Why this felt so hard

This episode is about grief. Not managing it, avoiding it, or reframing it into something more comfortable, but actually sitting inside it. After a decade of cancer diagnoses, divorce, and losing her father, the emotional landscape that built up over those years is finally being examined honestly. This episode is where that examination happens.

There's also something here that doesn't get talked about enough: the financial reality of serious illness. More than $100,000 in medical bills with no income during recovery. The grief of watching what your life was building toward get fundamentally disrupted. And the specific, quieter grief of living post-cancer, no longer the person who went in, without the illusion of invincibility that once made everything feel manageable. Cancer recovery, grief, financial hardship, identity loss, post-cancer life, emotional healing.

The episode moves into what grief actually does when you stop trying to manage it from a distance. Drawing on the writings of John of the Cross and Rumi, there's something here about the transformative power of feeling your way through pain rather than around it. Sitting with a yoga student navigating her own breast cancer diagnosis brought this into sharp focus, as did the quieter anxiety of raising a daughter who inherits a significant family history. Mind body connection, spiritual healing, yoga philosophy, transformation, cancer survivor, emotional resilience.

A decade of circumstances led somewhere that wouldn't have been chosen but can't be dismissed. The philosophical and spiritual frameworks that once felt abstract became necessities. This final reflection of the season is about what grief leaves behind when you let it move through you properly: clarity, honesty, and a kind of freedom that only comes from the inside. Inner work, psycho-spiritual healing, self-awareness, grief and loss, personal transformation, energy healing, acceptance.

