Embracing Nature's Wisdom: One Woman's Courageous Journey Through Cancer and Shamanic Healing

When Anna Bromley, with her unique blend of biochemistry knowledge and shamanic beliefs, faced the stark reality of cancer, she chose a path less traveled. Our latest guest's decision to embrace natural healing over conventional treatments is nothing short of revolutionary, revealing a profound trust in the synergy of body and nature. Anna's narrative, rich with emotional and spiritual insight, promises to be a beacon of hope, challenging listeners to consider the depth of their own convictions when facing health adversities.

Venture with us through a tapestry of healing rituals, the grounding force of nature, and dream work as Anna delves into the layers of her recovery process. Her journey is punctuated with personal practices, from the simple act of walking barefoot to the complex realms of shamanic trance dance, providing a panoramic view of how one can intertwine various healing modalities to nurture body, mind, and spirit. Anna's story stands as a testament to the idea that our well-being is inextricably linked to the natural world and the ancestral wisdom that whispers through our roots.

In an inspiring conclusion, Anna and I reflect on living with illness, making proactive health decisions, and the importance of emotional and spiritual wellness. Her wisdom stretches beyond the confines of her own experience, offering up lessons in balance and the courage to trust one's intuition. By framing life's hurdles as chapters in a grand adventure, we're left with a powerful perspective shift—one that encourages listeners to embrace their own quests for holistic health. Join us for an episode that's sure to leave you contemplating the vast healing potential that lies within and around us.

Anna Bromley
Website: anna-bromley.com
Email: anna@anna-bromley.com

Link to buy my book on Amazon:
A Wild Adventure on the Big C: My Journey of Natural Healing for Cancer https://amzn.eu/d/f9a1W0M

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 2:30

So hi everybody, and welcome to another edition of Barn to the Soul. And today I have a new guest for 2024, but also new onto the podcast, and that is Anna Bromley. So welcome, anna. Thank you so much for supporting Barn to the Soul.

Speaker 2: 2:51

And I'm just. Hi, natasha, it's lovely to be here, thank you.

Speaker 1: 2:56

I'm just going to give you a little rundown about what Anna's all about really. So Anna is a mother, a shamanic and active dream work, teacher and healer, a journey of between the worlds. She's a writing coach and an editor, and she has a scientific background in biochemistry and experience in R&D for the medical equipment industry. That's really quite a spread of experience, anna.

Speaker 2: 3:27

Yes, it is, and I think earlier in my life I was always sort of pushed towards the science side of things but much more interested in creative and artistic and eventually moving into this sort of alternative health where which kind of straddles both areas the scientific and medical side of things but also the esoteric and spiritual side of things.

Speaker 2: 3:56

Yeah, lovely, I can relate to that I wondered for many years why I wondered for many years why I ended up doing a biochemistry degree and Because I didn't really enjoy it very much. But when it came to my cancer diagnosis, it was really really useful to understand the chemistry of the cell and what was going on at a cellular level.

Speaker 1: 4:22

Yeah, I bet and that's the reason Anna's with us today Because Anna's written a really lovely book called A Wild Adventure on the Big Sea and I found it fascinating, anna, and really inspiring actually not to want to make you cringe because knowing people go on like that, but I did. So we're going to talk about your book, really, and one of the main things that came up for me and it really came up for me quite strongly straight away I just thought how courageous of you and steadfast really to not be wavered by the pressure that you probably came under by the medical profession and some friends and family to go the conventional medicine route, because you completely discarded that for your own very personal reasons and you went the natural route. But that must have been really hard and quite you know, having that pressure all the time is quite stressful.

