Into the Shitstorm

The mastectomy happened. This episode is about what that was actually like. The double mastectomy with PAP flap reconstruction, seven hours in theatre, and what I remember from coming around on the other side. Some of it is sharp and painful. Some of it is genuinely strange. At one point I played hangman with the nurses while on fentanyl. Recovery started in those first fragmented hours and didn't get easier quickly.

The days after surgery blurred together. Constant monitoring, broken sleep, pain that didn't let up, and drains coming out of my body until they didn't. Getting upright was a project. Looking in the mirror took a specific kind of courage I had to find each time. And watching the people around me carry the weight of it all brought its own particular kind of grief.

There's also something in this episode about what happens when you stop fighting what's already happening. Not giving in, but releasing the resistance. It didn't make the recovery painless. But it made it more bearable. This one is honest about the parts of surgical recovery that don't usually get talked about.

LINKS:

• Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ 
• Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/
• Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

Transcript

[00:00:00] 

[00:01:00] Monica: Welcome back. 

[00:01:01] In the last episode, I told you I went into the surgery already depleted. Months of sleep deprivation, months of dread, 

[00:01:10] feeling hollowed out before the surgery had even started. This was genuinely the most miserable I had ever been, and this episode is what happened next. And I want to say something before we dive in.

[00:01:24] I'm not telling you this as some sort of medical memoir. I'm telling you because of what I discovered inside the shit storm about pain, about resistance, and the story of suffering belongs to you as much as it belongs to me. These things are universal, and you don't need to have had cancer for any of this to map onto your life.

[00:01:47] You just need to have had a hard season that you didn't want and couldn't escape. This part is called "Rock Bottom," and this is where we go in. But before we do, let's take a long, slow exhale together.[00:02:00] 

[00:02:05] Now, the information I share here is my own personal experience. None of it is medical advice. Please always speak with your doctor or health professional. So the double mastectomy was scheduled for 3:00 PM, and I didn't need to be at the hospital until around 1:00 PM, and that gave me a whole morning.

[00:02:25] Previously, all my surgeries were in the morning, and I had to be at the hospital super early. At least I got it over and done with. This was something else. It gave me a whole day of dread, terror, and that ratcheting up of anxiety. I asked Tim to take Ruby to kindy for me because I just couldn't do it.

[00:02:45] Before I said goodbye to her, I picked her up and squeezed her tight. She loved her mummy cuddles, and this would be the last time in a long time that I'd be able to pick her up and hold her like this. The surgery was a double mastectomy combined with what's called a PAP flap reconstruction, the acronym PAP stands for profunda artery perforator, and it's a procedure where surgeons take the flesh and an artery from my inner thighs and use them to rebuild my breasts, and this is why parts of my legs were gonna be removed that day as lo- as well as my breasts.

[00:03:21] The alternative was implants, and I couldn't have them. My chest wall was too damaged from the previous 50 rounds of radiation that I'd had. But honestly, even if I had the choice, I'm not sure I would've gone down the implant route. I didn't want a foreign object in my body, and I didn't want the hassle of having to manage replacements every 10 years.

[00:03:43] I didn't want that ongoing maintenance. What the PAP flap gives you is your own flesh. It's warm, it's soft. It's tissue that moves and changes with your body. There's no foreign material, no ongoing maintenance. Now, the [00:04:00] trade-off is that it makes an already long and complex surgery significantly longer and more complicated, not just my chest, but my legs as well on the table.

[00:04:11] Now, I'd spent weeks or even months in the online breast cancer forums reading about everything that could possibly go wrong. I know that wasn't the wisest decision for my mental health. The fear that I'd already been carrying was significant, and now I had all this insight and knowledge of all the things that could go wrong.

[00:04:29] The risk that haunted me the most was the transplant failing, the blood vessels not connecting properly, the transplanted tissue dying before it could establish its own blood supply. If that happened, the surgical team would have to act fast. In the worst case, the reconstruction fails entirely. There was also the risk of infection, of wounds opening up.

[00:04:51] I'd read all the horror stories, and I'd stored every single one of them in the back of my mind. So walking into the theater that day, I was carrying all of that with me. Now, you may never face this particular surgery, but we all know what it's like to have to walk towards something that we would give anything to run away from.

