I struggled mightily to get this piece out to you this week, it is overdue and I apologize. As you read, I think you’ll understand why it took a minute to get my thoughts organized. They rose up from the writing I’m currently doing for my book, about the shocking intuitive awakening I had when I was 21, which brought up a lot of feelings about that time, and how while I was helped tremendously by that era in terms of what I learned about intuition and how to practice my gift, it came with a price.

I am an intuitive who came up from the New Age yet ultimately rejected the extreme thinking that it promoted, especially the idea that “natural” health was the only real path to wellness. The natural health voices have always made me queasy. I have always been perplexed as to why the same movement that opened up a discussion about our spiritual lives, one that could be completely distinct from religion, would also become so religious in their wholesale condemnation and repudiation of science.

Society over the centuries has swung wildly back and forth between making space for intuitive spirituality, and decrying it as hogwash. So the late 80’s wasn’t the first time our culture reopened the subject. As much as I personally benefitted from it, because it gave me a language and a way to practice new thinking around the value of intuition, and because that in turn would ultimately blow the doors right open on my own intuitive capacity, changing my life instantly and for the better, there was also a kind of fantasy-driven rot that manifested (pun intended) within The New Age, that led to the crippling superficiality, racism, ableism, and consumerism of its next iteration, the Wellness community, which in turn has also birthed the yoga-to-alt right pipeline.

It has confounded me. I find it incredibly dismaying because it is outright dangerous. I am an intuitive who has always understood that science and intuition work together all the time, and well. In fact, they both work best when they work together. I’ve never bought into the pitting of science and intuition against each other in some bizarre cage match to the death. I know that neither ability is more powerful than the other, and that neither are harmful. But enough people sure do that here we are in a public health crisis.

The choice to choose spirit over science, or vice-versa, is a false proposition and is supported by propaganda.

You can see the results of this movement that believes science is its enemy everywhere, from the installation of a morally corrupt charlatan to head the Department of Health and Human Services, to the widespread and rising rates of vaccine hesitancy, to the rampant mistrust of scientific research and public health. Worse than taking the progress that sustains our lives (and the quality of it!) for granted, which it does, it centers the absolutely miraculous contribution of medical science to civil society as harmful and unnecessary, as a tool of an oppressive government, and responsible for causing the exact mysteries it aims to solve.

For the entirety of my almost 40-year career, people have made constant assumptions about my approach to health, believing that I too rejected “Western” medicine in favor of a totally “natural” approach: that I was a vegetarian or vegan. That I did cleanses and tried every new trend that came along to purge my body of toxins and parasites, whether that was eating strictly “whole” food, or raw food, or no food, that I did infrared saunas, red-light therapy, oxygen supplementation, and I’m sure a metric crap ton of stuff I’ve forgotten.

I embrace my health with the gratitude of someone who has access to great care from many modalities. I believe passionately in “Western” medicine as my baseline, and I also practice what I think is a truly wholistic approach by seeing an acupuncturist and other “alternative” practitioners if appropriate to provide support. But I refuse to buy into the idea that any one way is the only way.

It took me a decade to fully unpack how I too had been influenced by the same movement that ironically helped me discover my intuitive gifts. I was lucky, though, because I might not have been able to shake off the propaganda had I not gone through a terrible tragedy that gave me the opportunity to confront the fantasy thinking at the root of it.

In 2015, my husband died a horrible death from gastric cancer. He was ill for 18 months. Gastric cancer is very like pancreatic cancer and glioblastomas in that they are aggressive and unresponsive to treatment. My husband stayed alive a remarkably long time considering. Towards the end, I approached a woman I considered a friend for support. She is an energy healer, and I chose her carefully because what I would reveal to her felt like a secret I had been carrying, one that had tormented me throughout his entire illness. I had known intuitively from the moment of the endoscopy that had revealed the cancer that my husband was going to die, so in addition to living through the nightmare of seeing someone I loved suffer from a unbearably cruel disease that was killing him, I had also been living in a state of utter panic and desperation as I tried to prepare our young kids for losing him. I’d hoped someone who knew me and who also worked in the same world as me would understand how devastatingly lonely it had been to have this information, a reality that I didn’t feel I could share with anyone, and how hard I had struggled to come to terms with what I knew.

Her response was….cheerful. She glibly responded that everyone can be healed if we believe it is possible.

At this point, he was actively dying, but she insinuated that it was a personal failing of mine if I did not believe that he could be healed. She then disappeared from my life altogether.

