I was never going to fight

After a third cancer diagnosis, something fundamental shifted. This episode explores the myth of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess who descended into the underworld, stripped of everything she possessed, and returned transformed. It's a framework that maps closely onto what 15 months of illness, surgery, and recovery actually felt like from the inside. Not a triumphant comeback. A different kind of return entirely.

The episode goes into what it means to live in defence mode, gripping hard, planning relentlessly, believing that enough control can protect you from loss. And what happens when something arrives that doesn't care about your plans. By the third diagnosis, it was clear that what needed to change wasn't the strategy. It was something deeper. This episode is an honest look at what conscious surrender actually involves, and why it's harder and more useful than it sounds.

There's also something here about the collective. So many people are carrying a quiet anxiety right now, a disconnection they can't quite name. The tools that used to work aren't reaching it. Inner work isn't a luxury add-on. It's the thing. This episode explores why those who have done their own descent, who have been stripped back and returned changed, carry a steadiness that can't be built any other way. Energy Alchemy, a program built on turning inner turmoil into genuine energetic shifts, grew directly from this understanding.

Whatever your underworld looks like, the questions are the same: what do you leave there, and what do you come back with? This episode doesn't offer a tidy answer. It offers something more useful: the understanding that the descent itself is where the story changes. Yoga philosophy, energy healing, emotional resilience, nervous system, cancer recovery, surrender, inner work, breathwork, Inanna myth, transformation.

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

1:02

Welcome back. In the last episode, I talked about returning to work, what I could feel in the room, and the collective unease sitting just beneath the surface, and why the tools that most of us are using just aren't cutting it anymore. Today, I wanna talk about the journey itself. And I've been weaving the myth of Inanna through this entire season. She was the Sumerian goddess who descends into the underworld and is stripped of everything at each of the seven gates. Her crown, her lapis lazuli necklace, her robes, her breastplate, all of it, until she arrives at the bottom with nothing, stripped naked, hanging on a meat hook for three days. We've talked a lot about the descent into the underworld, but we never finished the story. Inanna comes back. Now, before we dive in, let's take a long, slow exhale together 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 for personalised guidance. So Inanna doesn't come back the same way she went down. She can only leave the underworld if someone takes her place. And as she ascends through each of the seven gates, the gatekeepers return her regalia, the crown, the necklace, the robes, piece by piece. She's reclaiming what was always hers. She just knows what it is now. My return wasn't dramatic. There was no single moment where I stood up and felt whole. It was more like a slow accumulation of days where I noticed I wasn't as heavy, where I could breathe without it hurting When I realised I wasn't miserable anymore And when I got back on my yoga mat, even though everything hurt and I was creaking, I felt that part of myself I recognised. But something was different, and it took me a while to understand what that was. I'd left something behind in the underworld. Not lost it, left it there deliberately, even if I didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. I left behind the person who'd been playing life in defense mode, the one whose whole approach was built around trying to get what I want, trying to prevent loss, trying to prevent disappointment, and trying to control how everything worked out What I came back with is harder to describe than what I left behind. I feel more emotionally free, more grounded, less afraid of uncertainty And more content with the mundaneness of ordinary life And if we think of artists, painters, they don't only use bright colors. They need the blacks and the grays and the browns to provide contrast and depth. The brightness is only bright because of what's next to it, and the darkness gave me that. It gave me that contrast You know how in sport some teams play a purely defensive strategy, like a soccer game, for example, very hard to score against, no one gets any goals, but the team can never actually win. At best, they can draw because what they're so focused on not letting anything in is that they never kick their own goals. Playing life in defense mode is a whole worldview. It's built on the idea that if you can just stay one step ahead, plan enough, prepare enough, control enough, you can protect yourself from loss and disappointment. It feels logical It feels smart, but it's also a false sense of control, and it's exhausting because we can't control reality. The cancer kept coming back anyway. You can't plan your way out of a diagnosis And at a certain point, the effort of constantly trying, the bracing, the managing, it costs more than what it saves And by my third diagnosis, I knew something had to change, not just tactically, but fundamentally So I made that deliberate choice. I was not gonna fight this. I was not gonna push through. I was not gonna be strong. I was not gonna be brave. I tried all that before, and it didn't help. This time I was gonna put everything I knew into practice. All my years of yoga philosophy that I'd studied and taught and genuinely believed in, all of it was about to be tested with the stakes as high as they get. I was gonna consciously surrender And people think surrender means weakness, but it's actually the most advanced thing I know how to do, and everything in us fights it, and this is why We have these desires and preferences about how life is supposed to go. We want things to be a certain way, and when it doesn't go that way, we suffer. And the yogis call this the kleshas, the afflictions. It's our desires and preferences that cause us to suffer. This is where we cling to the version of life we want, where I stay healthy, where I'm in control, as well as pushing away the things that I don't