Speaker 2: 5:32

Yes, it was. And I think when I first had the diagnosis, having known a lot about alternative health, I probably I was thinking I would go do a bit of the hybrid of it and use the conventional medicine to sort of guide and monitor and diagnose and that sort of thing. But it became more and more apparent that there was only one way to go, because they put so much pressure on you to just do the full thing and I did not want to do surgery, I did not want to do chemotherapy, I didn't want to go do radiotherapy. I suppose the background to that is that I'd had some quite disastrous surgery. About 18 months before my diagnosis I had a hip replacement that went quite wrong and I think that was probably the basis of the cancer coming out. So it felt really wrong to try and heal from cancer using the thing that had caused it in the first place. So but yeah, I and I'd seen friends that had gone down that route and really didn't like what, how much suffering they went through. So I was quite lucky that I was part of a community, an online community, through Sandra Ingeman, who's an amazing shamanic teacher. I'd done some courses with her and so when I got the diagnosis, I wrote on the Facebook alumni group Does anybody have any advice? And I was just inundated with with help and advice and testimonials of people that had done similar, so that was a massive support for me. I'm also very lucky that my husband is he's a Shihatsu kinesiology craniosacral practitioner and, you know, really amazing healer and he was fully in support of me. So to have somebody right in my home that was fully in support of me was was the best thing, and I did.

Speaker 2: 7:51

I did get a lot of pressure from not so much like my, my immediate family first. First off, my parents were like, oh, you really should do this, you know at least have the surgery, and but I sent them lots of information about what I was doing and they came around quite quickly. So that was really nice to have immediate family all in support of me. The words are wider family and friends that put pressure on. But you know, I had to be steadfast to what I believed and I believe that we we create our own reality. So for me to try and heal through something that I didn't, that I believed was poisoning me, just wasn't going to work for me. So I had to put my belief into the alternative side of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:45

Yeah, so, and just talking about your husband there, your husband was mating. It was so supportive and lovely that was. So that was a lovely thing, that sort of a thread through the book, how lovely he was about everything. And also I thought it was lovely that you could use the key to need theology to sort of navigate your way through the whole process, testing as you went along how your body was changing and the different needs and because at one point you didn't need to magnetise him, another point you did need it and you could work that out with the kinesiology. So I thought that was really interesting way of sort of navigating your whole healing programme.

Speaker 2: 9:35

You're right, it was really key and I worked with two people with that. I worked with an amazing kinesiologist in Bristol who I knew from before and he does quantum kinesiology and he works quite shamanically as well. So he works on every. He can test for things on every single level and that was a huge comfort. When I first had the diagnosis, I had a session with him and he basically said you know, this is a hero's journey for you. This is like this is part of your life mission. And he was very, very comforting that I was going to get through it and it was meant to be, that.

Speaker 2: 10:21

I was meant to learn about this so that I could help other people. And he put together a protocol for me of you know what to do on a physical and spiritual level straight away with diet and things like that, and what to drink and what not to drink and etc. And that's so. That was really like that was my hooked onto that, and then I would have monthly sessions with him. But, as you say, in between my husband does a bit of kinesiology and that's growing for him. He doesn't he doesn't have all the test kits that that my other kinesiologist had, but he's very intuitive so he could sort of check and balance in between. I go, you know, was this all right for me or do I need this? And he would, he would test and he would also. He was also giving me Reiki and Shihatsu and Kainosakurl all the way through it as well. So, yeah, very, very lucky person to have this amazing healer and supportive person in my, in my home, with me.

Speaker 1: 11:31

Yeah, definitely, I love the boob Reiki before you went to bed. I thought that was a lovely way to put it. And then the other thing that really came up as well was how important the clearing emotions are which sit behind what develops in your physical body, which is something that I always go on about all the time. But it's so nice to read a book that confirms that. And you know, in the book you state that if you hadn't have dealt with the emotions, the cancer would just keep coming back, and how the cancer had been created by your emotions of self loathing as a child. And I thought that was so interesting and really we need to be dealing with that emotional aspect, or that emotional work before the diagnosis of illness. You know, do you agree with that? It's something that we really should be doing all the time if negative emotions sit behind illness.

