In my life, it’s hard to think of a more powerless experience (other than childhood) than my first diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.

That in itself is traumatic.

But when added to all the powerless and limiting thoughts that you are conditioned to think throughout your life, you can be left feeling like the life you dream about is an impossibility.

So, I created this episode to let you know that isn’t true.

When you can bring awareness to three ways of thinking that keep you stuck and convinced that you can’t have more.

You can start to change anything from your relationships to your job to your passions.

Check out this episode now and start breaking through the thoughts that limit you.

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Read the full transcript:

You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis. If you're looking for a way to create a life, that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

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Hello, friends, welcome to episode 342. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. And I'm happy to be here kicking off the month of May the month of mental health awareness. And I want to address mental health awareness right off the bat. Because when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I finished the treatment, part of it, the act of treatment, the chemo, the surgeries, and I had the goal of getting healthy again. I thought that that meant diet, exercise, cleanses, supplements, all the physical, tangible things. And I did not even begin to think about the emotional piece of it. And the trauma of it. And the difficulty in perceptions, both how my perception of my life and the world changed. And how perceptions of people around me maybe didn't change. Some of them did. Right. Some of them looked at me differently. And some of them went back to the old mentality that we tend to go to have you lived your good, let's go. Let's go back to normal. And there's just a big gap in between perceptions and how do you manage those perceptions? How do you manage your own new desires or your changed desires, the way that you see your life the way you want to see your life the way you see you the way you want to see you. There's so many things that go on. And yet, when we find a lump in our bus, when a mammogram says we see something, we are all over that we are in the doctor, we are getting biopsies. The biopsy says it's malignant when's the next appointment? When what do you do? How do you help me? How do I save my life, when we notice that the organ between our ears, the organ in our skull, that our brain is not working quite the same that it used to work, we dishonor ourselves, we don't give it the attention that it needs and deserves. We pile shame on top of that judgment on top of ourselves in I have a very close experience with mental health. And I'm going to call it mental health because I don't want to call it mental illness necessarily. It's just like when I look at the body, I'm not focused on cancer, I'm focused on healing. And when it comes to the mind, I'm not focused on the illness, I'm focused on the support and the health of the brain and the health of the mental and emotional state. And maybe that takes a little bit of judgment and shame off of it. Because we're not looking at like, Oh, I'm sick in the head kind of thing. And you know, it makes sense, because it's not been that long, that we've addressed mental health and looked at mental health, for the good that it is, for the necessity that it is right there's a long history of looking at mental illness of judging people as being possessed are having demons in them or calling them crazy and judging people as if they're not good enough if they're struggling with their mental health. So that adds a lot of the perception. And as human beings, we tend to think from the past, we tend to think from past patterns, past experiences, past behaviors, past perceptions. And that's kind of what this show is about today to how do we start thinking with the different mind, so that we stop limiting our lives, so that we stop shaming ourselves so that we open ourselves to opportunities, we open ourselves to the possibility that something else is out there into account when it comes to mental health that we open ourselves to the possibility that you deserve self love, that you deserve support, that you deserve treatment and that sometimes treatment may mean that you get some kind of treatment or you get some kind of medication just to get the chemicals in the brain working right again, so that you can start doing the intentional thought work you need to support your own mental health, right? We've got to remember that the brain is driven by many different mechanisms and chemicals are one of them. neurotransmitters, hormones, these things affect our brain, chemotherapy, drugs, radiation, all of this stuff affects our brain metabolic health, gut health. So it's not just like oh, I don't think Right or something's wrong with me or I'm crazy. It's, it's the experience of I'm not as well as I think I should be. Right? I don't feel well, I don't feel like my emotional and mental state is optimal right now. And when you recognize that you deserve support in that. So I just want to start off this podcast with addressing mental health because it is important. And I said a minute ago, I have a close experience with it. Because many people in my family struggle with depression, with anxiety, with addictions, addiction disorders. I've seen it very close, it's touched my life. Some of my children struggle with these emotional states. One of them was in a particularly difficult time, during the whole lockdown experience, and his mental health gotten filled, emotional, just, it's all coming back. It was a very scary time. And we got him help, thank God, he wanted help. He reached out thank God for that. But when he got the help, and I kept him here with me to make sure that everything was going smoothly, and he was okay. You know, it's a scary thing, when we're not experiencing optimal mental health is very frightening, the same way as not experiencing physical optimal health, right? When someone says you got a disease, the people who love us and we go into fear, because we don't want to die. We don't want to be incapacitated. And so there's