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. Recording this season of the podcast has been one of the most uncomfortable things I've done, much harder than I expected. Going back to those dark times and putting it into words has brought up a lot for me, some of which I thought was behind me, but clearly is still very much present. This episode is all about grief and how to be with it instead of trying to make it go away. Now before we dive in, let's take a long slow exhale together Now, 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 here's the thing. I felt like a lot was taken from me at my prime. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think about it every day and say,"Poor me," but doing this podcast season has caused much reflection on all the things that I've lost, and I'm not just talking about my boobs. 10 years of dealing with cancer, a divorce, my dad dying, the relentless difficulty of building a business through all of it. The last decade of my life has been one setback after another, and I felt like I've just never really had a clear run at life. Now sure, there's some beautiful moments in that time, but honestly, it's been really fucking hard, and there's this grief for that lost potential of all the things I missed out on and for never getting a clear run to live my life the way I wanted to And then there's the financial reality. Well over 100,000 in medical bills, and that's not counting lost income. Probably over two years off work whilst paying someone else to do my job. That money's all gone, as well as all the things I could have done with it And there's grief for my younger self For all the shitty things she had to go through and how young she was when it all started, and grief for my body and for the parts that are missing. So recording this has made it all very present again Now, there's this version of me that existed before cancer, and then there's the post-cancer version, and I'll never get that old version back. And it's not just the breasts, though that's its own kind of grief, and I don't want to minimize that 'cause it's very real. But the other losses sneak up on you, too The thing I miss the most is that carefree feeling that I had. I didn't know I had it until it was gone. And now I have very physical reminders of my mortality The other thing that's gone is that sense of independence, that sense of self-reliance, the confidence that comes from knowing you can look after yourself completely, that if everything fell apart, you'd be okay, and cancer showed me my limits in a way that I can't unlearn Now, 11 years ago when I got my first diagnosis, my life wasn't easy. I was in the middle of a messy divorce. I was in the early years of running a business. My dad was dying. I had plenty of problems, but there was an innocence that's been shattered, and I'll never get it back And there's the loss of confidence in your body. I was young, I was fit, I didn't smoke, I was vegetarian, I hardly drank. I was supposedly at my peak. There were no warning signs, nothing that said this is coming. It just came out of the blue Now, I know from yoga philosophy that we're not our body, but I did have this sense that I could rely on my body for a few more decades. I just assumed that my body would be here for me, and it wasn't And things don't go back to normal after cancer. You become acutely aware of your mortality. You know that in a way that's no longer theoretical, that life can knock you down with no warning, and that it can happen to you when you're doing everything right, and you can't un-know that. That's a kind of vigilance that never goes away, just like the screenings I'll have for the rest of my life And often when I'm sitting in the waiting room at the Women's Diagnostic Clinic, I feel like a veteran while all the other women are there probably in fear about what might be found. Sometimes I want to offer them reassurance that things will be okay, but I don't know that for sure I had coffee with a yoga student last week. She was diagnosed with early breast cancer, had the lump removed, and now she's been told she needs a mastectomy. I felt like an elder as I listened to her fears and the pain of all the decision-making and uncertainty. I shared my experience with her and the things that I wished I knew at the time, and I felt her grief And then there's the grief for what Ruby may inherit. Her mother and both grandmothers had breast cancer, and when she's older and I can have the talk with her about cancer and what that means, and just thinking about it makes me feel sick. I can feel her future anxiety already. She's gonna need regular screening from a young age, and that's really shit The grief I carry most is for the unlived life, for the things I would have done and seen and achieved by now, for the version of the life I had in my head that's not gonna happen. The missed opportunities and the energy spent on survival that could have gone into building something beautiful And those prime years don't come back. Yes, of course, there's still time. I'm still relatively young, but you don't get back that version of yourself that existed before the mastectomy, before the years of navigating cancer. That person's gone And there's a grief for what might still be cut short. My time here is shorter than I expected when I was younger, and there's still so much I wanna do, and that sits underneath everything And grief can show you exactly what you're still holding onto. I'm still attached to the idea that maybe life can go my way, that maybe finally I get a clear run. I'm still attached to my old identity, that carefree version of myself that existed before cancer became the shadow that follows me everywhere I go. I still want to be carefree. I don't want to worry And the kleshas, the attachments and aversions are not something that we can eradicate. They're something that we just become more aware of, and in that awareness we suffer a little less from them. But the grief is real, and I'm allowed to have it I also still grieve my dad. He was my mentor. He had several businesses over his lifetime. He built things from scratch more than once, and he understood what that actually takes, the grind of it, the uncertainty, the stress. A lot of people in my life admire what I've built, but they don't quite understand the cost of it, and he really did And he instilled in me the values that still run through everything that I do. Generosity, showing up, integrity, consistency. I learned those things by watching him And I could always share my wins with him. He was always proud, always genuinely interested, even though I think he never really understood what yoga was. And when something good happened at work, he was the first person I'd tell. Now, my mum is extraordinarily supportive, and she was the first person I called when I won some awards a few years ago. But Dad was my role model, the one who really understood what I was building He's been gone for 10 years now, and I still have his voicemail saved on my phone just for whenever I wanna hear his voice Now cancer has a very long tail, and just when you think the worst is over, the tail whips around and stings everyone close Tim worked away interstate for much of this to help pay for the surgeries. He came home on weekends exhausted and then carried the full load at home. He was steady and unwavering, he bore the brunt of a lot of misplaced frustration that had nowhere else to go, and he absorbed it all, and I could feel the weight of it on him. And he never said how hard it was. He just kept showing up. But I can see it now, the cost of it. My mum moved in and did everything I couldn't do, which was most things. She woke up in the night to see Ruby when I couldn't lift her out of the cot. She cooked, she drove, she managed everything at a time in her life when she shouldn't have been carrying all of that. And she'd delayed her own important surgery to be there for me during my reconstruction. And when she sensed I needed less support, she finally booked in her own surgery. The plan was that it was now my turn