In this episode of the Breast Cancer Recovery Coach Podcast, we’re talking about a powerful tool in your healing journey and in your day-to-day life: creating inner peace.
Life can be overwhelming, with fears of recurrence, daily stressors, and the challenge of protecting your mental and emotional well-being. In this episode, you’ll discover how cultivating inner calm isn’t just about feeling good in the moment; it’s about supporting your body’s healing and resilience for the long haul.
Join me as we explore practical ways to bring peace into your life, from setting boundaries and practicing self-compassion to using gratitude and meditation to build emotional resilience.
I’ll walk you through simple, actionable steps that can help you navigate negativity, reduce anxiety, and stay grounded even on tough days. We’ll also discuss how focusing on what you can control, rather than what you can’t, can bring a powerful sense of calm and empowerment to your life.
This episode is all about finding joy in small moments and allowing yourself to truly rest so your body can repair and thrive. By tuning in, you’ll learn how to make inner peace a daily practice, so you can meet life’s challenges with more ease, clarity, and strength.
If you’re ready to let go of constant worry and reconnect with your inner calm, this episode is for you. It’s not just a conversation—it’s an invitation to create a life that feels more balanced, peaceful, and supportive of your healing journey.
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You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lemmer. I'm a certified life coach and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides 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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Hey there, friends, welcome to episode 385
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of better than before breast cancer. With me. Laura lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach and thrilled to have you here today. It's so amazing to me that we are literally coming up on the last 60 days of the year. Unbelievable how fast this year went by. But what's important to me as the year comes to an end is that I'm very intentional about what I want to create for the end of the year, so I don't just get caught up in the madness that can happen with the holidays and parties and all the things, and also that I'm very intentional about planning for what I want the new year to look like. If there's one of the biggest lessons I think that I've learned in this amazing journey I've been on of healing, and it's funny, because I was gonna say in this amazing journey of the last four years, even though my first cancer diagnosis was 13 years ago, but I think that the evolution of the way I think about my life. Live, my life has just been a complete shift. You know, after the first diagnosis, it was really a little bit more about I knew what I wanted to create something else, but I was also still very much in the going back to getting things normal, whereas in after my stage four diagnosis, it really became, I'm going to figure this out, and things are going to change, and then figuring out how to support my body's ability to heal. I've really transformed the way I think in so many ways, one of those things, one of those really important ways, and that's what I want to talk about today, is the understanding that I am completely powerful and capable when it comes to me deciding how I want to feel and what I want to create for myself. And I think that that's a very important topic today, because I want to talk about creating a sense of inner peace for yourself.
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I think that when it comes to creating a sense of inner peace, that's very important for us this week, and without going into anything political, I think that little less than half the country is dealing with a lot of struggle for their inner peace, and maybe more than that, maybe a lot more than that. But it's not just because this comes to our awareness even more, because we just had a big, very controversial election in the United States. But there's always that struggle of inner peace, because we always have stressors in the world. We always have negativity and living in a world that's so technologically focused, social media, news shows all the things, and the way shows get us to watch then is by triggering us, you know. So it's very deliberate. It's very fear based. And I see that a lot, I hear that a lot. I turn off a lot of things. I unfollow a lot of things, because I won't allow my inner peace to be disturbed by fear mongering, I just won't have it. So I want to talk about that, because I think a lot of times that we get very caught up in thinking that it's the things around us that make us feel the way we feel, and we don't realize, because most people aren't taught that we can create a sense of peace. And I think that that starts by asking yourself, How do I want to feel? And whatever we're feeling in the moment, whether that is because of stressors and negativity that is happening in the world, a cancer diagnosis you're dealing with, a scan that you have coming up, a treatment that you're unsure about, lots of these things can become stressors. But I really and truly believe that when we can come back and connect to our sense of inter inner not enter of inner peace, then we're able to make much better decisions. And I think there's two elements to that. It is the inner peace and the willingness to be curious about what's happening, the openness to curiosity versus the draw to judgment. And so I think that when we can be very aware of when we're in judgment and thinking very judgmentally about other people, and