Breathe in the light and blow out the darkness

SIMON APFEL

Goldberg, a rabbi with a black belt in Choi Kwang Do, and a clinical assistant professor of paediatrics at Wayne State University School of Medicine, is the founder of Kids Kicking Cancer.

The non-profit organisation, established in 1999, teaches breathing techniques and meditation to children battling serious illnesses.

Goldberg has been in South Africa, presenting to Sinai Indaba audiences in Cape Town and Johannesburg over the last two weeks.

He begins his talks with a joke. At first his dry humour seems some sort of coping mechanism for someone who has stared into the face – and faces – of tragedy for more than 20 years. As the extraordinary presentation progresses, however, it becomes evident life has been one defined not by tragedy, but, improbably, by triumph.

In 1981, Goldberg, fondly known as “Rabbi G” (“it sounds less Jewish”, he quips), lost his two-year-old daughter, Sara, to leukaemia.

“She was a special neshama,” he recalls. “She would tell the other children at the hospital not to cry. Her skin was sloughing off, she had sores in her mouth and diarrhoea, but she was telling me: ‘It’s okay, Abba, I love you.’”

That personal tragedy proved the catalyst for the programme that has given similar courage to thousands of kids across the world.

“She has influenced so many people. Everything I do now is really based upon what she taught – that, no matter how difficult the mountain is, you have to find the strength to walk up singing and dancing. That was ultimately her life’s lesson.”

Though KKC teaches childhood cancer patients, some of them as young as three, the basics of martial arts, the programme is not about breaking boards or bricks, throwing opponents over one’s shoulders, or beating off armed robbers in dark alleys. The focus, as it is in much of martial arts, is on the mental aspect.

“We use martial arts as a hook,’’ Goldberg explains. “Ultimately, we teach our kids that the greatest power of all is the light inside them. The real power of martial arts is in your mind, your soul, your spirit…’’

The core focus of the programme is on the breathing exercises – what he describes as “breathing in the light and blowing out the darkness”.

Goldberg’s breakthrough success with this treatment occurred while working at Camp Simcha, a summer camp for kids with cancer and other blood disorders. He watched as medical staff restrained a little boy while administering chemotherapy. The boy screamed in protest and Goldberg decided to intervene. He asked the camper if he wanted to learn some martial arts, and when he said yes, the rabbi taught him some breathing techniques.

“I explained that in martial arts you learn that pain is a message you don’t have to listen to, that you can breathe in this amazing chi or energy and blow out the pain,” Goldberg recounts. “Twenty minutes later they pulled out the needle and the boy looked up at the nurse and said: ‘Did you do it yet?’”

Two decades later Kids Kicking Cancer has become a fixture in scores of hospitals across the US, with branches also in Israel, Canada and even Italy.

“We were asked to bring Kids Kicking Cancer to the Bambino Gesù hospital in Rome,” says Goldberg. “So, an Orthodox rabbi needed permission from the Pope to teach Eastern meditative techniques to Vatican children.”

Kids Kicking Cancer is very much universalist in outlook.

“Thirty per cent of the children we work with in Israel are Muslim, and we have the largest sickle cell programme for children from Africa.

People of all ages around the world, including high-level executives from corporations such as PVS, Pfizer, Walmart and Ford, have learnt how to breathe in the light and blow out the darkness to help them deal with stress, anxiety and other debilitating feelings.

And most remarkably, it is the kids from Kids Kicking Cancer who do the teaching – closing the so-called “Hero Circle”.

Goldberg believes that when the children teach the breathing technique to others, they themselves find purpose in their lives. He says that Kids Kicking Cancer isn’t just about giving terminally ill children strength and endurance – it’s about making them powerful; transforming those in dire need of healing into healers.

“We transform the children from victims to victors, and they are. Because everyone can be a teacher. That’s power, peace, purpose,” he says, voicing the mantra of Kids Kicking Cancer. 

It is this fresh approach to patient care that won Goldberg recognition as a “CNN Global Hero” in 2014, bringing his work to the attention of not just global health officials, but also celebrities.

“When [Hollywood actor] Christian Bale heard about the programme, he called me up saying he wanted to come and give presents to the kids. We don’t do that. I told him we’d bring the kids to him.

“He and his wife Sybil sat on the floor for two hours learning how to breathe in the light and blow out the darkness. Imagine how it made the kids feel that Batman was learning from them how to be a superhero…”

For Goldberg, instilling that sense of purpose is especially important for children at the end of their lives. He tells the story of Danny, a nine-year-old boy on a dedicated ventilator at the Lin Hospital in Haifa, who could only move his eyebrows.

How do you teach karate to a boy who can only move his eyebrows?

“We created a mediation based on his favourite music,” says Goldberg. “I told Danny: ‘When you’re able to focus on the light, blink once. Once you visualise this globe of light in your head, blink twice. When you feel the warmth of the light blink three times. Blink four times when you can take light and spread it through your body. And blink five times when the light is so powerful you can spread it to the rest of the world’.”

Danny’s meditation was distilled into a 180-second video that was posted to a protected website.

“The first 10 000 people wrote to Danny: ‘I’m doing your meditation, it’s changing my life.’ And that freed this child from being incarcerated and filled him with purpose. That’s the beauty of Hero Circle.”

Kids Kicking Cancer gives each terminally ill child a black belt before they die. “People ask me how I deal with children dying,” Goldberg says. “I cry. But for me the death of a child is not the greatest tragedy. The greatest tragedy is a person who is 95 years old and dying – and they don’t have a clue why they lived.

“Some of our children have impacted this world so powerfully. And that light is forever.”

Goldberg nods. It’s a nod of defiance – of those who look at his children and see only illness and feel only pity. But it’s also a nod of encouragement. Power. Peace. Purpose. Breathe in the light and blow out the darkness.