Cultivate Calm

I don't know why this upset me so much

• Monica Rottmann • Season 2 • Episode 8

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May was a month of contradictions. Surgery recovery, grief and a rainbow unicorn birthday party. Life kept moving and I was somewhere in the middle of it, trying to keep up. This episode is about what it looked like when something finally started to shift.

It started with an incident at Bunnings, a stranger's throwaway comment that hit a nerve I didn't know was still live. I talk about tamas, the yogic concept of inertia, and what it actually took to break through months of it. Spoiler: it wasn't a peaceful meditation. It was anger, and it worked.

From there the episode gets into the small, unglamorous steps that followed. Bath time squats. Daily breathwork. The slow realisation that physical and emotional recovery move at completely different speeds. There's also Mother's Day, Ruby turning four, and what it felt like when the darkness started to lift. Not dramatically, but just quietly, and enough.


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[00:00:58] Welcome back

[00:01:00] In the last episode, I shared about the spark of life returning. Today is about what came after. The slow, unglamorous work of coming back. Back to the body, back to the yoga mat And coming back to life again

[00:01:17] And then the month of May, a month that I wasn't expecting, a month that held surgery and grief, and a rainbow unicorn birthday party in the park all at once. Now, in the Inanna myth, she doesn't just float peacefully back to the surface. She stirs. Something in her wakes up that isn't gentle, and this episode is about that stirring.

[00:01:42] But before we begin, let's take a long, slow exhale together

[00:01:51] Now remember, everything I share here is just my own personal experience. None of it is medical advice. Please always speak [00:02:00] with your doctor or health professional. It started at Bunnings. We'd gone there to pick up a few things, and I couldn't help myself, I ended up in the indoor plant section. Now I have a slight plant addiction, and remember I was still in the space of trying to make myself feel better.

[00:02:19] So suffice to say, there were a few plants in my trolley. And right next to the indoor plant section is a playground, and Ruby spotted it immediately and started pestering me to let her play in there. I held out for a while, but then I gave in So I watched her climb up to the top of the enclosed slippery slide, and it was probably two stories high.

[00:02:42] She climbed to the top, and then she froze. She was too scared to go down the enclosed slide, and she was too high to get back down the way that she came. She was stuck at the top starting to panic, and she's only three years old. I tried to coach her down. I tried to support her verbally, but in the end I had to go in.

[00:03:04] And what followed for me was crawling through these plastic tunnels that were absolutely not designed for adults, especially adults who were as stiff and sore as me post-surgery. Crouching, turning, squeezing, everything reminding me of exactly where I was in my recovery. I got Ruby down, and I managed to climb out of the climbing equipment all hot and sweaty and looking really undignified, and a young guy nearby looked at me and said, "You gotta move it or lose it, love." And I wanted to say, "F you," but I didn't.

[00:03:40] I felt it. And that feeling itself was quite interesting because I'd been feeling so flat for so long, barely feeling anything at all. And then there was this stranger giving me unsolicited advice who had no idea what I'd been through, making such a throwaway and I really let it get to me And [00:04:00] here's the thing, what I realised later.

[00:04:02] It got to me, it really got under my skin because it hit somewhere real. I'd always had pride in what my body could do, not so much in how it looked, but what it could do. I was never the most flexible yoga teacher, but I was strong, and I could do all the complicated arm balances with ease. That had always been my thing.

[00:04:24] And now I was walking around like a crippled old cowboy, and some bloke at Bunnings was pointing it out, and I'd had enough In yoga philosophy, everything in nature moves through these three qualities, the three gunas. Before the mastectomy, I was in that state of rajas, that quality of fire and movement, but not in a good way.

[00:04:46] It was that frantic, agitated energy of a nervous system that had been mobilized and had nowhere to go. It was those 10K walks, the relentless staying in motion, trying to outrun what I couldn't control. Rajas out of balance looks like that, wired, agitated, running. And then after the surgery, everything collapsed into that tamas state, the heavy quality, the earth, the stillness.

[00:05:13] And when balanced, tamas gives us the capacity to rest, and for a while, that's exactly what I needed. But after a while, tamas becomes inertia, the flatness, the heaviness, the gray, the stupefaction, The sense of moving through life like mud, just trying to get through each day.