fear also around mental health, especially for people who love us. And I think that we tend to go one way or the other, right, it's like, get help, or you can get past it. Right, I hear way, way, way too often, someone struggling with mental and emotional health and their loved one saying, You're stronger than that you can get through it, you can push through it. There are times when maybe you shouldn't push through something. Right? There are times when maybe put your big girl panties on and move forward isn't the best solution. And that's something I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the fact that there are so many opportunities available to us. And we can limit ourselves by thinking from our past brains. So when my child was struggling with this, and he was here with us, he got on medication, he was doing so much better after a few days. And then he went right into judging himself right into the fear of well, what if I have to be on this the rest of my life? And judging that I'm not good, or something's wrong with me if I have to be on medication, the rest of my life just to feel good? And I said to him at the time, what if I had to be on chemotherapy the rest of my life to live? When we judge me for doing that? Like? Certainly not? So why do we put shame on one part of our body needing health, health support? And not the other? You know, what are the options available to us? And why do we limit ourselves to these polarizing thought patterns so often in life? So I want to start off, I want to share with you this made me think a lot about well, let me back up this month in my better than before breast cancer membership. We're focusing on living a life without limits. We're looking at how we limit ourselves, how we limit ourselves to our language, our words and through thinking from an old brain pattern. And how can we change that, to open new opportunities to love ourselves more to invite more abundance into our life. And then when people hear abundance, their mind often go straight to money, which there's nothing wrong with that. And in fact, after a breast cancer diagnosis, working on manifesting financial abundance is important. Because more often than not, I see people go straight into financial scarcity and fear. And that adds more stress. So what if we could adopt abundant thinking, when it comes to finances, when it comes to health, when it comes to love when it comes to relationships when it comes to fitness? When it comes to fun? What if we can move into allowing ourselves to think from a place of abundance instead of going to these long conditioned patterns of scarcity and fear? Now, I think two things, the scarcity and fear is very real. And we were taught to think it for good reasons. One, because so for me from my generation, I was born in 1963. I'm 60 years old, my parent, my mom is 83. So in her generation, there weren't the opportunities that exist now for us as many opportunities right? There was hard work and there was exchanging dollars for hours. So I was taught to work hard, actually, I was taught to grow up and be a good wife so that I would get a good husband who worked hard and could take care of me because being born in 1963 and being raised by a mom who was born in the 1940s women didn't have any kind of power. We didn't have economic power. Right, we didn't have very much autonomy. It wasn't until the mid 1970s, that we in the United States, females were allowed to open a bank account or sign a lease without a man signing for us. So we haven't had a long experience with independence, with abundance with autonomy. So it totally makes sense that we go to scarcity because it's familiar. Right? insecurity and scarcity is very familiar to humans. And I think it's very familiar to women dependency, scarcity, fear, there's a lot of it. But what if it didn't have to be that way? And this is a great question. Any time we are in a thought pattern, where we see we're limiting ourselves, and we're limiting our life, what if you ask yourself that question, what if it didn't have to be this way? What are the other options, because a lot of times, I'll hear the thought pattern, people feel limited. They're living a life, they don't want to live there in an experience or situation or circumstance that they don't like, but their thought is, there is no option. I hear this. Oftentimes, when I'm going through cancer treatment, I didn't have a choice. A couple of weeks ago, I was working on a project with a group of other people who either are in the cancer experience or are surviving or have survived a cancer experience. And I was really kind of blown away by how many times I heard the statement, I didn't have a choice, there was no choice. And I always think, well, there's always a choice. Those choices, as I've talked about before, might both suck, but they are still choices, right? If we get a diagnosis of breast cancer, and the doctor says, Here's my recommendation, here's what I see. And I think you should do chemotherapy. And I think you should have this surgery. And here's what I want to put on the calendar for you. You have a choice to say no. Or if you say yes, will there be consequences of either of those choices? Absolutely. But it's still a choice. And I think it's really important to own that, then even when we would rather not choose something with the options that are presented to us are always a choice. And the reason I think that's important comes again, back to personal power, when we realize I made a choice to do this. And our mind goes right? Well, I didn't have a choice, I had to, we never have to, we never have to. But if we're not dealing with the consequence of not doing something, or we're not dealing with the consequence, not willing to deal with the consequence of doing something that may have consequences we don't like. And we just have to make a choice between the two, it's always a choice. So even saying I've got a couple of shitty choices here. And this is the one I made because I believe it's the best thing for me, that allows you to step into some power that allows you not to be powerless in your life and in your treatment and in your health. So when we're saying I don't have a choice, we're limiting ourselves even more. And I gotta tell you, as someone who follows a metabolic approach to healing and health and life, there are so many