How I Destroyed Cancer From the Inside Out: An Interview with David Blake
“If someone wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness. Only then is it possible to help him.”
I first learned about David’s battle with stage 4 cancer during a meditation session last year. We were merely strangers at the time. A couple months later, he shared that his tests showed that he was cancer-free, and it was a moment of miracle (which we all believed in) and worthy of celebration among members of our meditation group.
Over the span of last year, I watched David progressively become healthier, stronger, more vibrant, and I was ready to sit down with him to get the full story behind his healing journey. After the interview, it dawned on me the word “battle” with cancer was truly misused; the more appropriate word might have been “surrender.” But David’s story is much more than that. It’s not just a story about surrendering to miracles, it’s also a story about strength, persistence, self-love, and a step-by-step process of healing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, to transform his entire life.
Q:
When were you first diagnosed with cancer and how did it affect you?
A:
So I first got into spirituality around 2015 and started listening to Dr. Wayne Dyer. His speeches had such a profound impact on me that I was listening and reading everything he has ever put out there. His work then led me to Marianne Williamson and A Course in Miracles. I started doing daily practices from A Course in Miracles, but I wasn’t quite ready to take that deep plunge that the Course is asking you to take. So I put away that book and ended up devoting myself to the teachings of Ram Dass.
When Covid hit in March of 2020, I was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer, but it quickly spread to stage 4. I had surgery to remove the tumor in my colon and did a round of chemotherapy.
I thought to myself, all this spiritual stuff hasn’t had any benefit to my health, so I threw it all out as soon as I was diagnosed. I thought this was a physical problem and I needed to deal with it on a physical level, that spirituality has no benefit to me. My logic was, if it did, I wouldn’t be here with a large tumor in my colon. My mind wanted to know everything there is to know about the disease, so I became an obsessive researcher on cancer and how it works inside the body. All the different theories about what creates it, and the different pathways it uses to feed itself. I was obsessed with implementing the perfect protocol alongside conventional medicine that would stop the growth of cancer. I became very knowledgeable about supplements and everything I could do externally to help the process.
None of that worked. Surgery removed the tumor but it would just come back. In early 2021, it came back into my liver. At the same time, I had done an interview with an Australian woman, during which she asked me, are you doing Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work? The hair on the back of my neck stood up, remembering that I had read his book, You Are the Placebo, and was fascinated by his studies. So I began practicing his work, and dove deeply into it because that is just how I operate. I went on to reread all of his books, took his progressive course, and became incredibly knowledgeable of his material.
In August of 2021, I decided to stop the treatment of chemotherapy. It just wasn’t the path I wanted to go down. I remember looking around in the infusion ward and saw how sick everyone was. I just knew that it was a slow march to death—they were treating people to death.
If there is one thing I could get across in this interview is the message that when people are faced with a disease like cancer, you really have 2 options: you can treat the disease or you can decide to heal the disease. The people in the infusion ward were treating their disease all the way to their graves. They were not healing. I decided that I was going to heal and not treat. So I gave up all conventional treatments at that point and solely focused on my mind.
I went on to learn everything about the mind, because I believed that my mind had created this. By that, I don’t mean that I woke up one day and thought, hey wouldn’t it be fun to have cancer. There was no part of me in a conscious way that wanted this, but somehow on a subconscious level, I had created this, so I went on to learn more about that.
Q:
What were some of the turning points on your healing journey and what have you discovered along the way?
A:
I was previously shown that I had a tumor in my lungs. In late 2021, that tumor started to grow and the amount of cancer DNA in my test results shot up. I started to have difficulties breathing. And that kicked off a series of cascading effects in my body and mind. My mind was constantly reminded that I am not getting enough oxygen and that I have a growing tumor in my lungs. There were no surgical options to take them out because they had already spread everywhere. I was now operating in survival mode every day.
