#149 I Am Here For You

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Have you ever whispered to yourself, "I am here for you"?

Perhaps it's a phrase you seldom, if ever, directed inwardly.

While diving into the words of Zen Monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, I encountered this profound idea of being truly present for oneself.

The essence of it is a radical act of self-love and healing. Imagine standing by yourself as steadfastly as you would for a dear friend. Recognizing your needs, and meeting them with compassion.

The power of being your own pillar cannot be underestimated in the journey to a fulfilling life.

But how can we make this a reality?

In this episode, I'll guide you through three easy yet impactful steps to begin nurturing your bond with yourself. It's time to become your own unwavering ally.

 


 

Read full transcript below:

 

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Hi, this is Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm a healthy lifestyle coach, a clinical or Aveda specialist, a personal trainer, and I'm also a breast cancer survivor. In this podcast, we talk about healthy thinking and mindfulness practices, eating well, moving your body for health and longevity. And we'll also hear from other breast cancer survivors who have reengaged with life, and have incredible stories to share. This podcast is your go to resource for getting back to life after breast cancer. Hello, hello, welcome to another episode of the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I am Laura Lummer, your host, I'm so thrilled that you're here with me today. And I want to start off this show with a tremendous thank you to two lovely ladies who took the time to leave a review and a rating for the podcast. And the first one is a Ferguson 207. Pretty sure I know who you are. And thank you so much for taking a moment to leave that review few moments you left a lovely review, and I appreciate it so much. And the other love your username hugs 117 Thank you so so much. And the reviews, I can't even you know, they're great for the podcasts, they help the podcast for sure. But I just can't even tell you how meaningful they are to me when I read them. And I realize that the podcast is really making a difference and helps people and connects to people. And that's everything. You know, that's the whole reason for this. So thanks for letting me know that it makes my day It makes me so happy. And I'm just so grateful. So thanks so much for taking the time. And if you are a regular listener, or if you're new listener, and you love the show, which pretty sure you are gonna love it, then it would be awesome. If you could take the time and take a moment to just scroll down to wherever you're listening to this, I know most of us listen to the podcast on a phone and you can just scroll right down to the bottom and leave a rating and review. So it means a ton for the podcast, it helps it to be shown more so other people who may need to hear it can find that information. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you once again. And I just wanted to leave a quick reminder here, when this podcast comes out. It will be Friday, July 30th. That is the day that we start the better than before breast cancer workshop. It is a coaching workshop, it takes place for one hour a day, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the 30th, the 31st and August 1. And it's a powerful, wonderful experience. And if you're listening to this on Friday, it's cool, you can still come and join, just go to the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash b, T B as in better than before. And you can grab a free seat. And you can just jump in because each call is recorded. So if you miss Friday, no problem. You can come live on Saturday and Sunday. And you will also have a week to go back and review those three days worth of videos and the introductory videos that I already have on the workshop page, as well as the free download on a tool that I use for coaching in my membership programs. So if you're listening to it, and it's still workshop weekend, jump in and join us, you're never too late. And then this is also the final weekend to join my online monthly membership coaching program revived. The revived membership experience is something that I created, so that women who are looking for support after their diagnosis and their treatment for breast cancer could find a community and have coaching and be able to do the work on themselves and learn the tool to continue to coach themselves through this difficult period. And not just in recovering from breast cancer but just in working out life after breast cancer. Because if you're listening to this, you already know that things change. Right? And how do you process that change. So the revived membership is open through for enrollment through the end of July through July 31 until 11:59pm On Saturday, so jump in join me you will love it. