensive care unit.
They were surrounding me in an emotional frenzy, hooking me up to machines while poking and prodding with needles and tubes.
I felt no attachment to my limp body as it lay there on the hospital bed.
I didn't feel as though it were mine.
It looked far too small and insignificant to house what I was experiencing.
I felt free, liberated, and magnificent.
Every pain, ache, sadness, and sorrow was gone.
I was completely unencumbered, and I couldn't recall feeling this way before.
Not ever.
I then had a sense of being encompassed by something that I can only describe as pure, unconditional love.
But even the word love doesn't do it justice.
It was the deepest kind of caring, and I'd never experienced it before.
It was beyond any physical form of affection we can imagine, and it was unconditional.
This was mine, regardless of what I had ever done.
I didn't have to do anything or behave a certain way to deserve it.
This love was for me, no matter what.
I felt completely bathed and renewed in this energy, and it made me feel as though I belonged, as though I'd finally arrived after all those years of struggle, pain, anxiety, and fear.
I had finally come home.
It's a great opening and it hits so many deep notes.
There's the almost funny irony of dissociating from a lifeless body, of thinking the unthinkable, of feeling pain flip into pleasure and joy.
The husband is faithful and won't give up.
The oncologist has only a limited view into the mysteries of life and death, and by watching Anita's body, she's missing the rise of her soul.
Anita is dying, maybe, but also becoming a kind of sage who can almost communicate between worlds.
Now, if this book was about a strange and beautiful experience that informed the author's life and changed their perspective, relieved anxiety, and allowed them the space to reflect on the wisdom of a time as complex as any of us will go through, that would be one thing.
I love weird stories that upend our ways of knowing things.
But this is a Hay House book, so it's going to go beyond the defamiliarization process of art.
It's going to try to establish a new orthodoxy of belief, in line with the foreword in this book from Dr. Wayne Dyer and the legacy of Louise Hay herself, who modernized the principles of religious science for the new age.
Hey's whole pitch is that she cured herself from cervical cancer by letting go of the fear and resentment she carried with her as a rape survivor.
It's an interesting, inspiring, Flawed, ableist, and victim-blaming argument that Hay then just projected out into the world, most famously in her attitudes towards AIDS patients who she believed were sick because they didn't love themselves enough.
Morjani stays in this lane by slowly and tenderly unpacking the claim that she chose to return from the edge of death, and that because she brought her radiant experience with her, she was able to cure her cancer on her own.
The blurb of the book summarizes it.
Quote, As her organs failed, she entered into an extraordinary near-death experience where she realized her inherent worth and the actual cause of her disease.
Upon regaining consciousness, Anita found that her condition had improved so rapidly that she was able to be released from the hospital within weeks without a trace of cancer in her body.
But when we get to Chapter 10, Moorjani gets even more specific about how her dream state permitted her to express contempt for the care she was actually receiving.
The chapter is called Proof of Healing.
Several days after coming out of the ICU, I started physical therapy to strengthen my muscles.
The first day that I could walk across the room, a nurse took me into the bathroom so that I could see myself in the mirror.
As I looked at my skeletal reflection, my heart sank.
It was the first time since coming out of the coma that I felt disheartened.
I asked the nurse to leave me alone for a few minutes so that I could have some privacy.
I just continued to gaze at myself in the mirror.
I almost didn't know the person who looked back at me, almost couldn't recognize her.
Most of my hair had fallen out in great clumps, my eyes seemed too big for their sockets, my cheekbones jutted out, and I had a bandage on the side of my neck below my right ear, hiding a huge, open skin lesion.
I stood riveted by my own image and I began to cry.
I wept not for the sake of my vanity.
My physical appearance didn't seem important in that moment.
Instead, I had the same deep sadness that anyone would feel when looking at a person in that condition.
I felt sorrow combined with profound empathy.
I could see in that image, in that face, in those eyes, the years of pain that it took to get where I was today, standing there in front of the mirror.