Then, only 13 months after he passed away, a routine mammogram revealed a lump in my breast. Five days later I found out it was malignant. I spent the next 3 months convinced I was orphaning my children. It plunged us back into another cycle of trauma, after we had just barely begun to come back to life. I could not imagine what kind of universe we lived in that was forcing my children, so soon after having to come to terms with their father’s death, to suddenly have to confront that they might lose their mom as well.

While I was deciding on treatment options, which involved extensive testing at my local medical center and traveling back and forth to Dana Farber Cancer Institute, I barely slept. I woke up nearly every night in tears, convinced that it was somehow my fault that I had cancer. That I had not healed myself enough spiritually or emotionally. That I had not eaten correctly. That I had not managed stress well enough. That I had been exposed to silent toxins that I was remiss in not purging from my body. That I had not affirmed or manifested my own good health enough. I believed I was a horrible mother because I had neglected my own purity, and the result was that I was going to abandon my children.

In the wee hours I also I cried my heart out for my husband who died not only with a broken body, but with a broken heart at having to leave us. And finally, I sobbed for my own pain and for how hard I had tried to be the perfect parent to my children to save them from what was happening to them, and for how impossible that had been.

My diagnosis turned out to be one of the most potent forces for healing that I have ever experienced. I was about to turn 50, and having to confront my mortality lead me through an exhaustive inventory of every single belief, agreement, or behavior that was not serving me anymore. It began a wholesale cementing of my deepest priorities. I stopped waiting to be myself. I became a better friend to myself, I laughed more, cried more, lost my tolerance for drama and stinginess. I was also able to access deeper stores of the sharpest and most painful parts of the grief I felt, not only for the loss of my husband, but for so many other traumas I had experienced as a child. Anything stored in the attic of my heart came up to be felt and resolved.

I also began to feel even more connected to a loving and abundant Universe than I had at any other point in my life. I eventually shed the crippling fear of an imminent death and intuitively knew I wasn’t going to die of breast cancer.

Yet, no matter how much I grew, no matter how much breast cancer changed me physically, emotionally, and spiritually, I never once fell back into the trap of thinking that I could attain a level of spiritual and emotional purity that would insulate my body from sickness, aging and ultimately dying. I forgave myself for being propagandized into believing I could control or cure the vehicle I live in, my body, with its built-in obsolescence. My goal from then forward was to be the best loving parent I could to my body given the many advantages I have. But I would never, ever shame myself into believing it was my fault if something went wrong.

Looking back from almost 10-years cancer free, I am so grateful that I was forced to confront the propaganda that filled my thinking with utter garbage. It is the height of irony that a movement that believes “negative thinking” can influence our physical health but promotes the idea that we control our bodies with our minds, itself the very definition of poisonous thinking. The idea that we are meant to live our human lives in a state of perfect health is am ableist fantasy. We may be spiritual beings having a physical experience, and I believe we are, but we also choose a human life on earth specifically because it is imperfect and temporal. Our bodies have built-in obsolescence. We not only are going to die someday, we are supposed to. Believing that there is a way to purify ourselves to avoid living a real human life is ridiculous and cruel, and until the tumor in my boob was found I didn’t really understand how influenced I had been by the idea.

During the first year of the pandemic, a client called me filled with terror about what she felt was a conspiracy to control the citizenry of our country with vaccines. They were dangerous and a plot by the state to make us all sicker, she said. She said she had proof, sourced from her own research. I have ended a session early only a very few times, but I told her I wasn’t available to help her manage this issue. What surprised me the most was how surprised she was that I refused to go down the road of fear with her, paved as it was with propaganda (with once again, such cruel irony: her beliefs were manipulating her more than a revolutionary and live-saving vaccine ever would). She’d thought I was the perfect person to talk to about it. She’d believed I was a soft landing for her fear running wild, unbridled, torturous.

I think about her often, hoping that she found her way.

I think my struggle to write this piece is simple, actually. I know that who I am and what I can do is the definition of outer limits for a lot of people. Intuition, and by default intuitives, are marginalized as weird and wrong. We are believed to be rare, unreliable, and dangerous, and the poorer representatives among us have not helped to re-write that narrative. But challenging that context is not the same as plunging wholesale into the kind of extreme thinking that would have you believe intuitive spirituality is some kind of fantasy land. It is real and sustaining, and not the playground of those who are motivated to escape reality. It actually requires you to have both feet on the ground and be mentally very well.

I feel a deep responsibility to educate you about what intuition is and what it isn’t, although if you had told me three decades ago how much of my time and energy would be devoted to separating out the myths and misconceptions about intuitive spirituality I would have been surprised. But all of us are alive to learn, including myself. We are all here to live perfectly imperfectly, the best we can.

Holidng you in my heart always,

Susan