want: 6:41

the diagnosis, the surgery, the uncertainty, the pain What it all comes down to is that we can only be okay under certain conditions. We need everything and everyone to be a certain way in order for us to be okay And when those conditions aren't met, we struggle. We've outsourced our peace and contentment and happiness to events and the situations that we can't control. We're relying on external things to be a certain way in order for us to be happy. It makes no sense, but that's what I was doing We're betting our happiness on life happening in a very specific way No wonder we suffer when it doesn't go our way. That's exhausting, and it's playing a losing game Now, surrender doesn't mean giving up on goals or having plans. I still have both, but I'm no longer betting all my peace on them needing to happen in an exact way. Because sometimes life has something better in mind, and you need to be nudged sometimes firmly in a direction that you would never have chosen for yourself Life has a funny way of redirecting us onto our path, and I know this because it happened to me long before cancer When I was a newly minted yoga teacher, I started by teaching friends in the park in the city after work, and this was fine in summer, but then it got cold and dark, and there were always weirdos watching us, so that ended pretty quickly. I asked my workplace if I could use a meeting room after work, and that worked until HR got involved and said that there needed to be a first aid officer and a fire warden on site, so I became both, and then the bureaucracy just made it impossible, and I walked away from that deflated. I hired halls instead. The first one I hired was the Rosicrucian Hall in Norman Park, and then later the Anglican Church on Agnew Street. The classes were packed. Five nights a week, I was teaching, doing my day job in the city and at night teaching yoga. It was going gangbusters, and I was loving it, and then the church told me they were selling the building. I looked everywhere for a new space. I had a quite a large following, and I had nowhere to take them. And then one day I was walking through Mowbray Park on my way home from work, and I got this clear feeling. It sounds weird, but those old fig trees spoke to me, and they said,"Have a look in East Brisbane." And that's where I found the old cinema on Stanley Street was for rent. And the cool thing is that I actually lived on Withington Street when I was 20 and 21. Had my 21st birthday on Withington Street. I was really familiar with the area and, uh, I'd been to the cinema before, and that's where I've been ever since. Every single one of those setbacks felt hard at the time. Every single one of them was redirecting me towards something I never would've found on my own Started with the park and then the meeting room, then the church hall. None of that was the destination. Surrender made those setbacks bearable and useful. And when you're not white-knuckling every outcome, when you allow things to unfold organically and just trust that things might actually work out for you, then you allow life to redirect you where you need to be And we have these patterns, based on our desires and our preferences that create grooves in our consciousness over time. They're known as samskaras in Sanskrit. These are the channels that deepen with every repetition until we stop noticing that we're running them. I'm talking about controlling and managing and bracing. That was just how I moved through the world, and then I got cancer three times, and it came with the realization that I couldn't outrun this. I couldn't plan my way through it. I couldn't muscle my way through it, that something had to change And that's what surrender led me to. I no longer resisted what was happening to me. I didn't waste precious energy trying to fight cancer or be strong or be brave. I just let it happen. I stopped resisting. And that moment when I was lying on the floor with my legs up the wall, I made that decision then and there when I was so sick of being in pain, that rather than running from it, rather than wishing it were gone, rather than trying to avoid it, I went straight into it And it intensified. It got stronger and hotter, and I could hear my pulse in my ears. And then it was like the pain became its own entity, and it turned around and left. And it left me falling, like free fall. It was terrifying And then something caught me And that's what surrender really is Now, rock bottom is not where the transformation happens Marianne Williamson said it well, " It's not the falling apart that changes you. It's when you get yourself back up and face reality." The low point is only the catalyst. What you do with the suffering, how you respond to it, what you build from it, that's where it gets interesting And people who've genuinely fallen apart have developed a particular kind of strength Having confronted the absolute bottom, they carry a level of empathy that isn't performative. It's real, because they know what it's like to fall apart They have a genuine calmness because they've already survived the thing they were most afraid of The descent isn't the point. It's what you do on the way back up. That's the point And over the last two years, as I fell apart and hung around in rock bottom, something else was beginning to germinate Something else about how to use this knowledge, how to use this suffering, and how