Lance Armstrong has my vote for greatest athlete for at least the last 50 years. I spent many summer evenings watching the Tour de France, amazed by his performance. The Tour de France, the world's premiere bicycle race, has to be the most grueling athletic event in our modern era, requiring incredible effort simply to finish, let alone win. Winning this event seven years in a row represents a pinnacle of male, warrior energy.
Much has been said about another battle Lance Armstrong had before he went on to seven consecutive wins: his fight against cancer. I find it interesting that his cancer came in his testicle, the source of male generative or reproductive power. We use the term having "balls" to mean having "gutsy, action-oriented (masculine) energy." Taking this one step further, Lance Armstrong developed cancer in his male organs, and cancer, in a nutshell, refers to cells of our body that grow out of control, infringing on the body's normal systems. Where these cells originate gives a particular cancer its name, e.g. kidney cancer refers to kidney cells growing out of control. The more chaotically cancer cells grow out of bounds, the more dangerous they are. We might summarize Armstrong's physical disease as "cells specific to male generation growing out of control."
Is this a coincidence that Lance Armstrong got such a disease? In a real way, some "energetic essence" within Lance Armstrong has to do with "male energy exceeding its bounds." It is what enabled him to win the Tour de France seven times, and it was at the root of his cancer. After he began recovering from cancer he began training for his first win of the Tour. It was as if something triggered this part of him, producing first his cancer and then his seven-year winning streak. For those of you who followed Lance's racing, think of his control over every aspect of the race, whether it was the training, his pacing and daily race strategy, his food intake, pretty much everything that had to do with the race. Winning had to do with his ability to harness and control this male energy straining to exceed its bounds.
Lance's case is of particular interest to me, because the relationship between his physical disease and his deeper energies is unusually easy to see. Conventional underplays any relationship between physical disease and underlying energy. Everything I have seen in my professional life shows the opposite: a person's physical symptoms connect to every other part of the person--his emotions, his dreams, his way of being, everything. The development of a chronic physical disease is not accidental. I believe the future of medicine lies in understanding and treating this connection between the solid energy of our body and the energy of emotions and consciousness.
This is easier to think about if we realize our physical body is energy. If this is hard to imagine, simply think of electrons spinning within the atoms that make us up. We are built to perceive our body as solid. We might call it "solid energy." There is a smooth, direct connection between the "solid energy" of our bodies and our deeper energies, which include emotional energy and the energy that makes up our consciousness. Because of this connection, we cannot help but express physical disease in a way that relates to this underlying, "less solid" emotional energy. This is the deeper meaning of the term "holistic medicine”: It treats the common energetic source of both emotional and physical symptoms.
I hope that using Lance Armstrong as an example helps you to entertain the possibility more is going on than what the meets the eye. There is something unusual in his case, something that suggests the presence of underlying energy pattern. See this and you are on your way to understanding classical homeopathy: a choice of a homeopathic remedy is a judgment about what the underlying energy of a person is. The challenge is to exactly perceive it and then give the remedy that mirrors it. To be accurate in one's treatment is the hallmark of good medicine, whether it be alternative or conventional.