Life just became incredibly stressful and I was still working at a corporate job at the time. I began to have panic attacks with a sense of constriction from not being able to breathe, which then caused what they call adrenal fatigue. So things got really dark in late 2021 to early 2022. The adrenal fatigue caused insomnia at a level that I had never experienced. I went through about 3 months where I had maybe only 2 hours of sleep each night. I was trying to keep up with work and taking care of my kids like a normal person, but I was hardly getting any sleep, and my breathing was getting worse. My blood-oxygen levels had gone down into very dangerous levels.
In April of 2022, the cancer had come back into my liver as well. The doctor had given me months, at the most a year to live, even with treatment. At that point, I had already gone through several rounds of chemotherapy and the disease had become resistant to it. I was told to take the vacation I had always wanted to take, and prepare myself to die.
At that point, there was nothing left for me to do, except to surrender. The most honest thing I could say is that I didn’t decide to surrender, surrender just happened to me, because there was nothing really left of me. There was no more will that I could put into this and there was no more knowledge from me that could help get out of this. So in a moment of surrender, I basically said, I don’t know anything. I had come to the realization that I could know all ABOUT something but that is not to KNOW something.
I didn’t know what it meant to heal, I didn’t know how my mind actually worked, and I didn’t know who or what I was. I came into this deep state of surrender that I give up — there is no more of me to give to this.
I recognize now that I didn’t really surrender my control at the time, but I had surrendered to the control I already had. I gave up the idea of who I was, what I knew, my past history and any idea of my future. I had given up all of that and there was only awareness and presence. I looked up one day, as I was coming out of my meditation, and there on top of my refrigerator was A Course in Miracles, the book I had put away years ago because I wasn’t ready for it. I saw a light behind the book, illuminating it, and I knew it had the answers I was looking for. If anything, I thought, it would bring me a deeper sense of peace.
I made a decision at that moment that I was going to stare fear in the face. That I was not going to use any methods to push it away but just allow myself to sit with it, stare at it and see if it was real. All of the spiritual texts say that fear is not real, there is only love, but I wanted to know it experientially. That moment changed everything. It changed how I was going to move forward, and what was in priority for my healing. So I started to do the daily practices in A Course in Miracles while continuing to practice Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work, but approaching it from a different angle.
From that point on, I became very clear on how I needed to approach my healing process, by dissecting it into small steps. I knew I needed to get quality sleep first, because if I can’t sleep then my body can't heal. I began to incorporate visualizations into my meditations and used the daily blessings from A Course in Miracles as mantras, so that my mind could not get lost in fearful thoughts. One night, the daily blessing was “I am entitled to miracles.” I repeated that mantra hundreds, maybe a thousand times, and fell asleep. I slept until the alarm went off in the morning and had a full 6 ½ hours of restful sleep for the first time in a long time.
After that, I knew the next thing is that if I can’t breathe then my body can’t heal. So I began to focus on my breathing while practicing Dr. Joe’s meditations. Our breath is such a gift, and we take it for granted because it normally happens automatically on its own. It was during one of his meditations, I took my first full breath in probably 6 months. I stopped in the middle of the meditation and just lost it, feeling that I finally got it!
After that, I began to explore different breathing techniques, and was introduced to SOMA breathwork. I intuitively knew that I needed to learn how to breathe again, and through breathing I could infuse more oxygen into the deep tissue cells and allow for healing. So I started to practice SOMA breathing techniques every day, and my blood-oxygen had gone back to a completely safe level.
Q:
What would you say were the most important decisions you made that had the biggest impact on your recovery?
A:
So back in April of 2022, I had decided to give up all conventional treatments, but I’ve had a liver resection previously with this surgeon. I thought I’d send him my scan, even with the knowledge that my condition wasn’t operable. Even if it was, I wouldn’t be able to book with him for over 3 months. My doctor said, don’t even bother, the tumor is in both your lungs and your liver and growing, he’s not going to do the surgery. But I just had this intuitive hit that I should try, so I sent him the scan anyway.
Then out of nowhere, I got a call from his office in May, saying they’re calling to schedule my surgery. For some reason, the surgeon decided to move forward with the surgery to remove the liver tumor without worrying about the lungs. The surgery was scheduled for July.