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose. All right. I'm gonna get into the show finally, right? If you're new listener, like oh, god the commercials, so we move on. So I first I want to give credit where credit is due. So the title for this episode is I am here for you. And I use that title because I read it in a book by chick not Han. And it just resonated with me. It made so much sense. And I'm going to give you a couple of quotes out of that book too. So it's a book that I went back and I've been rereading. It's called you are here in it's an awesome book. It's a quick read. It's a small book. I think it's probably not more than that. 100 And I don't know, maybe 130 pages, 150 pages, something like that. So it's an easy read. And I remember really loving this book. And as I've shared with you before, you know, at this point in my life, I work daily on just understanding connecting to my body, understanding what it is that I need to do to heal, and just being very, very present with myself with my body and in this life. And so I was reading this book rereading this book, you know, I earmark things and underlying things. That's just how I read make notes to myself. And I came across this saying, and I thought, there's actually two two quotes that I want to share with you. And I thought, this is so important, this is so powerful, and so important to know. So the first one that I want to share with you is a quote from Chapter Two, the heart of practice. And in this, he says, in daily life, we are often lost in thought, we get lost in regrets about the past and fears about the future, we get lost in our plans, our anger and our anxiety. And At such moments, we cannot really be here for ourselves, we are not really here for life. And I thought, wow, that is really a lot to think about, isn't it? And it's so true. Because when our mind is everywhere, but here, when our mind is judging ourselves and comparing ourselves and rethinking and ruminating on everything that happened in the past, and all the mistakes we've made and what we could have done different, what did we do wrong? Or it's in the future of what do we need to do? And what is this going to look like? And how long am I going to have to deal with this, and we're missing everything, we're missing this moment. And I'm going to talk to you about three different ways to be here for you. Be here for yourself now. Because oftentimes, saying, I am here for you to yourself, making commitment to care about yourself. And being in the present moment with a ton of awareness is so challenging. Because all that stuff you're telling yourself about the past and the future. It's there, right? It's hanging out in between your ears, and you have to think about it. And you have to process it. And you have to consider the thoughts that you have and the conditioning you have and ask yourself, Why am I thinking like this? How is this serving me? How is this helping me to heal and to establish myself in my life and have the life that I want to lead? When I have all this stuff in my brains, we turn on the radio, we turn on Netflix, we go get a ding dong out of the pantry, something to avoid having to be in this moment, right? It's so much easier to do what we've always been used to worry about what we did in the past worry about what might happen in the future. But life is only happening right here, right now. And it is a practice to be able to be here in this moment, and to be here for yourself. So let's talk about that a little more. When I have new women come into my program, I'm going to say hands down. The biggest challenge is caring for themselves. They are really good at beating themselves up over the things they say the way they look how they feel, how they shouldn't feel. They struggle, and they fight with pain and fatigue and fear. And they say to me, I'm the strong one. I'm the person everybody goes to. I am the rock. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with being those things to people. As long as you're being there for yourself

