Cultivate Calm

Fuck resilience

• Monica Rottmann • Season 2 • Episode 3

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Resilience was something I wore like armour for years. Two cancer diagnoses, the end of a marriage, and a lot of pushing through. By the third diagnosis, I started questioning whether resilience was actually serving me, or just keeping me from feeling what I needed to feel.

In this episode I talk about the moment I realised I didn't want to fight anymore. Not giving up, but genuinely stepping back from the warrior narrative that surrounds cancer and asking if there was another way to move through it. Michael Singer's The Surrender Experiment comes into it, as does a book I received from someone who cared about me that I simply couldn't bring myself to read.

I also explore a concept from yoga, the idea of being the witness to your own experience rather than being consumed by it. What it actually looks like to stop performing strength and start being honest about what's happening. If you've ever exhausted yourself being strong, this one's for you.


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[00:00:59] Welcome back, friend. In the last episode I took you all the way back to the beginning to Kroo in 2014 to the flat that I was renting after my marriage ended to that stinging sensation in my breast that sent me to the doctor that ended up being cancer and to my dad. I told you how I got through that first diagnosis and the second one by pushing through, by being strong, by compartmentalizing and returning to normal and business as usual.

[00:01:30] I told you that I was very good at suffering today. I wanna tell you about the moment I decided that I was done with that. But before we begin, let's take one long exhale.

[00:01:46] Now the information I share in this podcast is my own personal experience and it's not medical advice. Please always speak with your doctor or health professional. One of the first things I did this time when I got [00:02:00] diagnosed was to take as much off my plate as possible. I delegated as much as I could to my incredible manager, Sarah, who willingly carried the load for me.

[00:02:09] basically put my business on cruise control, got out of the driver's seat, and let someone else take over, and I'm incredibly lucky that I'd built the right team and enough momentum to step back almost completely and just do the bare minimum. And one of the next things I did was reach out to my podcast editor, the one who helps me put this show together and tell her that I had cancer and that I was stopping the podcast for a while.

[00:02:33] I just needed to take everything off my plate. When I told her the news, she asked if she could send me something, and a few days later, a package arrived. Curious. I opened the package and it was a book. And I had a really strong negative reaction, not to her gesture. It was incredibly thoughtful to send me a gift.

[00:02:52] Now I don't even remember the title. I don't remember the author's name. I threw it in the bin, and I've got no desire to retrieve it. Even for the purposes of this episode. It may have been an excellent book, but I didn't wanna read it. It was written by a cancer survivor and was something about being strong, brave, and resilient.

[00:03:12] It would've been a great book the first time around. It would've been really useful the second time around, but when you get cancer for the third time, that whole be strong, brave, tough narrative just doesn't cut it anymore. In fact, not only did it not land with me, I had such a strong negative reaction to it.

[00:03:32] that it became a catalyst for what I did next. I was tired of being strong. I was tired of being brave. I actually didn't want to fight. I wanted to try something different. I tried all those things before and. They may have worked at the time and the stage that I was in, but this felt like such a deep soul reckoning that demanded a different approach, just like the goddess and Nana had to surrender her breastplate [00:04:00] and armor to descend into the underworld I was gonna have to surrender to and let myself fall into the underworld consciously, deliberately.

[00:04:10] And as the ultimate initiation, this was happening for a much deeper reason. This was a soul reckoning, and I was gonna face it head on. I threw the book in the wheelie bin, and I think you know by now that I find throwing things out cathartic. And then I said out loud, fuck, resilience. I know that's not what you're supposed to say.

[00:04:34] I know that resilience is a virtue and that we celebrate it and we admire people who have it. We even aspire to develop it in ourselves and our kids. I get it, and I'm not disputing its value. Resilience will get you through lots of things, but not this. I'd been resilient before. I had absorbed two cancer diagnoses and with what looked like from the outside remarkable composure.

[00:05:00] I kept going. I kept my business running, my community intact, my relationships functional. I returned to normal, and by any external measure, I was the poster girl for resilience. Yet here I was again, and I thought. What if that's what's needed now, not strength, not resilience, not getting back to normal.

