The bleak reality of misery

The surgery was done. I thought the hard part was over. This episode is about the long grey stretch that followed, the part nobody really talks about, where the emergencies have passed but you're still completely stuck in it.

Six weeks after the double mastectomy, I got the green light to drive and do light exercise again. That first moment alone in the car felt enormous. And then I got home and realised how far I still had to go. I talk about what it was like not being able to walk or get on the yoga mat, two things that had kept me functional for years, and what that did to me as someone who teaches yoga for a living.

I also talk about tamas, the yogic concept of inertia, and what it actually feels like when that takes hold in your body. The months of minimal function, watching the world move while I couldn't quite reach it, and the slow unglamorous steps that eventually started to shift something. Progress in this kind of recovery is invisible from the outside. This episode is about what it looks like from the inside.

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] 

[00:00:59] Welcome back. 

[00:01:00] In the last episode, I told you about the nine days in hospitals, how coming home was an anticlimax, being stuck in the compression garments and the headaches that felt like my skull was cracking in two. 

[00:01:12] Today, I'm gonna share what came after, which, to be honest, wasn't much better. This episode isn't just about recovery from surgery, it's about that long gray stretch that comes after any crisis.

[00:01:26] When the acute emergency is over, everyone around you has moved on and assumes that you're getting better, but you're just still in it. Most of us have been here in some version of this, of what I like to call the bleak reality of misery, and I'm not gonna dress it up. But before we begin, let's take a long, slow exhale together.

[00:01:50] Now, remember, the information I share here is my own personal experience, and none of it is medical advice. Please always speak with your doctor or health professional. [00:02:00] At six weeks post-surgery, I finally got the all clear to start exercising and driving again. I've talked about this before, that freedom and independence are my highest values.

[00:02:10] They're the reasons I work for myself. And those six weeks of being totally dependent on others were some of the hardest parts of the whole experience. Needing help with the most basic things, needing someone to drive me places, needing to ask all the time if I needed something. I was glad that stage was over.

[00:02:31] So when the doctor said I could drive again, I felt like a teenager who'd just gotten her license. I felt free, that I could just go in my car and do what I wanted without needing to coordinate with another person or explain what I needed. It just felt huge. Just to be in the car moving with the windows down, it felt like a big step.

[00:02:53] Now, you might not be recovering from surgery, but if you've ever had a season where you lost your autonomy, you lost your ability to move through the world on your own terms, you've lost that sense of freedom, you'll know what it's like to h- have even a small piece of that returned. It's no small thing at all.

[00:03:12] I was also really excited to start walking again. Movement had been my medicine for the four months before the surgery. I'd walked hours every day just to keep the anxiety at bay, and six weeks of being flat had left me desperate to move So I put my shoes on and walked out the front door. Now, I should say it was peak Brisbane summer, and we'd been through a particularly brutal, humid stretch, and I was still wearing full-length compression pants.

[00:03:40] I was hot before I'd even stepped out of the house. Hot and bothered and dressed up for winter in a 35 degree heat and 80% humidity. I managed about 400 meters before I had to stop. My legs were so tight. The skin on my inner thighs had been pulled taut by the surgery, and it hadn't softened [00:04:00] yet.

[00:04:00] Everything pulled and felt weird. My pelvis was out of alignment, which sent sharp pains to my knees and into my lower back. It just hurt, and I was also humiliatingly unfit. Six weeks of not moving, plus major surgery, plus weeks on pain medication, and then going through withdrawal, my body had nothing in the tank.

[00:04:22] My heart was racing, my legs were burning, and I was sweating through my compression pants. I stood there on the footpath, exhausted and frustrated and defeated. I didn't expect it to be so hard, so I turned around and walked home.

[00:04:37] Yoga has been central to my life for about 16 years, not just as exercise. It's been the practice which I've used to understand myself, to process difficulty, and to return to my body after I've been stuck in my head. It's been my number one coping tool for everything; grief, stress, confusion. The mat has been the place I processed it all, and six weeks without yoga has been its own kind of withdrawal.

[00:05:06] And I often joke with clients, but yoga withdrawal's real. I hadn't been able to do a single posture, a single conscious breath, anything, and I'd really missed it with a physicality that surprised me. So I was excited to get back on my mat, until I wasn't. I couldn't get down on the floor and get back up again.

[00:05:26] My legs were just so tight. Child's pose was impossible. It stretched all the places that had been stitched and was pulling in all the wrong places. Butterfly was impossible. Any twist hurt. I still couldn't raise my arms above my head, let alone hold weight in my arms, and the pain in my chest and shoulders stopped me.