I continued to do all the spiritual work I was doing without thinking about the surgery. Then one day, I did this lesson from A Course in Miracles, and I’ll never forget, the lesson was “The light has come, I have forgiven the world.” The Course teaches a lot about forgiveness, but as I went through each lesson, I realized that it’s not anyone else that I needed to forgive, it’s really just myself. I also realized that there were parts of me that lived in my shadow that I thought I had forgiven years ago, but were still holding on to the past.
I started to understand the way the Ego works, which is never allowing you to forgive something, but pushing it away into your subconscious mind so that you’re not looking at it anymore. It’s an illusion of letting go, but the Ego never let go of anything. So as I was doing the work, I was starting to let go of what was in my subconscious mind that I was not aware of.
I went into a very deep level of self-acceptance. I remember going out to my backyard one day and the sun was shining. I sat down on the grass, and all of a sudden everything just came to life in a way that I had never experienced before. The grass was so green it was vibrating, and the trees were rustling and communicating with each other. I could see their branches grew into each other and gave space for the other tree to move into its space. The birds were singing and I felt that they were singing to me. I stood up, took it all in, and in that moment, I knew I was healed. I just knew it.
Still, I went ahead with the surgery in July of 2022. Between April and May, the scans had shown that the tumor had doubled in size and was growing rapidly. The scan from May was the latest the surgeon had to go off of. When I woke up after the surgery, the surgeon told me everything went perfectly, that he didn’t find anything else to be of concern. He added, by the way, I was expecting the tumor to be much larger. Because I was so confused by what I saw, I decided to measure the tumor. We found that the tumor shrank and was actually in the necrotic process, characterized by dying from the inside out. In looking at your chart, I’m also confused that you chose not to do chemotherapy prior to the surgery, so how did the tumor shrink?
My answer to him was, I decided to live from the inside out. He said, well, that’s interesting, because that’s how the tumor seems to be dying.
“Energetically, whatever you’re fighting will fight you back. So you are feeding the disease with energy when you are fighting it. I want to clarify that when I say surrender, I don’t mean loving cancer, but come into acceptance that this thing seems to be occurring within your body. Be present with this moment and allow the next moment to show you what steps you need to take. ”
Q:
Could you share some of the miracles you’ve experienced that encouraged you to keep going?
A:
There were many… I was taking these tests that measured the circulating tumor DNA in your bloodstream. They would take a sample DNA of the tumor and look for that sample in your system, and it’s a very accurate test to determine whether you’re going to have a recurrence or not.
I was getting very frustrated with the test because every time I took it, it came back positive. Even though the amount was low, it still meant there was traceable cancer in my system, and that in about 9 months, it would show up on a scan. I would take this test every 3 months and it would show me the results along with a record of all previous test results.
After I began practicing Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work, I started to notice strange effects it has on the disease. My latest test result would come back positive, but somehow my previous test results had changed themselves to negative. It was logically impossible for me and my doctors to understand. But I intrinsically knew and felt it in my psyche that I was somehow healing my past and it’s showing me that through the test results. The test results continue to change as I take them. All the doctors and technicians threw up their hands and couldn't understand what was happening. To this day, no one could logically explain what had happened and I’ve not yet met anyone else that this had happened to.
Another miraculous experience I want to share, and one I hadn’t really spoken about. I had planned to go to a Dr. Joe’s retreat before my final surgery was scheduled. After the surgery, it didn’t make sense financially for me to go, so I gave up that plan. Out of nowhere, I received a “Get Well” card from a family friend I hadn’t seen or spoken with in years. In it, was the same exact amount of money I needed to attend the retreat, including event ticket, airfare, and lodging. At that point, there was no dispute that I was going to the retreat!
Leading up to the retreat, Dr. Joe’s community announced that they were going to do a coherence healing study specifically for cancer patients. And the news broke out all over the internet, on all the sites that were cancer related. Even people who didn’t follow his work were trying to get into this study. Multiple thousands of people submitted their names for a chance to be included in this study, and maybe a few hundred were included. I had submitted my name and visualized myself being a part of this study during my meditations.
