Episode 12: Cancer, Covid & Croissants Pt 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY6HWyd6Bfs

How surrender became the strategy

Part One of this story was the outer timeline.

Diagnosis. Surgery. COVID. Running a bakery through chaos. The return of cancer. Radiation. Hormone therapy. India. The pivot from fear to love.

Part Two is the inner timeline.

This is the part where the real transformation happens. Not in the mechanics of treatment, but in the shift from being someone who endures a crisis to someone who becomes an active participant in the alchemy of it.

Fred says something in this episode that matters.

He is grateful his body got cancer.

Not because cancer is good, but because the experience forced a kind of awakening he cannot unsee now.

You can’t “remove fear” by staring at fear

When Fred and I first started working together, his goal was simple.

Heal physically, eliminate fear.

It makes sense. It is the natural executive response. Identify the threat, neutralize it.

But fear does not work like a business problem.

Trying to eliminate fear by focusing on fear is like trying to get a song out of your head by replaying it.

A friend named Bruce delivered the reframe that changed everything.

Don’t focus on eliminating fear.

Focus on receiving love.

Love is already there.

Fear collapses in the presence of it.

That distinction becomes the thread that runs through the rest of this episode.

Group coherence, or what happens when 2,500 people choose love at once

Fred describes a practice from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s retreats that is hard to convey unless you’ve witnessed it.

At these events, there are group healing sessions.

They do not call people “patients.” They call them healies.

A healy lies on a cot. A group of strangers sits around them. The ballroom is huge, often around 2,500 people.

The room is dark. The music is somber. The collective intention is focused. Everyone is meditating, then sending energy, love, healing.

Fred describes it like a hurricane of coherence.

People cry. People shake. People shout. It can look wild from the outside, but he describes it as deeply ordered from the inside.

The part that matters is what it did to him personally.

It made help real.

Not conceptual. Not polite. Not theoretical.

Real help, offered freely, without performance, from people with no reason to care other than shared humanity.

And it forced a new skill.

Receiving.

The radical act of asking for help

Fred says something plainly that I think a lot of high-performing people will recognize.

He never asked for help.

Not really.

He might organize a team, direct resources, hire expertise. That is still control. That is still leadership-as-management.

But the kind of help that requires openness, vulnerability, and surrender is different.

After his first Dispenza event, Fred asked if we could bring that kind of group healing into his real life.

So we did.

We gathered a small circle of people he trusted, in person, then continued with remote sessions over months.

People who did not fully understand the theory still showed up with devotion.

That is what group healing often becomes in real life.

Not a performance of belief.

A commitment to presence.

Fred asked.

Then he accepted.

That was one of the biggest shifts in his entire arc.

Becoming a “healy,” and being surrounded by strangers who love you

In April 2025, after radiation was complete and while he was still dealing with the long tail of hormone therapy, Fred applied to be selected as a healy at the retreat.

Thousands applied. A small fraction were accepted.

He was accepted.

This matters because it flips his role.

Instead of being the helper, the strategist, the one holding it together, he becomes the one lying down in the middle of the room, blindfolded, surrounded by strangers.

After his first session, he sat up and removed the eye mask.

Eight strangers were looking at him with pure kindness.

Not curiosity. Not evaluation. Not pity.

Just love.

And he says something crucial.

There is no control there.

You are at the mercy of receiving.

For someone whose identity has been built around steering outcomes, that is ego death in a very specific form.

The synchronicity moment

During one of those healing sessions, something happened that felt almost scripted.

When Fred sat up, he realized that both Lauren, his wife, and I were seated beside him in the circle.

At a retreat with thousands of people, with randomized seating, without coordination, both of us landed there.

From the outside, you could call it coincidence.

From the inside, it felt like the universe saying: yes, you are held.

That moment meant a lot to him. It also mattered to me, because it was a direct experience of what we talk about on this show.

Coherence is not theory.

It is felt reality.

Ishmael, the blue light, and the sobbing healer

In Fred’s first healing session, one of the men in his circle, Ishmael, was sobbing uncontrollably.

At the time, Fred had no idea why.

Later, a woman from the group asked him if he remembered Ishmael. She encouraged him to reach out.