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first. Because friends, if your cup isn't full, then you don't really have that to give to someone else. So when you're the rock and you are the strong one and you're the go to person and you're taking care of everything, but you win, I am here for you to everyone else, but I'm not here for you to me, then what are you really doing? This is what I hear. I'm so drained. I'm so exhausted. I'm so tired. And if you think about that in the wet that's the way that you always been. Look where it got you. You know, look, were not being there for yourself got you to this point in life. And consider this. Not only are you draining and exhausting yourself because you're telling yourself you have to be there for everybody else. But when we do that we really rob others our loved ones are champions maybe it's people at work in the work environment. that you feel like you have to do everything for, but we're taking an opportunity away from those other people, right? How did you get to be the strong one, I hear stories all the time, I was left in charge, I had to last a mom, really mom had to work, I took care of the young ones, how did you become that person that can handle stuff and take care of stuff and make good decisions, because you were put in a position where you had to. And you probably learned by your mistakes, and you probably made a lot of mistakes, but you learned so you know, you can count on yourself. And when we don't allow other people to pick up some slack for themselves, right, we don't allow other people to learn from their mistakes, or to realize how much that they can handle, then one, they miss an opportunity for their own growth. But two, they miss an opportunity to be there for you. They miss the opportunity to be the person that you can lean on. And I hear this all the time, I do this that the other thing for other people, but I don't have anyone to lean on. Well, you haven't let anyone around you develop and be on their own and take care of themselves. And in addition to that, I'm pretty sure that I can say this with competence. You haven't expressed your needs, you might not even know your own needs. Because how many times have you been there for you? I can definitely reflect back on my life when my children were young, I have four children. And I was a single parent for many years, and worked a very demanding job. So I can look back at that. And I can just see holy cow, I can see where I was never there for me, because I was trying to make ends meet. And I was trying to get the kids where they needed to be and help with homework and make healthy meals and sending traffic and all the things that had to be done. So when I looked back, and I see a lot of stress in those earlier times in my life, compared to now where I've learned and evolved over the years, and now I don't have little children. So it's easier to make time, let me state that I truly understand the difficulty in making time for yourself when you do have small children. But that's why you have to make it a priority so that you can be there for you, you may not have as much time, but you have to have some time. Because the difference now is that when I make sure and that I make time for myself that I feel calm and fulfilled, then when my kids who are adults now, but still obviously are dealing with challenges of life, and they come to me, or my husband comes to me and there are issues or there's the things they need support with, I am fulfilled, I am whole. So I feel good about being there and being supportive. And I also know where my boundaries are, and how much I can do and how much I have to offer. So it makes a huge difference when we are trying to support our health, whether it's to get through treatment, whether it's coming out on the other side of treatment and saying, Well, how do I take care of myself now? What do I do with this feeling of being lost and not fitting and being confused by life and seeing life differently and having a different perspective, and then you're just not there for yourself? And you say, Well, I guess I just have to trudge on and do what everyone else expects of me. This is the second quote that I want to share with you. And I think this brings us to exactly the right point. The second quote from the book you are here that I thought was so meaningful, is love is treating your heart with a great deal of tenderness with understanding, love and compassion. If you cannot treat your own heart this way, how can you treat your partner with any understanding and love. And I think that goes for so many people in our life, not just our partners, but loved ones, colleagues, neighbors, it's very hard when we don't treat ourselves well, to treat other people as well as we have the potential to do. So what the hell do you do with that? Right? How do you make the shift? How do I suddenly be there for me? You know, I talk a lot about, you know, this shift, this really big shift that I had, from the idea of fighting cancer, to the idea of healing my body and connecting to my body and treating myself with compassion. And I think that that kind of a mindset shift works also, when you're beginning the practice of being there for yourself. And it is a practice, right. And I'm going to talk about that. I told you I'm going to give you three things you can do so I'll talk about that in a minute. But something I think that's important to keep top of mind is this question rather than fighting exhaustion and fatigue, fighting heartache fighting pain, which just leads to more suffering. I, you know, when I, when I hear and talk and work with women who are really frustrated by the aftermath of cancer treatment, and the medications we stay on for a long time, and they say, you know, there's just so much fatigue, and there is fatigue, it exists, it is real. And it's a very real side effect. But the pain and the suffering comes in when we're fighting the fatigue, rather than honoring it, rather than noticing my body is very fatigued. Now. What do I need to do here? Do I need to hydrate it more? Do I need to feed it better? Do I need more sleep? Do I need to take a nap? Do I need to I remember when I was at work and for during chemo, and for quite a while afterwards, I was so exhausted, that I kept a beanbag chair in my office, because I had to shut off lights and shut the door and take a nap during lunch breaks. I just had to there were some times where I had to get to the office early because just getting there and then getting from my car into the office was so friggin exhausting. I needed a nap. So I'd get there a little bit early. And I'd set my alarm for 15 minutes, and I would fall asleep and five seconds. And my alarm would wake me up in 15 minutes. I'm like, okay, I can get in and get my day started. I mean, I had to find ways to manage that fatigue. So when I talk about shifting from fighting to healing, and being there for yourself, I think it's important to shift from fighting all the side effects we have and getting curious about them. And embracing them and saying, Okay, I'm really tired right now. I'm not going to frustrate myself even more on top of that, I'm going to be there for me, what does that entail? What do I need to do? How do I need to treat myself? Alright, so really considering where you're still fighting your own body? Because you're telling yourself I'm fighting this because cancer as if it's some external thing did this to me. And I hate cancer and screw cancer and failing to acknowledge that cancer was a part of your body? And I get it. I sure do get it I sure do get hating it and being angry about it in screw cancer. But is it serving you? You know, and the emotions that it brings up? Are those serving you? Or could you sit and say, Well, I'm recognizing this is happening in my body? I recognize I'm having pain here. What does this mean? How what can I do for myself, instead of fighting it and becoming exhausted and emotional, right, and be very emotionally draining. So let's talk about three things that you can start to do to be there for yourself. Number one is really asking yourself truly and I mean that it sounds so simple that we bypass it, but it's so powerful. Ask yourself daily, how can I be here for myself today? That's it.