Speaker 2: 12:36

Absolutely At a cellular level. Those emotions actually affect us. Anything that causes stress, has this, creates this response in your cells, where the cells at the membrane becomes less permeable, so it's less good at letting out the toxins and taking in the nutrition, and I guess that's, you know, that's what happened with my breast lump. It's like my body going oh, where should I store this stuff that I don't know what to do with? I know I'll stuff it in my breast because that's kind of, you know, she doesn't need those anymore At that time of life. So, yeah, so those, those emotions actually, you know, affect us at a physical level.

Speaker 2: 13:28

In Chinese medicine they call it stagnation. That you know, and processed emotions cause stagnation, and they also say that stagnation is at the basis of every, every tumor, every cancerous lump. So moving those out of your body is is absolutely essential and there's that you know. There's a number of ways to do that which I described in the book, and sound healing is something that's coming up more and more for me because you know the actual physical frequency can break up the emotions and let them out. But, you know, doing your, your shadow work as well, and nurturing your inner child. You mentioned how there was a phase when I was young, when I was very young, when I took on some you know unkind words that were said to me and took them on as a sort of deeply held belief about myself that I was in some way deformed and that you know, that kind of manifested, I think, in a couple of different ways in the hip replacement that I needed and then in the in the cancer.

Speaker 2: 14:43

So dealing with that, you know get my technique is to use shamanic journey, so a journey back, and I meet my, my inner child, and comfort her and tell her that she's going to be all right and and you know, and you can sort of physically dial back time and and and change the outcome. You know, like you can do that with dreams as well. So I work with my dreams too. So inner child work really, really important and people that don't know how to journey can do that in a meditation as well, just imagining, imagining your inner child, and, you know, sit them on your lap and and hug them and comfort them and stroke their hair and tell them they're going to be fine.

Speaker 2: 15:33

And I also did work with the kinesiology, with that as well, where the kinesiologist that I work with in in Bristol. He works with that quite a lot. You know you can like write out whatever the the belief is that you want to let go of. You can write it out on a piece of paper and, you know, set your intention that you're going to let go of that and then burn it in a candle and you know, that's, that's your. That's like a little ritual, I guess, or a ceremony to help manifest that into to being yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:14

And the other thing that you also mentioned sorry, got bit of a bit of a lag. The other thing that you mentioned as well was in the book was how important it was to be outside in nature and go for walks and have your feet bare feet on the ground and become really fully grounded, and that's something that's come up for me quite a lot recently, how important that is. But that was another important layer for your whole healing protocol, wasn't it?

Speaker 2: 16:54

Absolutely essential. So I make it my practice to try and be outside for at least an hour a Now. In the winter here in the UK it's harder to be barefoot, but you can also ground by, you know, like putting your hands on a tree or a earth. So we were talking earlier about the importance of grounding and everything. So there's the kind of emotional, psychological benefit of being out in nature, but there's also the sort of scientific, physical way that you need to be grounded. You need to have enough negative ions in your body and sort of being indoors and around electronic equipment and Wi-Fi robs you of those negative ions that help with your cellular transport. So, physically, getting your feet in contact, bare feet, in contact with the earth and or your hands on a tree, that helps to restore those negative ions to you. And we were just talking earlier about how there is some footwear that you can wear that is conductive, because most of our shoes with the rubber soles don't allow us to ground. But you can actually get some footwear now that has conductive soles so that you're actually grounding when you're walking outside. So I've got a pair of those, which is, you know, it's useful in this colder weather.

Speaker 2: 18:33

Then also, you know we're going through this transition. I believe you know people talk about 3D to 5D, but we certainly our consciousness is evolving and our bodies are evolving to a higher level and so we've been through this sort of, you know, traumatic times with the pandemic and everything. So I think that just being in nature, sort of grounding from a psychological point, keeping yourself centered and aligned in that way, is really important as well. And I find being out in nature very uplifting. You know, the sun on your face, the wind in your hair, breathing in fresh air, it's all really really important.