How could I have allowed myself to go through so much anguish?
How could I cause myself this much pain, I grieved.
Yes, I felt as though I'd done it to myself.
I reached my hand up toward the mirror, and as I touched the image of my tearful face, I made a promise that I'd never hurt myself so badly again.
The doctors were being cautious about my healing, particularly because of the state I was in when I entered the hospital.
They wanted to adjust the mix and dosage of the chemotherapy they were giving me, which, at one time, I'd greatly feared.
I watched as the nurses came in to administer the chemo.
They hung the bag of drugs on the IV stand.
Each bag, which they were feeding directly into my veins, was labeled POISON in huge red capital letters.
The nurses wore masks and latex gloves so that they couldn't accidentally have contact with any of the dangerous chemicals.
Strangely, it seemed that it was acceptable for these drugs to be introduced directly into my bloodstream.
I knew I didn't need the chemo.
The doctors were administering it for their own reasons, not mine.
For I knew that I was invincible.
Nothing could destroy me, not even poison injected directly into my veins, the very thing I'd feared for so many years.
Interestingly, I didn't suffer from the normal side effects.
My medical team was very surprised that I didn't have the usual nausea associated with a treatment.
I felt a level of victory.
I'd so completely overcome my fear of everything, from dying to cancer to chemotherapy, that this proved to me that it had been the fear destroying me.
I knew full well that if this had been before my experience in the other realm, The very sight of the word poison in giant red letters labeling a drug that was coursing through my veins, coupled with the nurses all wrapped up in protective gear to avoid contamination, would have sent enough fear through me to kill me.
The psychological effect alone would have finished me, for I knew how fear-filled I was before.
But instead, I felt invincible.
I knew that the decision to come back that I'd made on the other side completely overrode anything going on in the physical world.
So there's so much there that is so confusing to me, but I also know that it is the outcome of many years of exposure to very compelling but contradictory ideas, beginning with the belief that cancer is a moral failing and spiritual flaw, a materialization of an immaterial ignorance, a mismanagement of one's life.
And on its own, this attitude seems unfair and unnecessarily self-blaming, but I understand that from a theological perspective, it also resolves the problem of evil.
Cancer can't just be a thing that happens in a world in which God or Spirit reigns.
The fault must resolve to the individual, and when it does, God and the world and the universe can remain safely blameless.
You don't have to integrate the abominable possibility that God is killing you, which is what is actually happening if you believe that God is in charge.
But with the Hay House crowd, it's not enough to settle for a rationalization, however contradictory.
It's not just about making it through the day with something that works to ease your mind a bit.
They have to go farther.
They have to say that if your sickness is all on you, then so too is your cure.
The world didn't get you into this mess, so you're on your own getting out of it.
Now it starts to make sense that those who would actually help you have to be seen as meddling or overreaching.
And if they should dare to be successful in helping you achieve a remission, they have committed the sin of hubris.
So it's not enough for Morjani to say, something very weird and wonderful happened.
She has to claim credit for it.
Which means she also has to downplay and even resent any other care she received.
And this is the juncture at which a flawed but understandable mode of self-soothing, to believe that you are blessed and you're in control, flips over into something dangerous, into Morjani saying, I knew I didn't need the chemo, seeming to forget that she's writing those words while alive after getting the chemo.
It's a claim that's craven and dangerous enough and we have to wonder how many people out there read this New York Times bestseller and believed they didn't need evidence-based care.
But then there's something else, there's a spite that comes in to seal the deal.
Incredibly, she says that the doctors are giving the chemotherapy for their own reasons.
As if they're in it to boost their egos and not her.
This is the kind of projection that the New Age thrives on.
To say that doctors are selfish as they are offering care.
But no, Ms.
Morjani, they didn't give you chemo for their own reasons.
They gave it because it was best practice and it would have been unethical for them not to.
There was no other option.
I think what really burns me up about this material is that it's presented through this halo of light and seeming empathy.