[00:05:32] The central quality of tamas is inertia, and inertia has a specific property. It takes an extraordinary amount of activation energy to overcome inertia. A body at rest stays at rest, especially a body that's been through what mine had. My activation energy, it turns out, was being judged by a stranger at Bunnings.

[00:05:54] It wasn't the ideal catalyst, but it worked

[00:05:57] Many of us grew up being told that anger was [00:06:00] dangerous, violent, something to keep a lid on. Most of us learn very early to be the good girl or good boy who doesn't make a scene But David Hawkins, a psychiatrist who spent years mapping human consciousness, describes anger as the first emotion on the scale that has energy moving outward.

[00:06:19] Everything below anger folds inward. Shame, guilt, grief, fear, they all contract. Anger is different. It pushes back. And stripped of its association with violence, anger at its core is an energizing force. It has direction. It says, "This is not okay." It mobilizes us to do something. What happens when it doesn't get to be anger is worth knowing.

[00:06:45] When it can't go outward, it goes sideways into resentment, bitterness, and that version is much harder to shift than the original anger ever would've been. So that flash at Bunnings, that F you that I kept to myself, it wasn't a bad day. It was something that had been quiet in me for a very long time, finding its voice again And in the myth of Inanna, when the food and water of life are sprinkled on her body, she doesn't just float back peacefully to the upper world.

[00:07:14] She comes back fierce. Her return isn't gentle. Anger is the first sign of her body coming back to life. And that flash at Bunnings was my first sign that I was coming back to life. That evening was Ruby's bath time, and normally I'd sit on the stool next to the bath. But that night I made a decision to do the thing that I'd been avoiding, the pose that I'd been dreading the most, and I got myself into Malasana or the yogi squat.

[00:07:44] Now, this position is uncomfortable at the best of times, but after what I'd been through, it was the ultimate test. This pose would tell me exactly where I was at. And as soon as I got into it, I felt like my skin was tearing apart. I [00:08:00] actually had to pull my pants down to have a look that the scar hadn't burst open, and it hadn't.

[00:08:05] The skin was intact, it just felt like it wasn't. I managed about 10 seconds, then I came out, and I did it again the next night, and the next, and slowly, very slowly, it became something I could hold. Bath times became my strength and mobility session, and it still is. I still do Malasana while Ruby's in the bath, but these days I also add weights to it.

[00:08:29] But that's where it started, with 10 seconds on the bathroom floor while Ruby splashed around in the bathtub I started adding other poses back in. Pigeon. What seemed impossible at the time slowly became bearable and then pleasurable again. Down dog, forward folds, the things that I'd been avoiding for months.

[00:08:50] What I had to make peace with was the loss of strength. Poses that used to be easy for me were now impossible, and some of them may even stay that way. Even now recording this, I still can't do Chaturanga. It gives me a burning pain in the sternum where the bone was cut, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that pose again, but I'm okay with that It was humbling though at the time in a way that I hadn't fully anticipated.

[00:09:18] My identity had always been tied to what my body can do, and now it was showing me its limits It was here that I started doing more active breathwork. I knew that I had to get the energy moving again. And one of the most direct ways to transmute stuck energy is through strong pranayamas. Breath of fire, O breath, spinal flexes.

[00:09:42] These became a daily practice. Deliberate activation, moving prana through my system and clearing all that stuck and stagnant energy. And the more I did it, the better I felt. Not dramatically, not overnight, but a slow [00:10:00] build It was consistent and started moving forward in a direction that I recognised In yoga philosophy, we talk about the granthis or energy knots, places where unprocessed experience, patterns of fear or grief create a tightening in the energy body, a place where the flow gets blocked, and you feel it as a chronic holding or a bracing or a tension that has nothing to do with the muscles and everything to do with what the muscle's protecting And the physical and emotional recovery don't run on the same timeline.

[00:10:34] You can walk out of hospital and look fine, but the emotional body has its own schedule, and it's always, always slower than we hope it is. The crisis is over, and it's only then does the body start to deliver what it's been holding

[00:10:50] As my practice came back and I started moving more and breathing more and clearing more, the fear and heaviness was lifting. Not because anything had changed in my external circumstances, but because the thing that I'd been dreading for almost a decade had already happened. I'd gone through the worst of it, and here I was on the other side That's a kind of relief that nothing else can give you.