Speaker 2: 19:25

And one more aspect that was felt really important to me the title of my book Wild Adventure on the Big Sea, as in sea for cancer, but also there was a theme of the sea, the physical ocean, very strongly through my book. I had a prophetic dream early on which was about the sea and it just felt really important to get in the ocean. You know, sit by the ocean as much as I could and I think that's you know, you get the ozone from the ocean and all the minerals that you absorb through your skin when you're swimming in the sea, and just that sort of psychological upliftment of being by the ocean was really really important to me as well.

Speaker 1: 20:12

Yeah, and in fact it seemed important that you sort of had this whole layered healing protocol. So it was lots of different aspects, wasn't it? You sort of came from all different angles and created something very layered, almost, so that you had this 360 degree sort of view of everything, which I thought was yeah, that was fascinating to see that definitely and obviously the shamanic work had a lot to do with your healing. So how did you get into shamanic work and how did you start with that?

Speaker 2: 20:56

Yeah, just going back to the lead-ness of it, I think with cancer you have to approach it from every angle the physical, the spiritual, the mental, emotional. You have to work on yourself from all those different angles and, as we mentioned before, I use the shamanic journey, dream work and the kinesiology to help guide all of that. So with the shamanic journey, it was a long time ago maybe 30 years ago I was really into dance but I got fed up with dance just being about going out to clubs and where people are drinking lots of alcohol and I wanted to dance in a more holistic way, I suppose, and I got into five rhythms dancing. And then I met this guy called Leo Rutherford who's still around now and is well into his 80s. He's like the granddaddy of shamanism in the UK. He was doing shamanic trance dance sessions in London, where I was living at the time, and also weekends down at Moncton Wild in Dorset where you'd go and dance and journey and sweat lodge and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 2: 22:21

So that's how I got into it initially and a wonderful woman that was working with him there taught me how did a sort of course in shamanic journeying with me and I just it was just one of those things. It was like oh, I found it. Now this is. This is what I've been looking for. This is my tool to connect with my spiritual guidance and to find out all those things that you know. It sort of takes out the middle man. If you like that, you can go direct a spirit to ask for guidance about things, and my journeys are always like magical adventures and amazing narratives, so that's been really, really lovely. I'm just trying to think what else? Oh yeah, so I did some online courses with Sandra Ingeman, and I also worked with a guy called Robert Moss, who is he sort of bridges his work.

Speaker 2: 23:21

He calls it active dreaming, but it's a bridge between shamanism and dream work, so he teaches you how to work with your dreams and to journey back into them. If you have a dream that you don't quite understand, you can journey back into it and get more information and dialogue with the characters in the dream, and that was all. That was a really, really amazing healing tool for me and that guided quite a lot of my treatment as well. Early on, I met a guide through a dream who told me that he was my breast friend and he was going to help me. So I would regularly journey and ask for his advice about things.

Speaker 1: 24:09

Yeah, I found that part of your part of the work that you did fascinating. I'm actually listening I hadn't heard of Robert Moss before and I am actually listening to one of his books on Audible now because I just found it so fascinating and the fact and that the technique to go back into a dream that you hadn't understood, I hadn't come across that before. So that, yeah, doing dream work fascinates me. Dreams are such I really don't think we understand what our dreaming is really about and how vast is the information that we can pick up with. These techniques is extraordinary really, isn't it? Although a lot of it you've got to decipher, which always irritated me whenever I thought why don't they just tell us stuff and make it really really clear, like a neon sign across the sky? Why do we have to work for it? But we do have to work for it and we have to sort of learn how to decipher the visions and the information that comes up to us.

Speaker 2: 25:28

Yes, that's right, and that is one of the things that Robert says is you know, all the dream, information comes as metaphors.

Speaker 2: 25:37

And those different metaphors can mean different things to different people. So he, he journals, he's been journaling his dreams for, you know, eons and eons. And there are themes that come up for him when, when a certain you know animal comes into the dream, oh, that means this. And like driving a vehicle, he always you know. If he's in a car, that always indicates his physical body and you know so. If I get a flat tire, that means that you know. Or a flat battery, that means that my energy is running low, and yeah, so so he sees the car as a you know the vehicle of his, his body, for his soul.