But really, the crowning achievement of the New Age is that it gives its priests permission to wrap an intense form of cruelty towards the self in an equanimous apathy for the other while presenting themselves as glowing sages.
So it really makes sense that this is the perfect religion of neoliberalism, in which the brutality of individualism must find ways to present itself as not only benign, but as saintly.
Faye's near-death experience gave her spiritual relief, but the cancer had its own story to tell.
They came to another crisis point, where Faye entered the hospital again, weighing 37 kilograms and finding it difficult to move without a wheelchair.
She did accept more treatment and also found a really good protocol of medical cannabis to ease the nausea and facilitate the chemotherapy.
Although the cancer had spread to her bones and liver, this round of treatment once again seemed to put her back on track.
And, once again, Faye turned back to her values.
She wanted to return to Ubud.
She wanted to restart her yoga classes.
They left Australia, and Gavin continued to support her beliefs, but could also feel that the stakes were rising, that support was not quite enough.
We had this beautiful holiday just towards the end of that first six months after she'd stopped taking all her stuff.
All the stuff that worked.
And before it started really showing that it was back with a vengeance, we had this beautiful holiday in Vietnam and Malaysia.
And that was just this beautiful sort of moment in time after which, you know, shit started to get real, you know.
And She was getting more and more kind of strident in her sort of need for me to buy into what she had bought into, to validate it for her so that, you know, because if I didn't then, you know, I was sort of sabotaging her, the thing she put all her, the basket she put all her eggs in, you know what I mean?
So that was incredibly difficult for me to deal with because, you know, I could see what was going on, but I couldn't even talk to her about it.
Right.
You're in the position where you're in the position where this is what this is what your your dying partner wants and what she values and what she needs.
She needs me to to agree with her.
Otherwise, it's not going to work.
Because the power of belief is so essential to the process, right?
And she had quite a few friends who were all, you know, agreeing with her, which was beautiful, but it was only beautiful up to a point beyond which, you know, like it was, you know, I don't know what they thought they were looking at with her because, you know, you could see her wasting away, you could see her just turning to skin and bone and all the muscles atrophying and the
But yeah, she still wanted to go back and start her yoga practice up again back in Ubud.
So yeah, we went back to Ubud.
And I knew she wouldn't be coming back to Australia after that.
But, you know, we had about six weeks.
We were in Bali for about six weeks.
I told Gavin that it looked like he had done everything he could, like anyone would.
I told him that it seemed they'd received good care in some places and also been on an adventure of discovery.
I asked him if he had any advice for partners or family members who find themselves in this same paradox of having to believe things they do not believe in order to bolster the power of belief.
What would he have wanted to hear all those years ago?
I don't think there was anything anybody could have told me back then that I wasn't already sort of dealing with, like ways to resolve that complete, I don't know, what was it, a cognitive dissonance I don't know, what was it, a cognitive dissonance or something?
Or just a schism between what I had to give to the person I adored and what she wanted and what she needed were two such completely different things opposite to each other.
Yeah, wow, that's just...
Her way around that, I don't know.
I tried to reach inside her head and find the switch to just get her to open up to some other ways of looking at things.
Just been through it all again with COVID and so many people I know are I lost into the things they think, you know, just believing what they want to believe.
And they'll say the same about me.
So which one of us is right?
Indeed, who among us is right?
And that's what we're left with.
For me, there are concentric circles within which that question zips and echoes.
In the outermost rim, the place of social influence and economy, I think it's possible for influencers to be emotionally right at a key moment in a person's life, while also being morally lazy at that same moment.
Paradoxically, Eckhart Tolle's power of now is only really relevant sometimes.
And I think Joe Dispenza can be right about the zeitgeist of the moment when he tells Aubrey Marcus that scientific language, or in his case pseudoscientific language, can function as a kind of modern liturgical prayer.
But I think he can also be disastrously wrong in his grift of being your own placebo.
I think that Anita Morjani can not only be right about her near-death experience, but a good writer of it besides, whilst being absolutely wrong that her private experience provides some kind of blueprint for everyone.