[00:05:47] Before the surgery, I could stand on my head, I could do the splits, I could balance on my hands. Now I couldn't even get onto the floor. I felt like an old woman. I couldn't hold my own body weight. I couldn't do the most [00:06:00] basic shapes of a practice that I've been doing for most of my adult life. I tried a few times and then I stopped.

[00:06:06] And then I started avoiding the mat in the same way I avoid conflict and difficult conversations, by pretending it wasn't happening, by finding something else to do, something else to focus on, and just not going into the room where the yoga mat was. Out of sight, out of mind. The avoidance was deliberate and it was complete.

[00:06:27] Now, here's the thing I'm a little embarrassed to admit. So of course, I'm a yoga teacher. I've spent 16 years telling students, "It doesn't matter if you can't touch your toes. It doesn't matter what your body looks like. It doesn't matter what it can or can't do. Just get on the mat. Show up as you are." I believed all of that, and I still believe it, and I was not getting on my mat because I couldn't touch my toes and I didn't like how I looked.

[00:06:50] I felt like a hypocrite. And I think most of us have a version of this, the thing we know, the thing we believe, the thing we might even teach or advocate for, and then the way we actually behave when we're inside the hard thing. The gap between our wisdom and our behavior when we're suffering isn't a character flaw.

[00:07:08] It's just what it's like to be human. We hold the map and we still get lost. Now, in yoga philosophy, everything in this world, including our body and mind, is made up of three fundamental qualities called the gunas. You can think of them as three basic flavors of energy. They're always present, always in relationship, and the balance between them determines how we feel, how we move through the world, and what is or accessible to us at any given time.

[00:07:37] The first quality is sattva, clarity, lightness, harmony. It's that quality of pure awareness. When sattva is dominant, the mind is clear. Perception is sharp. There's a sense of ease and openness, a sense of being in the right relationship with yourself and with life. Things feel possible. You're in flow.

[00:07:59] You're [00:08:00] present. You're not being dragged backward or forward. The second quality is rajas, and that's energy, movement, action, and drive. Rajas isn't bad. It's what helps us get things done, what helps us get out of bed on a Tuesday morning. It propels us forward and creates momentum. But rajas in excess becomes agitation, becomes restlessness, becomes the mind that can't slow down, always planning and always bracing.

[00:08:31] Most of us know this rajastic state. Something's shifting and we're all feeling it. Time feels like it's speeding up. The news doesn't shock us anymore, and it's not because we don't care, but it's because our nervous systems have quietly reached capacity, and we're starting to ration what we can let in.

[00:08:49] And underneath all of that, if we're honest, is something gnawing. It's that low hum of something unresolved that follows you from the moment you wake up. The mind is already three steps ahead of you feet even hit the floor. It's the to-do list that never ends, that sense of always being slightly behind, always slightly braced.

[00:09:10] It's that feeling of checking your phone, not because you want to, but because stillness is uncomfortable. It's being tired but unable to rest. It's lying awake at 2:00 a.m., not with one big worry, but with a low, directionless static that hums beneath anything and won't let you quiet. You've tried all the things, meditation, breathwork, yoga, and they all help until they don't.

[00:09:34] Until you notice that the relief is temporary, and the undercurrent is still there the next day. Because here's the thing about Rajas, you can't calm a mind that's sitting on top of agitated energy. Working at that level of thought doesn't touch the energy beneath. The intervention has to go deeper. And that's exactly where I was in the months before surgery.

[00:09:56] All that walking, all that motion, all that [00:10:00] doing. Rajas with nowhere useful to go. And now I'd crashed from it. I'd come out of surgery on the other side of that spectrum entirely. Because the third quality is Tamas. Tamas is heaviness, inertia, dullness, darkness, even like a mental stupor. It's the quality of matter in its most inert form.

[00:10:23] It feels like exhaustion that's not fixed by sleep. In the mind, it feels like a thickness, a blunting of everything, a slowing. Motivation doesn't just drop, it vanishes. The future becomes hard to imagine. Everything feels a little drained of life. And if Rajas is the person lying awake at 2:00 a.m., wired and anxious, Tamas is the person who can't get off the couch and doesn't know why.

[00:10:50] It's not burnout. We've all heard about burnout. It's not depression, although you do wonder. And it's not laziness. You know that. You've tried telling yourself to just start, to just do the thing, to push through. But you know that bullying yourself into motion doesn't work when the problem isn't willpower.

[00:11:09] The problem is that the energy itself has gone flat. So you drag yourself through the day. You're still functioning, showing up, doing the bare minimum, but there's no feeling behind any of it. There's no spark. Just going through the motions of life, moving from one task to the next, and then slumping at the end of the day with a hollow sense that nothing you did really mattered.

[00:11:32] And then you do it again tomorrow. That's the state of tamas, and I was deep in it. I had the all clear to start moving. I knew intellectually that movement would help. I teach the physiology of it. Movement shifts the nervous system. It metabolizes stress hormones. It generates all the neurochemicals that boost our mood.