[00:05:09] That particular quality of dread, that sense of something terrible is about to happen, and we have to move through it, and the world just keeps on moving on anyway. I went for my last walk that morning, came home and showered, stood in front of the mirror and looked at my breasts, and the tears flowed freely.

[00:05:31] There was nothing dramatic about it. It was just deeply sad and terrifying. Tim drove me to the hospital, and I had a large bag packed. I was gonna be in for a while. Now, in the myth of Inanna, before she descends into the underworld, she calls on her most faithful friend, Ninshubur, and gives her instructions: " If I'm not back in three days, go to the gods, beat the drum for me, advocate for me, make noise on my [00:06:00] behalf."

[00:06:01] And I thought about that in the weeks leading up to the surgery I needed to know that people would be beating the drum for me when I was gone, making noise for me when I was gone, advocating for me when I couldn't. Tim had his instructions, my mum knew the plan, my friends knew what was happening. I handed everything over, and then like a nana stepping through that first gate, I went in.

[00:06:26] We sat and waited in the hospital as we filled in all the paperwork, and the dread that had been building for months ratcheted up to something I hadn't experienced before: full-scale anxiety. Now, I'm not naturally an anxious person. If anything, I lean more towards melancholy. This kind of anxiety was genuinely new to me, and it was severe.

[00:06:51] Earlier in my 20s, I had my wisdom teeth taken out in the chair, and the dentist had given me Valium the night before and again on the day to take the edge off the fear, and it worked, and I got through it. I wish someone had thought to offer me something similar in the weeks before this surgery, because what I was experiencing, that dread in the pit of my stomach, the nausea, the heaviness, the shakiness, going to bed with dread and waking up with it, was new to me, and it was horrible.

[00:07:21] I thought about all the people who live with that kind of anxiety every day, not as a response to a crisis, but as their normal baseline. I'd never fully understood it until I felt it for myself. And so if you live with anxiety, the kind that's there when you wake up and when you go to bed, I want you to know that I understand it now in my body, not just in my head.

[00:07:43] And I came out of that experience with a deep, lasting respect for anyone carrying it, especially the ones who are holding it together for their kids. It's such a heavy thing to carry. My heart was pounding. I wanted to vomit. I was shaking. I [00:08:00] changed into my gown, and Tim hugged me, and then I was on my own.

[00:08:04] I went to the bathroom, held my breasts for the last time, cried again, and they wheeled me into the theater. And it's freezing cold in there. There's about a dozen people in the room, five surgeons plus nurses and the anesthetist, everyone talking to you, trying to distract you, cannulas going in, monitoring devices being attached.

[00:08:27] The surgery was seven hours, two surgeons performing the mastectomy, three doing the reconstruction, all simultaneously to reduce the time under anesthetic Every hour that you're under increases your risk, and seven hours is a very long and complicated procedure. My last feeling was terror.

[00:08:47] I woke up in recovery in agony. It hurt to breathe. I was writhing in pain, and I often shake uncontrollably when I come out of an anesthetic, and this shaking was making everything worse. The plastic surgeon told me they had to remove parts of bone from my sternum and ribs during the reconstruction so that they could attach the arteries to the chest wall.

[00:09:13] So all at once, I had a double amputation, my inner thighs removed and broken bones. I've been in pain before, but this was next level. They gave me fentanyl and waited until I calmed down. And I have a really strange memory from that recovery room. Strange enough that I'm not sure how much to trust it given what was in my bloodstream at the time.

[00:09:35] It was way past midnight, and I don't even know if there were any other patients on that recovery ward. The nurses were on shift who were playing hangman on the whiteboard, guessing each other's middle names, and I just kept getting it right, yelling out the answers. It was almost like I intuitively knew their middle names, even though I'd never met these people before.

[00:09:56] High as a kite and winning this game of hangman, it was such an [00:10:00] odd, weird experience there. I was back on the ward around 1:00 AM. The nurse handed me my phone, and I texted Mum and Tim that I was alive. Because the reconstruction involved a tissue transplant, flesh and an artery moved from my legs to my chest, the team had to perform 30-minute observations for the next 48 hours to confirm that the transplant was taking.