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How can I be here for myself today? What do you need to feel fulfilled? And put that on a sticky note, put it on a mirror? How can I be there for me today? How can I show up for myself today, put it on your steering wheel, put it on your phone with a little alarm. So it goes off multiple times during the day. And it's got the little reminder, you know, you set your alarm on your phone, you can have it go off and you can put a note put the note, how can I be here for myself today? Make it a practice, because it's been a long time that you haven't been there for yourself. So now you have to create a new practice. And you have to retrain your brain to be thinking, Am I exhausting myself and draining myself? Or am I recognizing what I need? Am I getting curious about what I need? Or I'm just in my fighting my own body in my own life here? All right. So very simple question every day, we make it a practice and throughout the day. Because when you're beginning of practice, it can be very delicate, and it can slip away very easily. So find something in your life, some weights incorporate in your life, where you're asking yourself, What can I do to show up for myself today? How can I be there for me? A second thing is drop the judgment. So I touched on this just a little bit. But when we judge ourselves, I can't do this anymore. I used to be able to do this. I'm so frustrated. I'm judging myself on my pre cancer or my precancerous version of myself, then you have to stop and say is that being there for you? If you say I'm here for you, but you're judging, you know, if I came to you and I was your best friend, and I said to you, my God, I've been through this and I'm just exhausted. And I'm just really struggling. I have fought brain fog throughout the day. Are you going to look at me and say, Well, you know, I'm really tired of hearing that from you. And I really liked you better before you had cancer because yeah, this is ridiculous. I mean, look at you look good you If you're tired all the time I hear you complaining about your knees hurting. I mean, yeah, get over yourself. Is that what you to do? Is that what you're going to offer to somebody that you love? I sure hope not. So that practice becomes dropping the judgment on yourself. So when you ask yourself, how do I be there for me? You be there by embracing yourself by giving yourself grace and dropping judgment, and exchanging that judgment, for curiosity, what am I feeling? What is happening? And how can I be there for me right now. And then, a third thing that you can do is really be flexible, be flexible, and be open to options. And this ties in a little bit with comparing our life to our pre cancer life. Because a lot of times, just like, I'll hear women say, Well, I've always been like that. And I've always done that. And I'm the strong one, and I'm there for everybody. We still cling to routines, that maybe aren't serving us anymore in life. And we say, well, I have to do this. And this is just what has to be done. And I would just urge you to challenge those thoughts, and challenge the way that you went through life, if you ended up being sick and exhausted by life, and look back at it and say, Is this the only way it can be done? Is there a different option, maybe that's out there, for whatever it is, for the way you manage the kids or the way you manage the house, or the way you manage the job, or whatever it is, whatever that thing is, that's draining you and exhausting you and that you're saying, I wish I had time to go to a yoga class, but I can't because all these things have to be done? Do they? Do they really have to be done? Because I have found that going through my life in simplifying my life, and deciding what is really meaningful, and what has the most impact gets my attention. And the other things that I don't know were busy work that I told myself or expectations other people had, when they fall by the wayside. Guess what the world keeps turning, life keeps going on. There's just like, going through your house and purging the junk drawers and the closets and, you know, the old shoes or whatever, whatever. And you say, Oh, look, I still have enough clothes to get dressed. You might be surprised at what happens when you look at the extraneous things in life, the pressures you put on yourself, the pressures that you tell yourself, or demands that you put on you or because you say other people expected of you. And that if you let them go, the world won't fall apart. And it might be a lot easier to show up for yourself. And I know when I say that, that can sound really scary, right? Because like, wow, you've already changed a lot, you've already been through a lot, a lot has happened for you now you're going to change more. And so I just want to add into that. Don't change everything at once. Start with the little things. Start with the simple things. And then don't scare yourself, when you're starting with those simple things. And you're saying, Well, I'm going to start changing this one thing