[00:11:53] I know all of this. Knowing it doesn't touch tamas, though. Tamas doesn't respond to [00:12:00] logic. It's a heaviness that lives in the body itself, in the cells, in the nervous system, and it's resistant. Everything feels like too much, and the effort required to begin anything feels completely disproportionate to the result.

[00:12:15] You lie there knowing you should get up, but that knowing changes nothing. And that's what makes tamas so disorienting. From the outside, it looks like a character flaw, and it feels like one from the inside too, like you're choosing to be this way. Like if you just tried harder or were, weren't so lazy, you could shake it off.

[00:12:36] But you can't think your way out of a tamas state. You can't willpower your way through it. Effort applied to tamas usually just creates more resistance and exhaustion. The energy has to be moved at the level that it's stuck, and most of us were never taught how to work at that level. There's also a lag time between the mind and the body that I don't think gets talked about enough.

[00:12:58] I'd done the preparation for the surgery mentally. I'd made my peace. I knew what I was going through, but the mind's acceptance doesn't transfer automatically to the nervous system. The body has its own timeline. And six weeks of being incapacitated and medicated had left my nervous system in a state of collapse.

[00:13:18] It was like I was still there back in the hospital, still processing the trauma of what I'd been through. Now, this wasn't situational depression. I knew that. I have enough self-knowledge and a psychology degree to distinguish between the two. This was an energy problem. A physiological consequence of what I'd been through.

[00:13:37] My system had been flattened. What I was experiencing was the aftermath of that flattening. The dullness, the stupefication, the feeling stuck. It had a name and a mechanism and I understood both, but understanding it didn't make it any easier to deal with.

[00:13:55] The word that kept returning to me was horizonlessness. If [00:14:00] you've ever been in a place where you couldn't see the end of it, not just a bad day or a bad week, but a sustained stretch of grey where the future felt inaccessible, then you'll know this feeling well. And you don't need cancer to experience horizonlessness.

[00:14:15] Grief will do it. A relationship breakdown will do it. Burnout or a loss of any kind. And it's a specific kind of feeling. It's not sadness or depression. It's just an absence of direction. A flatness that makes moving forward feel impossible. And it felt like there was no end in sight. Not even a light on the horizon or a distant shape of something better.

[00:14:40] Just flat grey in every direction. The days ground on. I got through each one and then there was another one identical waiting. I was numb, sluggish, stupefied. And I'd lost faith in life. And I want to say that plainly because I think it's important. Not just faith in my recovery, not just faith in my body, but faith in life itself.

[00:15:04] Faith that things could work out for me. Faith that the arc of my story bent towards anything other than this. And there was still underneath everything this feeling that I was being punished. And I know that's not a rational thought. I know the universe doesn't punish people. But the feeling was there regardless.

[00:15:23] This low persistent sense that things kept happening to me specifically. That I'd somehow drawn this to myself. That there was something fundamentally wrong with my story. And beneath all that, if I'm being honest, the sense that life was moving on without me and I was watching it from behind glass. That other people have access to something that I couldn't currently find.

[00:15:46] Momentum, aliveness, and the feeling that going forward is possible. You wonder if there's something wrong with you, but then you look at the world and think maybe this is just a reasonable response to chaos. Or perhaps both things are [00:16:00] true. Gray, bleak, and heavy, a nothingness that stretched on for what felt like an eternity.

[00:16:06] Tim was back working away during the week. My mum had gone home. It was just me and Ruby, and I was trying to be present for her while running on empty. And I wanna name this clearly because I think the cultural conversation around illness and recovery has a tendency to rush towards meaning, towards the silver lining, to the lesson or the gift inside the difficulty.

[00:16:27] I do believe in those things. This whole season is built on that premise. But there's a stage before the meaning-making, and that stage is just bleak, and it lasts longer than anyone tells you, and you can't skip through it. You have to live through it one horizon-less day at a time, and I'm not gonna skip it here either.

[00:16:48] In the Inanna myth, this is what the underworld looks like. Not fire and brimstone, just gray and formless. Ereshkigal's realm is where the spark goes out and the horizon disappears, where everything that made you who you were has been stripped away, and what remains is just the bare fact of being. I was in Ereshkigal's realm, and above me, my friends, my family were still beating the drum, just like the faithful friend Ninshubur beating the drum for Inanna.

[00:17:20] But from where I was, I could barely hear it. Around this time, I started seeing a chiropractor for the headaches. They'd been a constant since the surgery, and they were unrelenting, almost permanent for weeks. The doctor told me to just take Panadol, have a lie down. It was probably stress. I knew something wasn't right, though, but I couldn't get anyone to take it seriously.