[00:10:23] And if transplanted tissue starts to die, they have to act quickly. So every 30 minutes, day and night, I was woken to be checked. I was still in a daze. I was in compression garments from chest to toe, and I didn't really look when they checked. I just lay there in some kind of strange state of not quite asleep, not quite awake, in a lot of pain.

[00:10:47] Day two was hard because that's when the fentanyl wore off. They struggled to manage the breakthrough pain. In and out of consciousness, massively sleep deprived, properly bed bound with a catheter. And then I noticed the drains, those horrible tubes coming out of my ribs and legs. There was four of them draining blood and fluid into pouches that the nurses measured and emptied every couple of hours They were itchy and uncomfortable.

[00:11:16] I felt like I was suffocating. I had trouble breathing. I was all wrapped up, hot and itchy, and I became fixated on wanting them out. I think I had a tantrum that day. On day three, the doctor wanted me to get up and moving because the risk of blood clots increases when you're not mobile. I couldn't use my arms or legs to sit myself up, so with help, I shuffled to the edge of the bed.

[00:11:42] They brought a walking frame over and asked me to stand, and I couldn't. I had a nurse on one side and a physiotherapist on the other side trying to raise me up onto the walking frame, and my legs just couldn't hold me. This moment really humbled me. My body had [00:12:00] always carried me through. Now I couldn't even stand up.

[00:12:04] And there was something specifically unsettling about the body not doing what it's always done, doing the things that we've taken for granted. It reaches something deeper, that sense of mortality, that sense of who we were and what we're capable of. I'd always been strong. I'd always been physically active, capable.

[00:12:27] I used to stand on my head and do the splits, and here I was unable to stand up. The next day, after a lot of trial and error, I managed to stand briefly before slumping back. Progress. Then the catheter came out, and now I had to get to the bathroom by myself or close to it. I needed a nurse and the walking frame just to stand.

[00:12:51] It was about five steps across the room to the bathroom, and then I needed the nurse's help to sit down. My legs were so weak, and I was sitting on my scars. It was agonizing. And then I needed someone to help me get back up again. Then came the first shower. The nurse sat me on a chair and removed my compression garments and washed me, and that was the first time that I really looked.

[00:13:17] My chest was black and blue with bruising. My legs looked like I'd been attacked by a shark, 40 centimeter scars running down the inside of both legs. I couldn't move my arms. I couldn't dry or dress myself, and I felt faint looking at my legs. You know that reaction you get where you see a wound or blood?

[00:13:40] I was reacting to my own horror

[00:13:43] The next day, the surgeon came back with the pathology results. Both breasts had contained cancer. So in that space between having a clear PET scan and the surgery in November, my body had grown more cancer. The [00:14:00] mastectomy had been the right call. And I want to sit with that for a moment. Not with relief, although it was a relief, but what it means in the context of the decision that I'd made.

[00:14:11] In the months before the surgery, I really agonized over this decision in ways that I couldn't fully describe. I'd spent 10 plus years trying to keep my breasts. So yes, there was the fear of the surgery itself, but also the fear of making an irreversible decision, of removing a part of my body before it had declared itself definitively sick.

[00:14:36] It was the fear of doing something that couldn't be undone and not being certain it was 100% necessary. We often assume that when we make the right decision, we'll feel at peace. We think that the sign of a good choice is that it settles something within us and gives us a sense of clarity or rightness.

[00:14:55] We assume that if we agonize over decision, it means it's the wrong one. And that's not always true. Sometimes we're faced with two shitty options and have to choose the least bad one. Sometimes we have no real choice at all and the illusion of one.

[00:15:12] And sometimes we genuinely can't tell which is the right choice, but we're forced to make a call anyway in the dark without all the information at hand. That agonizing isn't a sign that you're doing it wrong. Sometimes it's just an appropriate response to a really difficult situation. And it's only with the benefit of hindsight that we can know if we made the right choice.

[00:15:36] I remember agonizing over calling the vet when my cat Elsie was 18 and had stopped eating. She'd been with me for nearly two decades, through marriages and moves and having a baby and everything that had changed in between. Watching her decline and trying to read whether she was suffering, trying to decide when enough was enough, I made that horrible call to the [00:16:00] vet.