Speaker 2: 26:22

So, yeah, we had this vast amounts of information that comes through our dreams and I'm not sure why it comes through in metaphors, but some people it's more literal than others, but yeah, it's.

Speaker 2: 26:40

You get better at it, I think, when you, when you practice, when you do journal your dreams and you reflect on them. And he has a technique where you dialogue with someone else about your dream and and you sort of tell them the background of what it's sort of bringing up for you, and then they, they can reflect back to you as well, like, oh, if that was my dream, I, that would remind me of this and it might make me think that this should happen, and but you always have to be very careful that you're not telling the person what their dream means, because everyone's dream is is different, but if they just they reflect things to you like that, then you can go, oh yeah, that resonates or that doesn't resonate, and and so you can get get information back from other people around that. And my husband, again, my husband's very good at doing that and, you know, at the breakfast table talking with each other about our dreams.

Speaker 1: 27:42

Yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating. It is a completely different language, so you know sort of your language with spirit, I suppose. But I like the idea of slowly getting to know what the symbols means. It's a bit like when people mediums do work, they have symbols, don't they, that mean different things to them, and it's the way they communicate with spirit. So, yeah, I found that fascinating. And another thing that you did which I find fascinating, because I'm a past life regression therapist, is you did past life work as well, didn't you? And you did ancestral clearing as well. Again, fascinating stuff, and just really highlights how important energy work is. But that was that that was important to you in your healing as well, wasn't it?

Speaker 2: 28:36

Yeah, that was really that was a really key thing. You know, you can bring through trauma from past lives or attitudes and conscious beliefs, and it was really important to clear those. And the one of my past lives that was really important to clear was related to the whole the inner child thing and you know my, my attitude as a child and in it I've been quite badly treated by by parents that, you know, mistreated me really and and I brought through this belief that I was always wrong and that I was getting everything wrong and there was lots of kind of shame and guilt about that. So clearing that past life was really really, you know, uplifting and, you know, created quite a huge relief for me really.

Speaker 2: 29:34

And the same thing on the ancestral. There's lots of sort of traumatic ancestral memories that needed to be cleared and and I think I think there are certain members of families that it sort of the ancestral healing seems to come down to them and I'm one of those that it seems to be part of my life mission to clear a lot of the ancestral wounds and I guess because I've got the tools to do that. And so, yeah, a lot about women being suppressed, really wise women being suppressed and you know the whole kind of which hunt thing and there was a lot around that being a women being to speak out about their, their beliefs and their wisdom and their knowledge, without being persecuted for it.

Speaker 2: 30:29

So that was my healing.

Speaker 1: 30:32

Yeah, I found, I did find your book really uplifting. It was, it was and actually you talk about how you make making an ordeal an adventure, sort of so shifting your perspective of what's happening to you and your how you can be proactive in dealing with that sort of thing, which I was, I thought was lovely and presumably you know people. You don't have to be ill to have that attitude. People can use that and shift their perspective about any ordeal that they might be going through. Is that something that you you now teach and sort of help people with?

Speaker 2: 31:16

and yes, absolutely. Somebody said to me quite early on, the difference between an all deal and an adventure is your attitude, and that was a really big theme all the way through. So I treated it as a hero's journey. I don't know whether you're familiar with Joseph Campbell. He's written a book called the Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Speaker 2: 31:47

So we all go through these initiations and it might not be cancer, it might be something else for somebody else.

Speaker 2: 31:56

But if you just treat it like a big adventure and like, oh, what's the next stage on my adventure?

Speaker 2: 32:03

And at the end of it I'm going to come home to the village and be welcomed back and everybody will be really pleased to see me when I've achieved this amazing feat, and so, yeah, and that really really changed my attitude to it and it definitely feels like this was given to me as part of my life's mission, in order to learn every aspect about cancer healing so that I can help others with it. And for me it was the key theme was about sovereignty, about self-sovereignty, and that was why I you know, I choosing not to go with conventional medicine because that's somebody else doing something to you, rather than taking your own sovereignty and choosing your own path. So you know you can apply that to any situation that you're in stepping into your own empowerment and your self-sovereignty and making it your choice. I think is really key to this. You know, key to this change that we're going through at the moment as well the upliftment. You know, 3d to 5D, it's all about stepping into self-sovereignty.