[00:11:16] Not reassurance, not time, just being on the other side of the dreadful thing And slowly that energetic knot began to release. The worst was truly behind me, and my body was starting to believe it

[00:11:30] On suffering. Suffering's part of the deal. It's part of being human. That's what the Buddhists say, that all of life is suffering And I'd had my fair share of suffering Cancer, divorce, watching my dad die of the same disease. I'd absorbed it all. I kept going. I was very good at suffering But what happens when you stop avoiding the feeling?

[00:11:57] When you allow the grief to be there without immediately [00:12:00] making it mean something? When you feel the fear without letting it run the show? When you let the anger rise like it did at Bunnings without suppressing it Something opens, and even the hardest feelings, the ones we dread the most, are full of aliveness, a realness that you can't access any other way And we learn that avoiding the feeling costs more than the feeling ever would have Suffering isn't going anywhere, but identifying with it, that's a relationship, and every relationship can change By now it was May, and I had my second fat grafting surgery.

[00:12:40] Another procedure in the reconstruction process where they take fat from where I don't want it and move it to where I do want it It was familiar territory by now, another recovery, another week of being careful. Then in May came Mother's Day. We went out for dinner with Mum, and it was such a different feeling from the year before.

[00:13:00] 12 months earlier, I'd been sitting at a Mother's Day lunch, still waiting to know whether the cancer had come back, still carrying the weight that sits so differently to any other kind of weight. This year, I was on the other side of it, and it felt good. that same night, my mum got the call that her sister had passed away, my aunt, metastatic breast cancer.

[00:13:23] So May held both those things, the relief and the grief right next to each other, celebrating being a mum, being there with my mum, and losing a woman who was both aunt and a mirror and a reminder of what breast cancer can do. I sat with both those things, and I still sit with them now A week after Mother's Day, Ruby turned four.

[00:13:47] It had been 12 months since my diagnosis. The year before, she didn't want a birthday party. She didn't really have many friends, and the kindy struggles I talked about earlier in the season, the separation [00:14:00] anxiety, the difficulty connecting, a party felt impossible, so we didn't have one the year before.

[00:14:05] But this year, over a dozen four-year-olds descended on the park for a rainbow unicorn birthday party, and I was there trying to wrangle them into games of pass the parcel and pin the horn on the unicorn. None of the other mums knew what I'd been through. There's just no way, no easy way to explain it in between handing out party bags and cutting the birthday cake

[00:14:29] There was no way to explain that what had happened in the last year, the diagnosis, the surgery, the recovery, and the quiet work of helping Ruby build friendships when I had nothing left, all of that had been leading to that morning in the park. No one really knew what a pivotal moment it was for me, but it really marked a turning point.

[00:14:50] I was so proud to see Ruby there with all her friends around her having an amazing birthday party. That was a beautiful moment for me too

[00:14:59] Now, the fog didn't lift in a single moment. It was gradual. The more I moved, the better I felt. Small loops of improvement, getting on the mat each day, moving my body, doing the breathwork, the walks slowly getting longer and longer And then one day I noticed I wasn't miserable anymore. No more waking up and being there before I opened my eyes.

[00:15:25] No more just trying to make it through to the end of the day. I wasn't elevated. I wasn't floating on joy. I was still healing and in pain, but the misery was gone. And I don't know if you've ever had that experience of having a migraine or some really strong pain, and when it finally goes away, it just leaves you with this bliss, even though you still don't feel well.

[00:15:50] Just the misery going away feels beautiful, and that's where I was at. I was no longer miserable. I was no longer in the shit pit. I was no [00:16:00] longer horizonless. I was no longer in rock bottom, and not feeling miserable felt extraordinary If you've been in the dark for a long time, you'll know this. The first thing you notice on the way back is not brightness, it's the absence of the dark.

[00:16:18] That the gray has lessened without you noticing. That the weight has shifted. That you can breathe a little more easily than you could yesterday. That's where I was. The fog had lifted. There was a spark inside of me. The horizon had returned. Inanna was ascending In the next episode, I'll talk more about my return to work, my return back to normal life.

[00:16:46] But for now, remember this: recovery really is one day at a time, one step at a time. There's no shortcut through it, and you can't see the whole road from where you're standing. You've just got to keep going, keep moving, one foot in front of the other, one breath at a time, and trust that eventually the fog lifts and the light returns on the horizon.

[00:17:13] Until next time, my friend [00:18:00]