[00:16:00] She died on my lap in the lounge room, which was a beautiful death and I have no regrets. But making that decision over those days, that was agonizing, and the rightness of that decision was only visible afterwards. In that moment, it just felt like grief. So if you're listening right now and you're facing a decision like that, something irreversible, something where neither option feels good, something that's necessary and also terrible, I feel for you.

[00:16:30] Making the right choice won't necessarily feel good at the time. It might fill you with dread and anxiety, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong choice. Sometimes the right choice is the one that breaks your heart, and the peace you're looking for may only come on the other side of it, long after you've made it through.

[00:16:49] Turns out that I had made the right decision, and the pathology confirmed it. If only I'd known that earlier.

[00:16:57] This was the day when I also had my meltdown. I was done with the drains, done with the observations, the compression garments, the sleep deprivation, the pain. I just wanted out of there. I couldn't be still. I was just so agitated, but there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. The nurses were kind about it, and they told me this was usually the worst day and that it gets better.

[00:17:20] Every day, the physiotherapist came, and we worked our way up to walking across the room with the wheelie walker. I was exhausted in a way that I hadn't experienced before. Just last week, I'd been walking 10Ks a day. Now five steps across the room was hard work. Tim, Ruby, Mum, and my brother visited every day.

[00:17:41] That was a, a little break in the boredom and the tedium of just being there with the drains and the compression and the nothing to do.

[00:17:49] The drains finally came out around day eight, and I can't describe how good that felt, one less thing attached to my body. Whenever I got up to walk, I had to carry all [00:18:00] four drains around with me everywhere I went. Losing them felt like losing that ball and chain. Then the doctor said, "Do you have stairs at home?"

[00:18:09] And I said, "Yeah, we have a three-story house." And he said, "You're not leaving until you can climb the stairs on your own." So the physiotherapist started taking me into the hospital stairwell. I'd take a few steps and then need to rest My heart was racing so much from the effort that the nurse had to do an ECG on me to make sure it wasn't something else.

[00:18:30] It wasn't. I was just in pain and deeply deconditioned. When I could finally manage a full flight of stairs on my own, I could go home, and the doctor's discharge instructions were: "No lifting your arms above your head, no lifting anything over one kilogram, no exercise, no driving, no lying flat, no lying on your side, no lying on your front.

[00:18:55] Wear compression garments 24 hours a day, only take them off to shower." And then with Tim and Ruby, I managed to walk myself out of the hospital. Going home was an anticlimax. I'd been so desperate to get there, but the moment I walked through the door, reality hit. In hospital, the nurses were paid to look after me.

[00:19:15] At home, I felt like a burden. Tim had taken all this time off work and shortly had to go back. My mum had moved in, was doing everything that I couldn't do for Ruby, lifting her in and out of the cot, doing the baths, the dinners, the nighttime wakings. Ruby was still waking up multiple times a night, and it was my mum attending to her at 3:00 a.m.

[00:19:38] I was grateful, deeply, genuinely grateful, but I was also frustrated and angry and in pain and trying not to show it. I wasn't used to being so helpless and useless and miserable. It was good being home with Ruby, but it was also hard. She wanted to cuddle me, and I couldn't. She wanted to play [00:20:00] on the floor, and I couldn't get down there.

[00:20:02] She wanted me to pick her up, and I couldn't. All the things that we used to do together were now off-limits. Now, freedom and independence are my highest values. They're the reason I work for myself, and for three months, I lost all of it. I had to sleep upright on an incline. I had to eat food that others had prepared.

[00:20:22] had to wear compression garments day and night. I couldn't shower without help. All of the things that we take for granted. I couldn't sleep how I wanted. I couldn't eat what I wanted. I couldn't wear what I wanted. I couldn't shower when I wanted. I couldn't move when I wanted. Sitting down hurt because I was sitting on my scars.

[00:20:41] Standing up wasn't possible yet, or standing straight, rather, wasn't possible, so I was mostly horizontal on an incline, lying in bed, staring out the window hour after hour I tried listening to audiobooks 'cause I'd used them before the surgery to get through the sleepless nights, but I had zero concentration span.