options available to me, in addition to options that are given to me through standard of care. And for me, that's an incredibly powerful place to be. And as I work with clients on their metabolic health, and they start to understand different ways to see what their bloodwork is telling them what their genetics are telling them. The different way that tweaking their diet affects their clarity of their mind, their energy levels during the day, their moods, and they start to realize, oh my god, there are more tools available to me, there are more options available to me. And their thought process used to be it was this or that. Or it used to be like this is an unhealthy diet, right? processed food, fast food, we think of unhealthy diet. This is a healthy diet, Whole Foods, whatever they may be. But maybe some of those Whole Foods didn't serve those people. And they were still experiencing negative side effects, even from good Whole Foods, right doesn't mean it's bad food. But once they explore once they were willing to say, let me check out these options you're presenting. In the experience, the benefit is transformational. Right, their life change, the world changes. They feel so much better. So why, especially when it comes to cancer, and to health. Why would we ever limit ourselves? This is a great question as like, why wouldn't I be open to hearing about tools that are available to me, options that are available to me? And I mean that in both ways, like I don't I don't look at anything as being off the table. When it comes to saving my life and improving my health. All things are options, and I'm happy to listen to those options and decide which ones are best for me. So, anyway, that was really a tangent. So one of the things that inspired me to talk about this today was the fact that we are working on living a life without limits which always comes back to the way you think about your life. And if you want to do that for yourself, and you want some help, and some coaching and some guidance with that come and join the better than before breast cancer membership this month, because it will definitely support your mental health. But aside from that, I'm reading this fantastic book. It's called Well, I read it, it's called the midnight library. So one of my friends recommended it. And as I'm reading the midnight library, there's three different quotes that just stuck out to me and resonated so deeply with me, especially because we're so focused right now. And I'm coaching a lot on letting go of things that limit you, right, opening yourself to more opportunities. So I want to read this quote to you, because I think it's pretty spectacular. So this is it, these are two characters, and they're interacting, and one character is playing a game of chess. And so she's using a chess analogy to explain something to a different character in the book. And this is what she says, at the beginning of a game, there are no variations, there's only one way to set up a board. There are 9 million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves, there are 288 billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing, there are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the number of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy, and there's no right way to play. There are many ways in chess, as in life possibility is the basis of everything, every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living. I freaking love that. And one of the things I love in particular is the statement, there is no right way to play. We, again, are raised and conditioned and conditioned in our society with this polarized thinking, you know, it's this way or that way, it's good or it's bad, it's healthy, or it's not healthy. It's red, or it's blue. But what if it didn't have to be? What if there was no right way except what's right for you, and you allow yourself to explore those possibilities, when she talks about the billions of possible ways to move to make a chess move. I think about all the different versions and possibilities in life, if we're willing to make different choices. And if we're willing to deal with and manage the consequences of those choices, and consequences doesn't always mean something negative, right? It just may be something challenging, may be something different, maybe something unfamiliar, it may be something that's hard, emotionally to go through, that it may end up creating a really good result for you. So we limit ourselves oftentimes by saying, I can't do that, when the truth is, I could do that. But I'm afraid of the reaction I might get. I could do that. But I don't know where it would lead me. And this is another point. We're so in fear of the unknown. And something about getting a cancer diagnosis makes the unknown, very glaring, it's suddenly in our face, we're suddenly saying, I don't know, if I'm gonna get a recurrence. I don't know if I should make those plans because maybe something will go wrong in my body. I don't know, if I'm going to be here in a week. I don't know if I'm gonna be here in six months. But the truth of that is, you never knew that no one ever knows that. We see babies lose their lives, children, teenagers, 20 year olds, 30 year olds, people who don't have cancer, lose their lives every day. So it's always the unknown. Anything that's happening outside of this very minute that you're in is unknown. Anything that's in the future, you have no idea what it's going to be. But again, we train ourselves to think a certain way that we can just expect things to go according to plan. But it isn't true. Right? We never know what's coming. And yet when we realize that, because one day your life changes one day, you get a phone call and a diagnosis, and suddenly you have a different life. So that trauma in and of itself, that shift that pulling the rug out from under you, causes you to go into fear and to see clearly that you never know what's coming. Right? At you never did. So when we're in that kind of fear. We tend to play small, we tend to limit ourselves more, we tend to look at things from a place of fear. And that brings me to another quote from the midnight library. This is a quote one of the characters favorite favorite philosophers is the row. And so she quotes throw in the book and she says it's not what you look at that matters. It's what you see.

