In September 2019, I travelled to the Peruvian Amazon with my friend and mentor Richard Condon. I had spent decades in contemplative practice, transformational work, teaching, and personal inquiry. I went with one intention: to bring the threads of my life into a coherent whole.
During five ayahuasca ceremonies with Shipibo healers, a message came that I experienced as coming from Pachamama.
About three weeks after I returned, my right lung collapsed. In December, an oncologist confirmed stage four lung cancer. I had already been through prostate cancer. Without treatment, my prognosis was six months. With treatment, the median was eighteen months.
Early in those conversations, my oncologist offered his own counsel: "The best thing you can do for yourself is to just enjoy your life."
The same words had arrived through two very different encounters. They became a question I would have to live.
How do I undergo treatment for terminal cancer and still enjoy my life?
What does that actually take?
Treatment began in January 2020, just as the pandemic arrived. I was immunocompromised. Every scan, every blood test, every treatment carried the possibility of news that would change what came next. I described it as living with a gun to my head.
There was the body: the fatigue, the procedures, the treatment cycles. And there was the work of living with what might happen. Attention was drawn into the next result, the next intervention, the next possibility. The future could occupy the present before it arrived.
I began to see how much of life could become occupied by that effort, and to wonder whether another relationship to the experience was possible.
The first clinical trial worked for about a year, then stopped. A second followed. In June 2021, I developed severe colitis in reaction to the experimental treatment. I spent two weeks in hospital and nearly died. I came home almost forty pounds lighter, barely able to walk. Treatment was discontinued.
I came home to prepare to die. I wanted to die at home.
A lifetime of study and practice had been brought to a fine point. There was no further teaching to accumulate. Whatever I understood had to become available in the experience I was actually having.
I knew I wanted my last experience of life to be love. To leave in that state, I would have to live in it now.
So I turned toward the unfinished places. I attended to relationships. I grieved with Cathy, my partner, without protecting or managing anything. I explored the fear of death, the guilt, the shame, and the unkindnesses accumulated over a lifetime. Psychedelic work was part of this, alongside conversation, contemplative practice, and the daily experience of being alive in a vulnerable body.
Beneath every explanation, something very immediate kept appearing: could I be with what I was feeling?
This is the movement I now call Recognize, Accept, Let Go.
Something began to change. When I woke feeling reasonably well, I relished it. This might be as good as I would ever feel again. The morning itself became worth receiving. I felt a growing kinship with nature, the bodily recognition that I belonged to the process that had brought me into being and would one day dissolve this form. Dying became, in one sense, extraordinarily ordinary. Everything living takes part in it. And it stayed profoundly personal. I was going to lose everything I knew and loved.
Both were true at once.
I experienced what I called a state of grace: spaciousness, openness, connectedness. It became a baseline.
"I discovered that I could heal even if my body died, and that I could let go (die) before my body died."
Something else became clear in those months. The one who was dying, the person I had spent a lifetime becoming, could be known within a wider awareness that had nothing to lose.
That is the understanding at the root of my work. The sense of being a separate someone who must secure his own existence is a way of organizing experience. It is not the ground of it. This is a non-dual understanding, and it became something I lived before it became something I described.
About six months after treatment stopped, the tumour began to shrink. Within a year, I was told there was no metastatic disease anywhere in my system. My oncologist said, "We are in uncharted territory with you."
I do not know why I recovered.
What I know is something about how I moved through the experience. That is where my account rests.
Recovery opened a new difficulty. When I shared the news with two friends and mentors, their response was: now what?
I had come to terms with dying. Living asked something further of me. There was a future again, in which to choose, create, work, and take part. What did I have to offer people facing cancer, grief, or uncertainty? I could not tell anyone how to cure cancer.
Richard later developed cancer and died. He met his death consciously, in love, while in pain. His death and my recovery remain together in my understanding of this work. Love was possible in both.
So I returned to first principles. Over the years that followed, the Existential Load Model took shape, as a way of describing what I had discovered: how much of life is organized around the effort to be the one who secures our own existence, and what becomes possible when that effort releases.
The practice continues. Uncertainty returns. Familiar patterns return. As I have come to say: the work after is identical to the work before.
My path to this work was not a straight one. I began in London as an advertising designer. I spent a decade as a resident practitioner in a meditation ashram, in upstate New York and in India. I trained as an NLP Master Practitioner under Dr. John Grinder, and served for seven years as a Seminar Leader. In Victoria, I founded a technology company and created Vita, the first online learning system built to be fully accessible, recognized with a National Information Society Millennium Award in 2000.
Contemplative practice has been the constant for more than fifty years, alongside whatever else I was doing. Design, technology, teaching, and now this work all grew from the same question: how do we make what we discover in experience useful to other people?
I find great joy in exploring with people what becomes available through awareness. We begin with your experience, and our common map gives us a way to understand it together.
Not to become someone else, but to find out what was never separate from the life we are living.