[00:17:43] But the chiropractor understood immediately. The surgery had done a real number on my entire musculoskeletal system. My pelvis was out of alignment from the leg surgery. My shoulder blades were out of alignment. My thoracic and cervical spine were all out of alignment, even my [00:18:00] collarbones. Then she said the plates in my skull were displaced.

[00:18:04] My head and face were swollen, and she said it was real. And to be validated after weeks of being told it was just stress and to take Panadol, to have someone put their hands on me and say, "Yes, your body's in serious structural distress, and here's what we're going to do about it," that was a relief. And there's something particular about having your pain taken seriously after being dismissed.

[00:18:27] If you've ever been told that what you're experiencing isn't real or it isn't that bad Or it's probably just stress, or it's in your head. And then to have someone finally look at you and say, "Yes, I can see this. It's real, and here's what we're gonna do about it." You know what it means to feel seen inside the suffering.

[00:18:45] It doesn't fix everything, but it does change. it took months of twice weekly treatments to get my joints back into alignment. Months. My whole body felt crippled, and it took that long to uncripple it. It helped slowly, but incrementally it helped. In February, I had my next surgery.

[00:19:05] Now, fat grafting is a procedure where fat is taken from one part of the body and injected into the breast to build them, to add volume, and to fill out the reconstruction. This was the next stage in what was gonna be a multi-surgery process, and I was kind of looking forward to it, which felt strange after everything.

[00:19:24] But this surgery was far smaller in scale to what I'd been through before. It was much more manageable, and it was progress. It was my body moving closer to something that I could recognize. After the first surgery had left me feeling like a shark bite victim, the fat grafting was a step towards something better.

[00:19:44] But I wanna be honest, the improvement in my body didn't lift the fog of tamas. I'd been hoping underneath everything that when the physical result improved, I'd feel better, and that the emotional weight was someti- somehow tied to the physical reality, and when one shifted, the other would follow. [00:20:00] But it didn't work like that.

[00:20:01] And I think that's one of the more isolating parts of a hard season. When external circumstances begin to improve, when the thing that was supposed to help actually happens and you still don't feel better, there's a real confusion in that. You're supposed to feel better by now, but you don't, and you can't really explain why to the people around you.

[00:20:21] The tamas was still there. The horizonless feeling was still there, and I was still stuck in it.

[00:20:28] Still stuck in the shit pit. I had some independence back. I could drive. I could go for a five-minute walk. I had the company of a few good friends, a chiropractor who understood my body, a daughter who needed me to show up every day, and who by needing that gave me a reason to. Yet I was still deep in the shit pit, wallowing in my own misery.

[00:20:50] And there was just no energy, no will, no motivation I was doing my best to surrender into it, and I knew what surrender meant by now. I'd chosen it deliberately back in episode three when I threw that book in the bin. But surrender's not the same as ease. You can still choose to accept what is whilst finding it absolutely awful.

[00:21:13] And I was deeply stuck.

[00:21:15] And I was still using distraction to avoid feeling what I was feeling. I was still looking for something to feel better. And you can probably see yourself doing this too. I could see the avoidance, and I was still choosing it. And most of us do this, not with cancer, but with whatever we're not ready to sit with.

[00:21:34] We reach for the phone, the glass of wine, the busyness, Netflix, whatever floats our boat, not because we're weak, but because stillness is where the feeling lives, and the feeling is uncomfortable, and the reaching for something else is a completely natural human response. The problem isn't the reaching.

[00:21:53] The problem is when the reaching becomes the whole strategy. The physical pain was real, and the tamas and the exhaustion, [00:22:00] but alongside all of that, I was still adding a me-- a layer of mental resistance. I was still making it heavier than it needed to be. The chiropractor had helped my body, but my body wasn't the only thing that needed attending to.

[00:22:13] I knew somewhere in that fog that what I needed was an energy intervention, something that could work on my system at a deeper level than rest or distraction or medical treatment, something that could help me move the energy that had become so stuck, so numb, so frozen. And that's what the next episode's about.

[00:22:33] The next episode is what I eventually had to do with all that suffering, not manage it, not avoid it, but meet it. And I'll share something I haven't talked about publicly before, and the beginning, finally, of something starting to shift. But for now, if you're in a horizonless place right now, if the fog is the fog and the bleak is black and you can't see the end of it, you're not doing it wrong.

[00:22:58] This is just a stage of suffering that has to be lived. You don't think your way out of it. You don't use positive thinking. You just have to live through it one gray day at a time. And beneath all the heaviness, the fog, the nothingness, and the gray, the light of awareness is still there. It doesn't go out even when you can't feel it.

[00:23:19] The horizon does come back. Until next time, my friend. [00:24:00]