She can be right about her precious moment, which is hers and which no one should take away from her, and she can be morbidly wrong about the narcissistic impulse to suggest that her moment somehow defines human life and meaning.
When I look for moral and spiritual consistency in the New Age world, the place I find it is in those who have survived it and tended others within it.
I'm still moved by the story Mary told in episode 89 about the same situation that Gavin found himself in.
The common thread is that the future surviving partner ends up living in two worlds on behalf of the dying lover.
They must remain anchored in the evidence-based world and advocate for the best care possible because their person isn't going to do it for themselves.
But they must also accept and even celebrate the pathways that they may doubt or even resent or even feel jealous of if those pathways represent ways in which a personal bond with kin has been diminished in favor of a parasocial bond with an influencer.
These are people who walk a tightrope between the institutional world and the inner world of the person they love.
They try to get these two worlds to communicate, and this is almost impossible.
And in the end, they may find themselves living alone in a world from which their partner has fled like a refugee.
They also have to reconcile the failures of both worlds, because when the oncologist says, this is fourth stage and terminal but offers no spiritual support, the partner has to be there to fill in that gap.
But when the miracle healer says, this is a dream and you can wake up, the partner has to provide a reality check, but not one that is so sharp that they wake up into despair.
At the end of my interview with Mary, I reached for a metaphor I'll repeat here and elaborate a little bit and be more specific about.
I tried to explain that my older son and I, I'm sure the younger one will tune into this as well at some point, are Star Trek nerds and there's something that we love about Captain Picard.
He's a consummate scientist, but also an excellent diplomat, and he's often in heartbreaking but noble situations.
He'll often make deep bonds with a person who comes from another world, and sometimes that person will ask him to help officiate at a crucial life moment.
There are a couple of episodes that involve death, and they're very powerful.
Picard's friend will ask him to learn the funeral rites of another culture and perform them.
Now, the Captain is agnostic at best, but he will go and study the ancient texts, he'll learn to pronounce the sacred prayers, and he'll discharge his duty not because he believes in or perhaps is even moved by the premises, but because it's an art to displace skepticism with love at the right moment.
So, I'm not talking about endorsing toxic beliefs, but about finding the moment in which a person knows that it's too late to squabble over them.
That someone is dying, and no amount of regret will turn that around, and to recognize what was always true is the only real task left.
And what was true was that they are a person in the world.
They are loved.
That, paradoxically, they actually are everything their New Age guides may want to tell them that they are, but fall flat as they gum it up with fluff and hubris.
I asked Gavin what he's doing now, and he said he's continuing with his personal shrine project.
And this seems to be a really generous form of art, to encourage people to find and shape a symbol that captures their paradox.
And I can see why he's good at it.
Faye's story ended in the backyard of her home in Ubud.
It was just down the road from the place they had first met.
She died with Gavin at her side, under the coconut palms, looking up at the stars.
The last thing she said to me, literally the last thing she said to me, and she didn't know it at the time, but she said, this too shall pass.
And it did.
Thank you to Gavin Ryan for sharing this part of your life with our listeners and with me.
And thank you, listeners, for your continued support.
The one person we haven't heard from in this story is Faye herself.
So here she is reciting a poem called Karuna Breath.
Karuna is the Sanskrit word for the compassion said to be nurtured by a Bodhisattva, which isn't for herself alone, but is said to gain power because it is dedicated to everyone.
Gavin recently posted this to YouTube and put some music up behind it.
I'll paste the text into the show notes as well.
I close my eyes to see within.
Breath flows and flows, inexorable like the tide ebbing and floating to the pool of the silver moon sailing high in the empty void.
I am a conduit for the union of earth and sky.
My breath, the transmission Rising now from the death of my being.
Ascending.
Drawing the power from my darkest fears and darkest desire.
To reshape them, transport and transform.
Rising up and up through the core of my physical presence.
Aliphate on a life giving oxygen of pure intention.