to help her. So she had her surgery, and I was driving her to a follow-up appointment at Greenslopes. Ruby was home with our babysitter, Mary, and Tim was in Newcastle. And I had a medical episode in the doctor's office, a collapse, and I was taken to emergency and ended up spending three nights in hospital. Mum couldn't drive because of her surgery. Tim couldn't get home until the next day, and Mary stayed overnight and looked after Ruby, and she was wonderful. But that was the first night Ruby had ever spent without either of us. That was the first time Mummy said she was coming home, and she didn't. Now, my car was at the hospital. The car seat from Tim's car was in my mum's car. Mary couldn't even bring Ruby in to visit. And even though we video called and I told her I was okay, she knew something wasn't right And Ruby's very sensitive and intuitive and switched on. She felt it. And since that night, she's developed attachment issues. She gets very upset when I leave. She needs to know when I'm coming home. She's getting help for it and she's still doing well, but it's shaped her in ways that are still unfolding. My cancer has affected her development. Simple things like we had to stop swimming lessons because I wasn't able to go with her and sport because we just didn't have the capacity. And in social situations, she clings to me in a way that she never used to. She's seen her mum in hospital more times than any child should, and she worries about me in ways that five-year-olds shouldn't have to. She's aware that Mummy might not always be here. She's only five I've got another surgery coming up in July, and even though it's minor compared to the previous surgeries, she'll see Mummy in hospital again. And we've tried to shield her. I just say that Mummy has sore boobies, but she's intuitive And then during my third diagnosis, my auntie's breast cancer came back and it had spread to her bones and her organs. She died in Germany and I didn't get to see her or say goodbye. And my mum, already navigating her own stuff, watching her daughter go through this, then lost her sister from the same disease. Both her sister and her daughter at the same time. I can't imagine how that felt And then just before my diagnosis this time, I also lost Elsie, my cat, and she'd been with me through my divorce, through previous cancers, through every hard season of my life, and then she was gone, and that one hurt much harder than I expected The thing about grief is it doesn't leave, it just changes form. I can still cry thinking about my dad, and that was 10 years ago. And we've been sold this story about grief that doesn't always apply or serve us, that it has stages, that it ends, and that if you're still sad about something years later, then you're not doing it right. And that's not been my experience. Grief is just love in a different form, and somewhere in that it opens into something else, something deeper And the mystics have always known about this. John of the Cross wrote about the dark night of the soul, a period of spiritual desolation in which everything the self has relied upon is stripped away. The soul being emptied so it can hold something larger Rumi's entire body of work is the poetry of longing and loss. The Inanna myth, which we've woven through this whole season, is another version of the same story Across traditions, the same understanding appears, that there are passages in a human life that can't be fast-forwarded. That grief, when you actually feel it rather than manage it, is one of the most powerful forces for transformation there is. Because grief, when you let it in, does something else. It breaks open the version of you that was held together by the things that were never really true. It strips things away and leaves something real underneath And here's what I know from the other side of it. Grief reminds me of what matters. It points me to the things that I value, what mattered then, and what still matters now. And my values haven't changed through any of this. If anything, they've become clearer Now, I want to be clear that I don't feel like a victim of my circumstances. I moved through that a long time ago. I don't sit around and go, "Poor me," or, "Why did this happen?" Instead, what I feel is that my circumstances have led me somewhere that I wouldn't have gone willingly, into the dark places that I would never have chosen for myself. I feel like I was being initiated And all the philosophical and spiritual knowledge I've gathered over the last 20 years, at some point I had to stop knowing it and start living it, and cancer did that I put everything I understood in theory and put it to test in real-life conditions. And it turns out that there's an enormous difference between understanding something intellectually and actually embodying it when your life falls apart Now, I also sense, and I find it hard to articulate this without sounding like a full weirdo, which I am, by the way, but I still have my head screwed on. I also sense that this happened at a particular moment for a reason. The world is on the cusp of a great change. I can feel it. You can probably feel it. Psycho-spiritual work, the connection to the self, our capacity to feel what we're going through, these are gonna matter more, not less, in the years ahead. The veil is thinning. We're starting to see the flaws in that material reductionist viewpoint. Consciousness is becoming the new frontier, and people are gonna need better tools for what the rest of the decade brings. And I feel like I had to fall apart and put myself back together for this particular moment. I believe that in my soul Now, there's a theme that I really wanna highlight, and it's one that we've all fallen into at times, myself included That healing and recovery is not intellectual I know people who've been working on themselves for decades. They can describe their patterns with precision. They know the terminology. They understand on a cognitive level why they are the way they are, and yet nothing changes. Because knowing something is not the same as feeling, and feeling is the only thing that actually moves anything. The only way to alchemize the pain, to genuinely turn it into something lighter, is to go into it. You have to feel the feelings that you've been suppressing. That is the path. That is the salve to all the suffering And this season has me feeling the feelings I didn't always let myself feel when I was in survival mode. The grief, the anger, the terror, the dread, and it's been uncomfortable as fuck But there's a lightness on the other side that I couldn't have gotten to any other way So if you're dealing with grief right now for a loss, for a life that didn't go as planned, for a version of yourself that's gone, you're allowed to have that grief. You don't have to be over it by now. You don't have to find the silver lining. You don't have to get over it or recover from it so that other people around you can be more comfortable. Grief isn't a problem to be solved. It's love with nowhere to go Let yourself grieve what you've lost, the version of yourself you expected to be by now, and let it be as big as it actually is. Because on the other side of actually feeling it, there's something that emerges from grief, and it's the ability to be truly present with another person in their own darkness, and a love and compassion for the harshness of life that can only arise from confronting your own suffering Now, the next episode is the final one in this season, and I'm gonna bring the whole season together and talk about what life looks like from here, what I carry with me for the rest of my life, and what I hope you carry out of this season. But one more thing before you go. If this show has given you something, leaving a review on Spotify or Apple does more than you'd think. It helps new listeners find us, the people who really might need to hear this message. And to thank you for your review, just email me a screenshot of your review, and I'll give you a free week of yoga with me. Until then, take care, and I'll see you in the next one