[00:21:01] The pain was overriding everything. I'd start something and realise five minutes later that I hadn't even taken in a single word. When the hospital pain medication ran out, the doctor told me to take Panadol, and Panadol did not touch it. I had broken bones, surgical wounds, a chest that hurt with every breath, and I was taking Panadol.

[00:21:23] I also had to go through the opiate withdrawals, flu symptoms, and nausea on top of everything else, and then the headaches began. The excruciating headaches, the ones that feel like your skull is cracking in two, and nothing touched them. Not Panadol, not lying still, not darkness or heat or cold packs, nothing.

[00:21:44] They were a permanent fixture for about eight weeks. I woke with one, I went to sleep with one. My back hurt from lying down all day. My neck hurt because I couldn't lie flat. My chest was hot and heavy and painful. My legs were hurting, [00:22:00] and I just had that constant throb from the surgical sites that never went away.

[00:22:04] The word miserable doesn't really cover it. This was my body in full revolt, withdrawing from medication and healing from some of the most extensive surgery you can have, and I had nothing to offer it except time. There's a thing that happens, I think, when adult children move back in with their parents, or when parents move in to care for them.

[00:22:27] Something regresses. Now, I love my mum, and she was there every day doing everything, running on exhaustion. She was extraordinary. She also drove me a bit crazy, and I know how that sounds, but that's the truth, and I think it's a truth that a lot of people recognise. There's something about being cared for by a parent when you're an adult that activates a version of yourself that you thought you'd grown out of, that bratty teenage version, the one who's grumpy and ungrateful and irritable and impossible to please.

[00:22:57] Mum was only trying to help, and that made me even feel worse about it, and this affected our relationship for some time. Tim was exhausted, too. He was flying out on Monday morning, holding down a full working week, flying back on Friday evening, walking through a door and doing everything that was needed.

[00:23:15] He didn't complain, he just kept showing up, but I could see the toll it was taking on him, and watching the people that I loved most being ground down by my situation only added another layer to everything else I was carrying The real sting in the tail of cancer is that it whips around and stings everyone around you too, and they didn't deserve that.

[00:23:37] I only allowed a few close friends to visit during those weeks. I didn't want to be seen at my worst, and I was deeply self-conscious about my appearance. The ones who came were the right ones. They didn't offer platitudes. They didn't tell me to look on the bright side or remind me of how strong I was or say everything happens for a reason.

[00:23:57] They came and they sat with me where I [00:24:00] was, which was cranky, miserable, in pain, and completely over I asked them to take me out of the house. I even sat in the car while a friend ran errands. I was just happy to be out, to have that cabin fever relieved. To get a change of scenery was enormous. I'd been in the house for weeks and weeks.

[00:24:21] I didn't want to be seen in public, though. I couldn't stand up straight. I was hunched over, shuffling, walking like a cowboy who'd ridden his horse for forty days and forty nights. On top of that, it was the middle of a Brisbane summer, thirty-five degrees, and I was covered head to toe in compression garments.

[00:24:40] I looked ridiculous. I felt ridiculous. So we sat in a park or under a tree or down by the river in West End. With Tim, Mum, and Ruby, I felt like I had to put on a brave face and be grateful for all their support. With my friends, I could drop that mask and be my worst self. And there's something incredibly healing about being witnessed at your worst, something that says, "You don't have to perform for me.

[00:25:05] You're allowed to be exactly as you are."

[00:25:07] Now, there's something that happens to a lot of people after mastectomy called gaze avoidance. You stop looking at yourself in the mirror. You change clothes without looking. You shower without looking. The body becomes something you avoid, and I understood that completely. The research suggests that facing your reflection, actually stopping and looking even when it's hard, speeds up the emotional healing process.

[00:25:33] The avoidance extends the grief while looking at it, sitting with it, helps to integrate it. So I looked, and I want to be honest with you about what I saw and what I felt because I think the whole wellness narrative around this kind of thing can be a bit too tidy. I wasn't happy with what I saw. I wasn't able to look in the mirror and feel grateful or at peace or accepting.