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And what you see what you're willing to see where you're willing to look at. That is going to make make a huge difference in your ability to be open and grow and expand in your life, to be open to new opportunities to be open to creating the life that you want to live. I have said this before, like we don't get well in the same life that we got sick in. But sometimes we're not willing to change, we're not willing to see that there are other possibilities that exist for us. And this is a good thing to explore. When you find yourself in this is a famous word stuck. When you're stuck here. If you hear yourself say, I've been stuck here for a while, when you're stuck. This is the time to ask yourself the question, what if it could be a different way? What if it didn't have to be this or that? What if I decided to go that way, and figure out how to deal with the things that come one step at a time to create the life that I want. When we are allowing ourselves to be stuck between two decisions or two belief systems this way or that way black and white, this really undermines our mental health, it fills our brain was so many thoughts, there's no space to take care of ourselves. When you find yourself in that situation, and you're just stuck there like I've been here for so long. It's a great time to say, what if there's an option I haven't thought of, and then just allow yourself to explore, I highly recommend doing thought downloads in that kind of situation. And giving yourself the opportunity to just say if anything were possible, what are all of the possibilities? And then you go back and you go through those thoughts? And you say, okay, is that possibility available to me? Any possibilities available to you? So what consequences might choosing that possibility bring into my life? Am I willing to manage those consequences? Am I willing to manage those changes, this is how we start to move forward. And this is how we start to grow. And to support our mental health to you know, there's something about reaching beyond a familiar limit. There's something that allows us to grow and expand when we say, I'm gonna go for this impossible dream, right. And I love to set these goals for myself, I call it the impossible goal. Why? Because it's so huge, that the chances of me hitting it are who knows infinity like I'm not a mathematician, but they're big, right? So let's say that my impossible goal is to have no evidence of disease to heal from metastatic breast cancer. I go to any doctor and the standard of care. And they'll tell me that's not possible because there's no cure, this is not curable. But I get to see what I choose to see. And I won't see that as non curable. I won't limit myself to saying I'm not cured, because how can I heal myself? How do I let my body heal? If I believe it can't help? I can't do that. Right? How do I believe that I