Speaker 1: 33:22

For me, yeah, Well, I really, really enjoyed it. I thought it was a really good read and very it's a difficult subject for a lot of people, but it was very uplifting and it was, you know, an enjoyable read. And I love the illustration, the cover, which you did yourself, didn't you which shows the theme, because mermaids came up again, the theme of the sea for you, so that's something that you did yourself as well, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 33:57

Yeah, that's right. I, yeah, I really enjoyed painting that and I think that it puts the energy of the journey that I went on. It puts it into the cover, really by doing that painting, and it's something I love to do. And when I do a journey or a dream, often really beautiful images come through, so it's really nice to get those down in a drawing or a painting and that helps to manifest it. And, yeah, I try to write it. As you say, it's a difficult subject and, you know, not that much fun really. So I try to write it with humour and passion and, you know, make it interesting.

Speaker 2: 34:44

And the feedback I've got is that people really enjoyed reading it and that it was a fast. You know it's quite a long book but people read it fast because there was a, you know, there was a momentum to the journey that I went on and they enjoyed seeing how I, you know, overcame things and I really, really hope that that, as other people, that they can do the same and I do. You know, if people want to work with me, I do online sessions and you know they can have a chat with me. I can journey for them or just give them advice and I'm about I'm going to do a course in March April time, I haven't got the dates yet with a guy called Mark Atwood, sort of looking at all these things as well, you know, teaching people how to, how to journey and how to step into their self sovereignty. So that might be something that that your viewers might be interested in.

Speaker 1: 35:45

Yeah, lovely, and I will put up all the details when I've got the upload, the episode, all Anna's details that if people want to contact you, they can. So how? How do they, will they get hold of your book? Is that on Amazon or how do they get hold of it?

Speaker 2: 36:05

Yeah, it's on. It's on Amazon, it's on Barnes and Noble, it's on Blackwells or if they want a signed copy, they can email me and I can send that directly to them. But yeah, Amazon's probably the easiest way for people to get hold of it.

Speaker 1: 36:25

Excellent, and you talked about the one to one sessions, which I think would be amazing. But you also you're doing a retreat, aren't you as well, this year, so tell us about your the retreat.

Speaker 2: 36:41

Well, that was. That's the thing that I mentioned, oh okay. With Mark Atwood. Yeah, yeah, that being a person, yeah, it's going to be in sort of either Herefordshire or just over into Wales. Again, we're still working on all the details of that, but if people want to get on an email list we can let them know once. Once we've just noted on that, I'll be sort of end of March, beginning of April, sometime around then.

Speaker 1: 37:20

Yeah, I think that'd be lovely. I think it'd be fascinating. Oh, thank you so much, anna. I've really well, I've enjoyed your book tremendously. I haven't quite finished it yet, but I'm determined to finish it and thank you for coming on and talking about it. I think it will really help a lot of people to change their viewpoint of how they can work with illness and how they can be proactive and what they can do for their own health. Really, I think it definitely made me tweak a few things already diet wise and you know and a few things triggered me which was really interesting. So I went away and sort of delved into what's that about, sort of thing. So, yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Speaker 2: 38:14

Thank you so much and, as you say, I think the principles in it can be applied to any illness that you have or any emotional issue as well. So hopefully it will inspire people to just live a healthier life, physically and emotionally and spiritually. So it's been lovely talking to you, natasha.

Speaker 1: 38:39

Oh, thank you for coming on. It's been great and, like I say, I'll put it all on and contact details up under the episode and if you've enjoyed listening to us chat, then please like and share and you can always subscribe to Barm to the soul. So, thank you very much, anna, and I will speak to you all soon.