[00:25:55] I looked and felt worse. Now, the plastic surgeon did tell me that the [00:26:00] reconstruction was a stage process, and we'd only done stage one, and there was more to go. What I had weren't breasts. It was more like they removed a 400 gram steak from each thigh, shaped it into a roundish mound, and stuck it on my chest.

[00:26:16] It looked more like a man's pectoral muscle than a woman's breast. It wasn't even round. I kept trying to look anyway because I believed the research, but each time I stood in front of the mirror, I just felt worse. And we all have versions of the mirror we avoid, the account we don't open, the conversation we keep not having, the thing that we've quietly decided not to look at because looking at it makes it real.

[00:26:41] I wasn't ready to make this real, and I think that's worth naming because the pressure to be at peace with hard things, the pressure to get over things quickly and gracefully and to have the right attitude, it's a really cruel expectation. By the time several weeks had passed, I'd accumulated a comprehensive list of things I was sick of.

[00:27:03] I was sick of the compression garments, sick of the pain, sick of lying around, sick of being dependent, sick of the headaches, sick of the four walls, sick of my mum who was doing everything for me and who I adored, and then underneath all of that, I was getting sick of myself. That I think was the flaw.

[00:27:23] When the problem's no longer outside you, but you realize you're the problem, that you've become it, that's hard. And there's this ancient myth that I keep returning to, Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, and she descends into the underworld. And to pass through the gates of the underworld, she must be stripped at each one.

[00:27:43] She loses her crown, her jewels, her robes, her breastplate, and her power. She arrives in the underworld with nothing, and her sister, the queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal, kills her and hangs her on a meat hook. your meat hook [00:28:00] might look different from mine. Maybe it's a marriage that ended, a career that collapsed, a loss you can't metabolize, a season where you were stripped of your identity, your confidence, your sense of who you were, and you can't find your way back.

[00:28:15] The content is completely different, but the structure is the same. We all know what it's like to be stuck, stripped, no way forward, no way back, unable to access the things that previously helped you cope. Inanna hangs on the hook for three days. I was in my own bed and in my own kind of underworld Unable to move, unable to escape, and unable to go within in any of the ways that I normally would.

[00:28:42] Because my ribs and sternum were broken, even breathing hurt. No yoga, no breathwork, no movement, nothing. Now, you might be wondering about meditation because I am a meditator, and I teach meditation. But the important thing to understand is that meditation's best practice when you're already relatively calm.

[00:29:03] Trying to meditate your way out of a storm when you're in it doesn't work. What meditation had done for me after a decade of regular practice was give me the awareness to bring to the situation. So even though I was struggling, even though I was deep in the shit storm, I still knew that I'm not my mind or my thoughts, I'm the awareness behind them, and that doesn't fix the situation, but it makes it so much easier to hold.

[00:29:29] If you're in a crisis right now and you're thinking about starting a meditation practice to get through it, I promise you there are far better tools for that moment. Meditation's more preventative than a cure. But if you have been practicing meditation for a while, you'll find it there when you really need it, not to stop the storm, but to remind you who's watching the storm.

[00:29:50] And this is where the yoga philosophy I'd been studying for years stopped being philosophy. The yoga tradition teaches that human suffering has root causes, known as the [00:30:00] kleshas. Not symptoms of suffering, but actual causes. The things that when they're alive guarantee we'll suffer, and the first is the most fundamental.

[00:30:10] It's a lack of awareness. This is where we mistake our experience for our identity. We think that we are our thoughts, our emotions, our pain, our circumstances. Lying in that bed, I was not my miserable thoughts, I was not my emotional shit storm, I was not my pain, I was the awareness behind it all, and when we can step back from the narrative, even briefly, we can remember who we are.

[00:30:36] The other kleshas are our likes and dislikes, our preferences and aversions, and this is where we convince ourselves that we're in control, that we need things to be a certain way in order to be okay, and these two, in my opinion, create most of our day-to-day suffering. Here's how it works. We have an idea, whether it's conscious or not, of how we want things to go, of how we want our day to unfold, of how we want other people to behave, how we want our life to look And when reality matches that idea, we feel fine.