to turn it into a way of supporting others who are going through their dark times. And this is the program that I've now built, and I'll talk more about it later Now I want to talk about the heroine's journey So Joseph Campbell first mapped what he called the hero's journey. It's the classic Hollywood formula. It's Luke Skywalker from Star Wars. It's Frodo from Lord of the Rings. It's the reluctant ordinary person who receives the call, crosses a threshold, faces an ordeal, and returns transformed. The hero goes out, he faces an enemy, he slays the dragon, and the movement is all outward Whereas Maureen Murdock and Marion Woodman wrote about a different journey. The heroine's journey goes in. The heroine descends. She's dismembered. She loses everything she thought that defined her, and she reassembles herself by recovering something within. She comes back with herself more fully than before Nothing I went through was about conquering anything. I was determined from the outset that this was not gonna be a fight. There was no dragon, there was no adversary. It was me and me. The whole experience was an inward one. Everything that changed, changed on the inside And in Eastern philosophy, there's a concept called Leela or the divine play. And it's this idea that consciousness is playing a game of hide and seek with itself. That pure awareness hiding inside a human, inside a set of circumstances and a personality, and that slowly through practice or suffering or a bit of both, that consciousness beginning to remember who it actually is. The game is the forgetting, and the journey back is the remembering And we spend so much of our lives looking outward for the thing that will finally make us feel better, that will finally make us feel right. We look for the relationship, the job, the achievement, the accolades, the experiences, that right version of life, and it never quite arrives. We can have all the things, we can have the relationship and the career achievement and the money in the bank and the great lifestyle, and still feel like there's something missing Because what we were searching for was never out there It's that moment on the floor when you've run out of options, when you stop looking outward and start going in, and you find something that was never touched by any of it, something that remained whole the entire time, the part that was watching, the seer or the observer And once you've felt that, you can't unfeel it. You know it in your bones that you're not your circumstances, that you're not your mind, you're not your body, and that what you are can't be taken from you. Something I keep hearing in the studio lately is people telling me they're feeling anxious, people telling me they're feeling really unsettled, that they can't relax, that they can't focus. Some even say that they never fully recovered from the COVID years, and they're right, a lot of people didn't The collective nervous system took a battering, and the world didn't slow down to let it recover and catch up. It's just been relentless, and our attention is being pulled constantly in all these directions, and the systems that are doing the pulling of our attention are extremely good at it. Most of us are going through our days on autopilot, following a predetermined algorithm without realising we've handed the wheel over If you feel scattered, if you've lost your ability to come back to yourself, if you feel disconnected from your body or your sense of what's real, and one day you'll look up and not recognize the life that you're living The inner work isn't a luxury anymore. It's urgent. And the people who've done their own descent are the ones who can hold steady when everything around them is chaotic, and we're gonna need those people. And that's exactly why I created Energy Alchemy. It's built from everything I went through, the exact practices I used to climb out of rock bottom, structure for anyone who's ready to do that deep inner work to transmute their inner state, to shift their energy, to move from that rajas or tamas energy into more sattvic lightness. It starts in the body, in the energy, and it works outward from there This is the only round I'm running in 2026, and enrollments are closing soon. If this is something that you feel called to, the link for the program is in the show notes So I've been through my own descent multiple times, and I came back different each time And the third time, I finally stopped trying to come back as the same person. Whatever your underworld looks like, and it doesn't have to be a health diagnosis, the question is the same: What do you leave behind, and what do you carry back with you? And if you're in the shit pit right now, if you're at rock bottom, I'm not gonna tell you it has a purpose or that everything happens for a reason. That's just really shitty to say to someone. That's something you need to figure out for yourself What I will say is that there's something in the darkness, even if you don't know what that is And if you're on the other side of something hard and wondering what that was all for, the answer probably isn't what you expected It's not like trying to find the lesson. It's more like a stripping away The things that fell away were not the things that mattered And there's a reason painters don't only use bright colors. The richness is in the contrast. You won't come back empty-handed Until next time, my friend