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can create the next thing if I don't believe in myself. So using questions to help us open our eyes to other possibilities, even when they feel scary, is something that's really cool to explore. Because I tell my clients this all the time, let's just explore it, it doesn't mean we have to do it. It doesn't mean you have to change anything. It just means I want you to become more aware of the possibilities that exist for you, in whatever area of life you're working on. This is how we get unstuck. And then the next question that comes up when we realize there are other possibilities. There's an impossible dream. And this is the thing about those impossible dreams. I set like to set goals so big because it isn't about hitting the goal. And that's a foreign concept, right? What do you mean, you set a goal that you know you're not going to hit? It's about what kind of person do I have to become to achieve that? And then allowing yourself to be in the moment. So I see so often, that my clients tell themselves they're failing, tell themselves things aren't working. They have no patience, right? They've established a timeline in their mind. So let's say for instance, that they come to me and they say, Hey, I want you to help me learn how to get into ketosis. Let's take a look at my lifestyle. I want you to help me understand this metabolic approach. And we start working on it. And the next week, we get together for a coaching call, right? It didn't work, right? I couldn't stay in it, I fell out. It's like, it's been a week. It's been seven days of trying to understand how your body works. So we have this expectation that everything should happen just like that. And we have to ask ourselves, when we're in this process of working towards a goal, are we willing to be in it for as long as it takes to get there? Or we only willing to do it for a specific amount of time? And if we don't hit that goal in that time, then we're going to say it didn't work. Right. So when you want to live a life without limits Asians is a really big piece of that, because it's about the evolution. It's about what you grow into. So as me being someone who's healed from metastatic breast cancer, I had to examine my relationship with food, I had to open my mind to the value of other tools, I had to allow myself to prick my finger multiple times a day and test my blood, I had to open my mind to other options that were available to me. And then I had to be patient enough to learn along the way. And then I had to be open to setbacks. And knowing sometimes I wouldn't feel like doing the things that were right for me. And then I have to examine what am I going through? And that happens, I wouldn't just say, when I fall off the wagon, so to speak, that I'm a failure, I'd say, Oh, what, what came up for me? Why did I stop following the program for this amount of time? What was it I was thinking, when I decided I didn't want to take those supplements for the last two weeks, you know, what's going on with me. So it's really about the process of growth, and just truly being in your life, in the moment of your life without judging it or putting a timeline on it. That is Living without limits. So when I talk about these things with people, they want to know how, how how, and there are some steps that we can follow for many, many things in life for whatever it is that you're dealing with, to help yourself feel optimally joyful, happy and fulfilled. There are many steps, but we don't know how, until we try them. It's just like this question that a lot of women get stuck in that I deal with that I coach with, and I'll hear them say, they just are racking their brain for why they got breast cancer. They don't understand how they don't understand why. And then they don't understand how to move forward, how to change it, how to think differently. And here's my third and final quote from the midnight library for this podcast that just so stood out to me, because this is such an important thing to remember. The quote is you don't have to understand life, you just have to live it. This is so important. Because it's only in living it. It's only in being in the experience, being willing to make choices, being willing to be flexible, being willing to try new things, being willing to let go of past belief systems that hold you back, that keep you from experiencing your optimal health and enjoyable life. It's only in doing those things that you figure out what's right for you, and what works for you, and what doesn't work for you, and how it works for you. And when it works for you. And when it changes, right, we have to allow ourselves to be in the experience. And when it comes to our mental health, I see these things create so much suffering, the lack of patience, the timelines that we pressure ourselves to meet the inability to open our mind to explore what other options might be available to us in every aspect of our life. And the fear of moving forward without knowing how you're supposed to do it. Those three things can cause so much suffering, so much overwhelmed, so much anxiety, and so much depression. Wherever you're at, if you're ready to start looking at them, if you're ready to start exploring them, if you're ready to start writing down areas in your life, where you're not willing to look at other things, or where you've told yourself your whole life that it's this way or that way, it has to be this or that because in this world that we live in now is very different from the world, I was raised in and raised with many, many limiting beliefs that I've had to overcome throughout my life. And you are fortunate to share in that timeline with me that sometimes we just have to open our mind to if I take that step I've been wanting to take if I pursue that dream that I've been wanting to go after, maybe it would be possible for me. And again, that can be any area of your life, relationships, health, business, money, creativity, anything, right? If we're willing to look at the options, and then finally, giving ourselves permission to just take small steps and figure it out along the way. Because we don't know how we get there until we get there. All right. I hope this is the kickoff to something that can help you support your optimal mental health throughout the month of May. And there is no better time if you are ready to really dig into that to really commit to yourself. Come and join me in the better than before breast cancer membership. Or come and do private coaching with me. You can get all the details and all the different ways to work with me on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com And the value you will find there for yourself. The tools and building the skills to support yourself, love yourself more will enrich your life. Hey beyond maybe what you've limited yourself To believe you could do all right. So check it out breast cancer recovery coach.com Click on coaching and programs and I will talk to you very soon. Until then, take very good care of yourself.