THE THIRD WAY: A Manifesto for Integrated Living

This piece is offered as an invitation—to think freely, to live integratively, and to remember that healing is not a single discipline but a dialogue.

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When the pain arrives my first response is wrapped up in its origin, my mind racing to find an explanation. Then comes the whisper, “You have cancer. ” A reminder that calms me instantly down. How ironic that this worst-case revelation has become the least of what I fear.

The familiar [no matter how difficult] is our default, where our comfort is found.

Which brings me to chemotherapy. There are few of us on the planet who don’t have some notion of what it’s about—
its purported life-saving properties,
images of the destruction of the body,
ravages seemingly necessary to achieve its end.

Before this sixty-month-journey [and counting] I clung to a hard-held belief of “never chemo” without having another way forward in my head.

That way forward has revealed itself through a journey of learning and applying that has embodied the revelation that life is not either or, but the elegant integration of two seemingly oppositional sides: Alternative Medicine. Chemotherapy.

I am living embodiment that we needn’t be content to live in halves.
I am learning to participate in the necessity to revise.

To suit our simplistic ideals, we carve the world into tidy opposites and surrender our agency to whichever side shouts loudest. But revelation comes in the quiet, most often in commune with our Creator and within ourselves.

Have you been taught to choose — faith or science, spirit or substance?
Creation itself is composed of both breath and bone,  word and form.

There is another way of living that  leaves the argument and chatter to the rest—
The Third Way.

The Third Way does not bow to polarity; it listens for a harmony of seemingly contrary sides.
It refuses the lazy comfort of certainty when wisdom is asking for conversation that clarifies.

The Third Way asks what each path knows, not which path is right.

This isn’t compromise; it is consecration.
It is the courage to hold the microscope and the mystery in the same steady hands—
To study the medicine and pray over it.
To honor data as a dialect our bodies fluently speak.
To welcome wonder into the sterile room until the room becomes holy because we arrive.

The Third Way is an apprenticeship to wholeness.
The daily practice of becoming intimate with your own life.

It is a reading of the sacred script of your body,
celebrating the divinity of your design.
It is refusing to outsource the miracle,
learning the chemistry of healing refined.

I am returning to chemotherapy — not as surrender, but as an act of creative partnership.
This time, the dose is lower — a preservation, not an assault:
Low-dose, weekly rhythms that honor the body’s capacity to engage without capitulating to devastation.

This is intelligent, not timid.
Deliberate, not denial.
To change the dose is to follow my body’s formula — to let wisdom temper power until power  heals.

Around these agents, I will weave the gentle, intelligent company of
therapies that—
brighten the cellular terrain,
flood the tissue with breath,
release what is used and used-up,
steady the immune choir,
clarify the mind, align the body, and help the system carry away what does not serve.

Each practice [oxygenation, nourishment, detoxification, lymphatic movement, alignment, stillness] plays its part in the choreography of renewal.

The Third Way is choreography.
It honors timing — when to welcome, when to pause, when to cleanse, when to nourish, when to be still. It attends to sequences and synergies the way a composer attends to silence between the notes.

The Third Way is responsibility worn like a garment of light.
It studies. It asks better questions. It takes intuitive cues.
It gathers a council of wise voices and then remembers that the body, too, gets a vote.
It does not worship certainty; it honors an evolving Truth.

This is not defiance but devotion.
Not rebellion but remembering that the One who made us limitless never asked us to live small.

I am not choosing sides. I am choosing wholeness,
a life without borders, a body designed to heal.

And if you are reading this with your own body waiting for its next instruction,
hear this benediction:
You do not have to abandon your intelligence to honor your faith,
and you do not have to abandon your faith to honor your intelligence.
Bring them both. Let them listen to one another. Let them collaborate.

The cure is not in the argument.
The cure is co-creation —
the fearless weaving of what is true and life-giving, wherever you find it or it finds you.

This is my manifesto and my medicine.
This is my path, my way.

NOTES—Integrative Application

Context of Care
A low-dose, metronomic chemotherapeutic approach is being employed — creative by design, grounded in evidence, responsive to the body’s feedback.
Objective: maintain efficacy while minimizing toxicity, allowing the body to remain an active partner in its own healing.

Integrative Modalities & Functional Contributions
(Methodologies only; no brands, dosages, or timing.)

• Intravenous Vitamin C: supports redox balance; protects healthy cells under oxidative stress.

• Hyperbaric Oxygen: increases tissue oxygenation; assists repair; may enhance therapeutic sensitivity.

• Infrared / Traditional Sauna: encourages circulation and perspiration-mediated detoxification.

• Red / Near-Infrared Light: supports mitochondrial renewal and anti-inflammatory signaling.

• Fasting / Time-Restricted Nutrition: promotes metabolic flexibility; heightens cellular resilience, avoids feeding cancer with toxic take-in.

• Binders & Bile-Flow Supports: aid elimination of metabolites and reduce re-absorption of toxins.

• Curcumin / Anti-Inflammatory Phytochemicals: modulate inflammatory tone and tissue comfort.

• Chiropractic & Structural Alignment: restores communication through the nervous system, supports circulation and lymph flow, improves mobility, and eases treatment-related tension.

• Lymphatic Drainage (manual or assisted): facilitates toxin removal, reduces inflammation and edema, and supports immune and detoxification pathways — especially essential during chemotherapy recovery.

• Medicinal Mushrooms: reinforce innate and adaptive immunity; stabilize microbiome relationships.

• Mistletoe Therapy: immune modulation; improved vitality and tolerance.

• Targeted Botanicals (e.g., graviola and THC): context-specific cellular signaling support.

• Mind-Body Practices: prayer, breath, meditation, rest — regulating stress chemistry and deep repair.

Guiding Philosophy
Integration is not the merging of opposites but their collaboration.
It is stewardship — the choice to understand, to participate, to time, to listen.
It is the acknowledgment that healing is co-created: by clinician and patient, by body and spirit, by science and grace.

The Third Way invites partnership with all that is life-affirming.
It reminds us that the body is not a battleground but a meeting place between intelligence and love.

Image: This is me the last time I did chemotherapy at the beginning of my journey five years ago. This time I won’t lose my hair.