so that I can have 10 more minutes of time for myself today. Or I'm going to book a massage a month. You know, a lot of times we can say, oh, people will think I'm selfish? Or what will people think? Or what if I change too much? And people don't like me? What if I get really healthy and my friends who aren't healthy? What if I stopped drinking, and my friends who do drink they won't like me anymore? And I just have to tell you stop. When you want to be there for yourself? It is in the moment, right? So just like we're talking about not being in the past not being in the future. It is in this moment, what do I need? In this moment, if I realized, you know what I need to cut back on the amount of alcohol I consume. My body is sending me these signals. That doesn't make me feel good. It's not serving my wellness in the way I want it to. Okay, stop. Don't go past that and start going to well, will Jane and Susie and will we do for Wednesday one night and well. It'll be okay. You'll figure it out. But for now, you have to stop right there and just notice how am I going to be there for me today. And whatever it is that your buddy sends you and says you know what? You're gonna stop eating banana cream pie with the girls at lunch on Thursdays? Well, they're all having banana cream pie they're gonna want me to and you have to just roll it back a little bit and say one more time. How am I going to be there for myself? Remember that saying I am here for you. And just keep telling yourself that your body your mind, I am here for you. Because it's when we get in touch with that sense of ourselves. And when we realize wow, I can love myself. I can say I'm here for you Your day, then that other stuff is not such a struggle, trust me, because it doesn't come from a place of deprivation. It doesn't come from a place of fear. It doesn't come from a place of restriction. Your lifestyle habits start to come from a place of love for you. And answering that question. And being that person that says, I am here for you. Am I here for you today? Yes, I am. What do I need from myself today? And suddenly, changes become easier if you don't let your mind go bananas and run off into the future? Right? So keep bringing it back to that same question. I'm here. Now I'm here. Now, when you catch your mind going off on to next Tuesday. Next, when they say you know what, I'm going to come right back here. I'm just going to look at what I need today. I need a nap. So I'm taking a nap. I'm setting an alarm for 15 minutes. I do this all the time, because I need multiple naps, oftentimes. And I don't want to sleep for an hour or two hours, because there are things that I want to do. But I know in that moment, I need some rest. And so I do I set my alarm for 15 or 20 minutes, and I close my eyes. And those little power naps can be very restorative. So just being in the moment, and then I never say, Well, what if I don't get something done? Because I tell you what, sometimes I can't. And when that happens, I say okay, I need to rest right now. And so I'm not going to be able to get this thing done. Or I'm not going to be able to meet someone for lunch this afternoon. And so I called them up and say, Hey, I'm sorry, but I'm just not up to it. I'm not going to be able to meet you today. And you know what, I haven't lost a single friend. Of course, people are understanding, because everybody needs to be doing what they need for themselves, we need to be taking care of ourselves. And then we can show up as better friends and is better parents and is better lovers as better spouses as better employees. So I'm going to read that quote to you one more time because I want this in your mind, as we close out the show. Love is treating your heart with a great deal of tenderness with understanding love and compassion. If you cannot treat your own heart this way, how can you treat your partner with understanding and love? And I'm just going to fill that in with How can you treat others with understanding and love.

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All right. So the question is, are you there for you? And if not, how do you switch that so you can say I am here for you every day to yourself, I am here for you. You want help with that come to the better than before breast cancer workshop and let's talk it out and let's coach on it. Or take this opportunity to join our monthly coaching program the revived membership because this is the kind of stuff we work on. So you can be better for yourself and you can let go of the guilt and the obligations and the conditioned thoughts that no longer serve the life you want to live. All right. Have a wonderful week i will talk to you next week and until then, Please be good to yourself and expect others to be good to you as well. By now

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use courage to the test laid all your doubts your mind is clearer than before your heart is full and wanting more your futures given all you know you been waiting on

 

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