[00:05:22] What if I just let this most terrifying, destabilizing thing be as it actually is? What if I stop resisting my reality and just let it unfold? I also wanna name something about the language we use around cancer because it bothers me and it's always bothered me. The battle metaphors, the warrior language.

[00:05:44] You're gonna fight this, you're gonna beat this fight. What exactly? Fight who? What does it mean to battle your own cells? And what does it mean about the people who didn't survive that they didn't fight hard enough? It's one of the cruelest myths that [00:06:00] we've built around illness, and it lands hard on people who are already carrying it.

[00:06:04] I didn't want to fight. I wanted to stop, not to give up, but to stop fighting the wrong thing, to stop resisting my reality. To stop trying to control everything. Now, Michael Singer wrote a book called The Surrender Experiment. And if you haven't read it, it's basically the story of his life and how he decided to stop pushing and resisting, to stop trying to make reality match his preferences and instead to completely accept and flow with whatever life brought him.

[00:06:36] Not passively, not without effort, but without the constant internal struggle against what is, and he was incredibly successful. I. I'd read it ages ago. I'm a huge fan of his work. He honestly is a living spiritual master, and I was gonna follow his lead and conduct my own surrender experiment.

[00:06:56] What if this time, instead of being strong, I chose to fall apart? On purpose, not a collapse. I wasn't abandoning the surgeries or the care of my body. I wasn't abandoning my family or my responsibilities. Instead, I was choosing to stop bracing, to stop managing, to stop carrying everything in completely separate boxes and just let it be what it was.

[00:07:21] To let the fear be, fear to let the grief be grief, to stop pretending I was fine and just not be fine for a while, and be okay with that. And I wanna be clear about what surrender means because it's an advanced spiritual concept and often wildly misunderstood. When most people hear surrender, they hear giving up and waving the white flag.

[00:07:44] And if that's what surrender means to you, then I understand no one wants to surrender, but that's not what I mean. Surrender in this context means accepting reality as it is, rather than spending your precious energy fighting it. It means allowing [00:08:00] what's actually happening to happen without trying to change it, without wasting precious energy on the wish that it was different.

[00:08:07] And that's the distinction that mattered to me. I had cancer, that was true whether I accepted it or not. My resistance to that fact, my anger about it, my bargaining with it, my wishing it was otherwise, none of that changed the fact and that double mastectomy was still looming. What my resistance was doing was adding a whole layer of suffering on top of the suffering I was already experiencing.

[00:08:33] The diagnosis was one wound resisting that diagnosis was pressing on that wound repeatedly with my own hands. So I made a decision that day as clear as any decision I've ever made, that I was gonna accept this as if I'd chosen it. Not because I had chosen it, but because I didn't wanna be victimized by my circumstances.

[00:08:56] This was my reality now, and I could spend the next months in internal war with that reality, or I could put down that fight and use the energy for something else, for healing, for growing, for being present with Tim and Ruby. For whatever this thing was trying to show me that I'd apparently missed twice before.

[00:09:18] So instead of asking why has this happened to me again, I started sitting with a different frame. What could this be teaching me? I chose to put down the fight. I chose to accept this. And it felt in a strange way, like exhaling. Now, surrender is also a fundamental tenet of yoga philosophy. There's this principle in the yoga sutras called ishvara prana often translated as surrender to the divine or surrender to something much larger than yourself.

[00:09:51] It's one of the NIS or the personal observances that form that ethical backbone of our practice. And Ishvara is usually the [00:10:00] one that people find difficult. The other niyamas, cleanliness, contentment, self-discipline, self-study, they feel doable. Something you can grasp, surrender feels like you're losing something.

[00:10:13] what it actually asks of us is to, to do our part, but to release our grip on the outcomes, to show up to participate. Whilst releasing the attachment to how it all turns out because we are not in control of how it all turns out, there's something far bigger than us that's holding all of this together and pretending that we're in control when we are not just fosters that illusion.