When Fred called, Ishmael described what he experienced.

He felt an intense surge of energy the moment he entered the room. He saw a blue light hovering. He felt overwhelming love for his parents. He said he thought he had died, not because he was afraid, but because he felt transported into something beyond normal consciousness.

That is why he sobbed.

Fred also shares that Ishmael believed he saw an angel hovering over Fred.

Some people will dismiss this instantly.

Some people will recognize it instantly.

What matters is not whether the image is literal.

What matters is the emotional and energetic reality underneath it.

A stranger’s heart opened so fully that it became a conduit.

That is the kind of experience that permanently rearranges your worldview.

The doubt crack

At the retreat, during a meditation later in the week, I leaned over and said something to Fred that I think is the real hinge of this entire story.

You have to give up the doubt.

You have to go all in.

Fred describes living with an “escape hatch” in his mind. Even while pursuing healing, a part of him stayed braced for recurrence.

It is a protective mechanism. It is also a quiet agreement with fear.

During that meditation, he released it.

He did not just hope to be healed.

He felt healed.

He embodied the state as real.

And he describes that experience as his true emotional pivot point. Not the later medical confirmation.

The medical confirmation was simply the physical world catching up.

The PET scan came back clear

In June 2025, Fred received the PET scan results.

Clean. Clear. Gone.

He did not describe it as a dramatic explosion of emotion. He described it as validation.

He had already crossed the threshold internally.

The scan was the receipt.

He also shares an irony that speaks perfectly to the tension between Western and Eastern mind.

An Indian astrologer told him he was healed before the scan.

Fred, Western-minded, filed it mentally under “we’ll see.”

Then the scan confirmed it.

He describes this as a perfect juxtaposition.

Western medicine has its role.

Eastern practice has its role.

His journey required both.

“My body got cancer. I didn’t.”

This is one of the most important lines in the episode.

Fred does not say “I had cancer” in the way many people do.

He says: my body got cancer.

That is not semantics.

That is identity separation.

It removes ownership. It removes fusion. It removes the subtle psychological claim that “cancer is me.”

He describes it this way.

“My body had cancer. Now I have a cancer-free body.”

That distinction is part of why he can say something that sounds shocking at first.

He is grateful.

Because the journey created experiences he would not have had otherwise.

India.

Healing circles.

A transformed relationship to love and gratitude.

A deeper marriage.

A different way of doing business.

A different way of living.

The surrender of public control

Toward the end of the episode, we talk about something that is easy to overlook.

Many people do inner transformation privately.

They will surrender in their own home, with their own therapist, in their own journal, behind their own closed door.

But there is another level.

Surrendering the story of how you are perceived.

Fred shares that he first spoke publicly about his prostate cancer during a Conscious Capitalism event, when an interviewer pushed him to speak about the struggle, not just the bakery.

He was reluctant. Then he did it.

Afterward, men and women approached him to share their own stories. One man told him it helped him release grief he had been holding for years.

That experience became the seed for what he later did on LinkedIn.

After becoming cancer-free, he wrote a public letter. He called it the hardest thing he ever wrote.

He did not do it for attention.

He did it because he had learned that speaking openly can free other people.

And because he no longer needed to control how he was seen.

That is not branding.

That is vessel work.

The paragraph that closes the arc

Fred reads the final paragraph from his LinkedIn letter, and it lands like a bell.

He says he is different now.

He cries more easily.

He hugs longer.

He says “I love you” more often.

Sunrises look different.

Food tastes different.

He feels gratitude in his bones.

Then the core truth.

He had to accept he could die in order to learn how to live.

And the line that sums up the entire transformation.

Don’t focus on eliminating fear.

Focus on receiving love.

What this story is really about

This is not a story about “positive thinking.”

It is not a story about bypassing medicine.

It is not a story about pretending fear isn’t real.

It is a story about the executive realization that control has limits, and that surrender is not passivity.

Surrender is participation with reality.

And that participation can become a kind of medicine.

Fred ends with the strongest, simplest lesson.

Gratitude is power.

Love is around you.

You do not control how others receive your story.

You simply offer it.