Within a day of getting confirmation for my very first Dr. Joe Dispenza retreat, I received a notification that I was accepted into their coherence study as well. Once a week, I received a remote healing session from people all over the world. There was a session during which I was in a deep state of rest, and saw various images of my life—almost like what people describe as a near-death experience where life flashed before their eyes. These images were moments of my life where I was being authentically myself. Just by showing up as myself and interacting with those who needed help, I shifted them in some way that had changed their life.
This was incredibly powerful for me, because I had been doing A Course in Miracles and contemplated who I was and if it’s just my ego that wants to define myself as a divine being. And this experience has shown me that we are all divinely gifted in our unique ways, that we don’t need to identify with anything else but our authentic self.
Q:
How has this entire healing journey changed the work that you do now?
A:
After the retreat, I started coaching people for free, because at the retreat people would ask me questions and I seemed to have the ability to help them understand and fine-tune their work. So I just started to coach people, specifically cancer patients, as a way to help them. My plan was to gradually transition that into a full-time career and leave the corporate world, but the universe decided to speed it up for me, LOL. In January of 2023, I was laid off from my full-time job. In hindsight, I think it would have taken a long time and a lot of courage for me to leave the safety of that job. But the universe knew what was best for me.
So I started to coach people and just followed the breadcrumbs of where they were leading me. As I worked with more and more people, I wanted to understand the mind better and develop additional skills to work with different types of personalities and comfort levels. So I became certified in hypnotherapy and started to work more deeply into people's psyche. What I had noticed in almost every cancer patient I had worked with, is that there was some kind of serious trauma from 0-7 years of age, and that there was some kind of difficult event that happened in their life prior to their diagnosis. So I really focused on doing regression in healing their inner child. I then noticed that as I hypnotized people, their older selves would show up and block the progress as a way to protect their fragile inner child. That was when I was introduced to IFS (Internal Families Systems therapy), and everything just clicked. It just all made sense that the parts of themselves were protecting what they call “the exile,” which oftentimes is the inner child. So I started to study more about it and incorporated that into my hypnotherapy sessions, which brought me to where I am today. I now work with people using hypnotherapy, help them understand different parts of themselves, and bring Self energy to those parts that need healing.
Q:
Do you have any helpful advice you can share to those who are recently diagnosed with cancer?
A:
I would say that the power of surrender is beyond what your logical mind can understand. Your logical mind is going to think that surrender is a weakness, that you are surrendering to death. But when you truly surrender to what is, you are surrendering to life and surrendering to love. Love is far more powerful than fear.
I would encourage them to connect deeply with themselves to listen to their body and their intuition. Understand that this is a physical, emotional, and spiritual disease, which will require them to focus on all 3 aspects of themselves. Continue to show up for yourself in ways that you wouldn’t before. Connect with the part of yourself that is way bigger than the fear of cancer or death. Take care of yourself physically and learn to love every part of yourself.
Energetically, whatever you’re fighting will fight you back. So you are feeding the disease with energy when you are fighting it. I want to clarify that when I say surrender, I don’t mean loving cancer, but come into acceptance that this thing seems to be occurring within your body. Be present with this moment and allow the next moment to show you what steps you need to take. Ask yourself, what is it that my body really needs at this moment to heal, and really reflect on the events that have occurred in your life that could have created this.
Every journey is YOUR journey. I tell this to people all the time during my coaching sessions, to not follow exactly what other people did. Don’t follow exactly what I did because that was solely tailored to me. Tune into your own senses and follow them, instead of following fear. There will be so much outside noise feeding your fear, from doctor’s diagnosis to friends and family’s suggestions. You will need to be super grounded within yourself and ask, what truly resonates with ME.
David Blake is a life coach and certified SOMA breathwork practitioner specializing in hypnosis and mindfulness life coaching. He integrates hypnosis and Internal Family Systems therapy to guide individuals in identifying and healing parts of their psyche that cause challenges, helping them connect to their authentic Self for transformation and growth. His SOMA breathwork sessions often blend breath techniques with hypnosis to assist in reprogramming participants’ subconscious minds, fostering deep healing and lasting change.
You can connect with David and see his upcoming workshops and events on Instagram.