[00:31:12] When it doesn't, we suffer. And when we get what we don't want, we suffer. When we don't get what we want, we suffer, and we're doing this constantly with everything. The weather's too hot, it's too cold. The person in the checkout in front of us is taking too long. The driver ahead is going too slow. The person next to you in yoga is breathing too loudly.

[00:31:36] Your partner lo- loads the dishwasher wrong. Someone at work didn't do what you wanted them to do. Life didn't unfold on the schedule you had in mind. Each of these moments, and there's hundreds of them in a single day, is a small act of resistance, and each one adds something to the body, a little more tension, more frustration, more resentment.

[00:31:58] It creates what the yogis [00:32:00] call chitta vrittis, which are whirls of activity in the mind and energy body that stir everything up and make us agitated. And it builds up and builds up until we wonder why we feel so tight and reactive and exhausted, and we can't even identify why because no single thing was that bad.

[00:32:17] We tie ourselves in mental knots trying to control things that are entirely outside our control, and that's other people's behavior. The traffic, the weather, the way things turn out, all that tying in knots is the suffering, and I see it so clearly in Ruby. She shows it without any filter. When things don't go her way, she has a meltdown, and one of the things we're trying to quietly build in her is a tolerance for disappointment, the capacity to feel frustrated and not get what she wants and move through it without it overwhelming her.

[00:32:52] But adults do this too. We're just better at hiding it. The meltdown becomes a bad mood, a resentment we carry for days, a low-grade bitterness that accumulates without us ever naming it. It's the same mechanism. The only thing we actually have control over is how we respond to what happens. That's the whole game.

[00:33:12] Buddhism arrives at a similar place from a different direction. The first noble truth is that all of life is suffering. None of us get out of this alive or pain-free. And the second noble truth is that the cause of this suffering is our preferences and desires, the wanting and the not wanting. It's not the situation that creates the suffering, it's our relationship to the situation.

[00:33:36] And these teachings are universal, not specific to yoga or Buddhism or any cultural tradition. The monk in his monastery and the woman lying in bed after a mastectomy are suffering from that same root mechanism. The content is completely different, but the cause is the same. And I'd known this for years.

[00:33:54] I'd taught it. Lying in bed, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to access my usual [00:34:00] tools, I understood it in my body in a completely new way. I wasn't just suffering from cancer or the surgery or from pain. I was suffering from my resistance to it all. The wanting it to be over, the fury at being un- able to move, and the grief of everything that I'd lost.

[00:34:18] The situation was what it was, but my resistance was making it worse. Now, the Bhagavad Gita is one of the great yogi texts. It's an ancient Sanskrit poem that takes place on the eve of a catastrophic battle. On one side stands the army of the warrior Arjuna. On the other side stands the opposing force, which includes his family, his teachers, and people he's loved his whole life, and he has to fight them.

[00:34:44] He surveys the battlefield, and his bow drops from his hands. He just can't do it. He tells Krishna, his charioteer, who's in fact the divine in human form, that he refuses to fight, and Krishna's response is the entire story. The battle, it turns out, is a metaphor for the inner war that we all fight between who we are at our highest and who fear and attachment make us, between action and avoidance, between surrender and control, between the self that clings and the self that's free.

[00:35:17] And the core of the teaching is you don't get to choose whether the battle comes. You only choose how you meet it. No part of me had wanted this, but I was being called to anyway. And slowly, through the fog of pain, I was beginning to understand that I wasn't just being called to get through it. I was being called to go all the way in, to learn something in the depths of that despair that couldn't have been learned any other way, so that one day I could sit here and tell you about it.

[00:35:48] I was still being smashed against the rocks, but I was there. And six weeks after the surgery, I got the all clear to start exercising again. Now, in the next episode, I'll share something that I haven't talked [00:36:00] about publicly before and the slow journey of getting back on my feet again. But for now, remember this: the descent isn't the end of the story.

[00:36:10] It's the initiation. Inanna hangs on the meat hook for three days, and then she's brought back to life. She rises reborn. And what she becomes after the underworld is only possible because she went all the way down. And beneath all of the suffering, beneath the narrative, the fear, the pain, the resistance is the light of awareness.

[00:36:32] And that light of awareness is always, always on your side. Until next time, my friend