[00:10:39] There's also something that happens in the body when we stop resisting. When the nervous system's bracing, which is what resistance is from that physiological perspective, it uses a huge amount of energy just to maintain that tension. The muscles are contracted, the breath is short. The whole system's on alert.

[00:10:58] when we genuinely release that bracing, when we allow what's happening to be what it is, our nervous system can shift out of that guarded state. We can breathe again, we can soften and the mind's able to rest. And this is not mysticism, this is physiology. And here's what continues to humble me.

[00:11:21] I'd known this for years. I'd taught it in the front of the yoga room. I taught it to my alchemy clients. I'd watch students move from bracing to releasing and seeing it in their faces, their breath, their whole being, and I'd done it before in lower stakes situations, but never when my life depended on it.

[00:11:42] In yoga, there's this concept called Xi or the witness. The inner observer, that part of awareness that can step back from whatever's happening in the mind and body and just watch it without judgment, without trying to fix or change anything or make it [00:12:00] stop. And that witness, it's not detachment, it's not dissociation, it's not checking out.

[00:12:06] It's the opposite. It's a quality of full presence with what is, without being swept away by it. You are in the experience and you're watching the experience simultaneously. You see the fear, you see the anger, you see the crazy erratic behavior. You don't try to manage it, you just observe it. And in the weeks after I made that decision to surrender, and in the long months of waiting for my mastectomy, I spent a lot of time in that witness consciousness watching myself.

[00:12:39] Watching my own erratic all over the place behaviors as the reality of what was coming, settled into my body. ' cause I wanna be honest about what this experiment with surrender actually looked like in practice. It wasn't peaceful, it wasn't graceful, it wasn't floating. Through my days in a state of serenity, I was still all over the place.

[00:13:02] One hour I'd be fine. Genuinely fine. The next hour I'd be thinking about my funeral, and there was no predicting it, no managing it. The emotional rollercoaster was real, and the surrender experiment meant that I agreed not to suppress it, which meant that I had to feel it all as it came out. What witness consciousness gave me was a place to stand while all of this was happening.

[00:13:27] Instead of being inside the storm, I could be the sky watching the storm. Both things were true at the same time. I was terrified and I was the one watching myself being terrified. It sounds simple, but it's quite difficult in practice, but it's also, I discovered a really potent form of self respect and even self love.

[00:13:52] ' cause it says what I'm going through is real. And what I'm feeling is real. And I honestly believe that we can heal in the [00:14:00] presence of a calm, loving witness. And I was gonna give that to myself. I was gonna be in that shit storm without getting lost in it.

[00:14:08] So that was the decision to surrender. Brought on by a book that's now in the bin that I can't even remember the title of. I was gonna consciously and deliberately fall apart. I was gonna stop being strong. I was gonna stop resisting reality. I was gonna stop wondering, why the fuck is this happening to me again?

[00:14:27] And feeling victimized by my circumstances and started seeing that this was happening for me. And I was gonna observe myself doing all of this. The messy, the can't predict the bits of it from that place of being a witness, not judging, not fixing, not watching, and definitely not controlling. I knew there was a lesson in this third diagnosis, but I was still too deep inside it to see the shape of it.

[00:14:55] But that was the only approach that I hadn't tried yet. Complete acceptance, complete surrender. Not controlling, not fighting, not being strong, just being here in this exactly as it was.

[00:15:10] The mastectomy was coming. I'd started the fall and pretty soon I'd be at rock bottom. But I decided to be a willing participant in this surrender experiment.

[00:15:22] In the next episode, I'll take you through those agonizing months of waiting, what the surrender experiment looked like in practice. The walking the sleepless nights, the philosophy I leaned on when nothing else worked, and meeting a new surgeon who said something to me that I wasn't expecting. The thing that broke through every last piece of armor I had left.

[00:15:45] For now, I wanna remind you that eventually everything changes, and beneath all the suffering, beneath the narrative, beneath the fear and anxiety is the light of awareness, and that light of awareness is [00:16:00] always, always on your side. Until next time, my friend.