instead become curious about things and events and why people think the way they think. What other people might be feeling. I've always said that curiosity is the anecdote to judgment. When I'm in judgment, I'm thinking from my perspective only, no matter what we're talking about in life, I'm thinking about my perspective. People should behave like this. People should act like this. People should think like this. People should do things like this. That's all me, and my perception of the world, and my choice is what I would do in the world, regardless of what it's we're talking about, you know, my treatment, my life, my relationships. But when we're thinking about what is that person going through that might cause them to think these things, then we're stepping into curiosity. And a lot of times we can apply that curiosity to ourselves. I encourage my clients all the time be very curious with your own mind, when your mind is coming up with so many thoughts and so many stories, and this is when I talk about unfollowing things, turning things off, limiting my exposure to certain things is because I will hear people projecting into the future about really awful things that they're saying could happen that are not happening, and it creates a lot of fear and anxiety and unsettled feeling in us who as we listen to these things. So I think it's very important to notice that and to ask yourself, How is this making me feel? To be very curious with the stories your mind brings up around certain things. When we can do that, when we can say, wow, you know, my mind is weaving this story, there are steps we can take to make a decision to nurture our inner peace. And I think that that's a really important thing that needs to happen right now, nurturing that sense of inner peace. So when we go through stressors in life, I mean, they can be little T traumas, a lot of stressors, right? They could be big T traumas, the bigger stressors. And I think that when we go through breast cancer, that's, is it a big T trauma? It's kind of depends on how we look at it. It can go like a medium T to a big T, right? I wouldn't call it a little T trauma. It's a medium T to a big T. And when we have those kind of traumas, then we can see that our reactions to other stressors often can be very magnified unless we learn the tools to bring ourselves back the cognitive tools how we can perceive our brain and redirect our brain and reframe our brain so that we can not Only face our daily challenges, but we can also be aware of and deal with that fear that has kind of settled into us. But it is when that fear or that sense of powerlessness or insecurity comes up within us, I think in that lies an incredible opportunity for growth and for a chance to learn how to create a sanctuary inside yourself, a sense of peace inside yourself. And I don't think that inner peace is just a nice concept. I believe it is an essential part of healing. It's an essential part of promoting and supporting our mental and physical health, because without an inner sense of peace, if we're feeling, you know, emotionally chaotic, it's very difficult to have physical health and do the things that are required to support your physical health, and it's truly difficult to just really thrive and have a vibrant life. And you know, it makes me think I've shared this before, way back when, when I was originally diagnosed with stage four cancer, I shared the fact that the way my diagnosis came about, and I discovered that it had been two years earlier that there was actually a tumor that showed up in my CT scan that I was not made aware of, and in 2020 when I was diagnosed with widespread stage four cancer, and they compared my my diagnostics to the previous ones, which was 2018 is when the first time that I was told you had a tumor in 2018 that was never treated. In that moment, that's an incredible stressor, right? And I was facing a lot of stressors in that moment. I was facing the fact that I was my body was freaking full of cancer. My bones were full of cancer. I was in fear for my life. My family was in fear for my life. I was pissed off that someone who I trusted to read a CT scan neglected to tell my oncologist that I had a tumor that had not yet spread to my bones, right? That would have been a completely different treatment, and there was just a lot to deal with, and it took several days of really processing and journaling, writing about it, thinking about it, but at one point, I had to come to a decision, and that decision was I want to heal, and I know that in order to support a healthy life and support my ability to heal, i. Have to have inner peace. And I cannot fight and be angry and have inner peace at the same time. I know me. I could not do it. And so it became a, I don't know it was a project. It became I was, I was, it was a commitment. It became a commitment to myself, to find a way to be committed to holding on, holding space for that internal piece, and to consciously decide to let go of the anger that I knew would only undermine my health. It was not easy to do. It took a lot of work, and it took a lot of conversations with people around me too, because I had to say, I'm not available for the negativity. I can't be I won't have it around me. So we have to work through other people's thoughts about things too, and create a lot of healthy boundaries. So I'm really familiar with this concept, because I feel like it's been a very big part of my healing over the last four years. So so let's take some time and let's talk about a few things and a few practices that are very important when things feel out of control, when you're feeling really upset, angry, emotional, and some of the things you can do to process and metabolize those feelings and bring back the sense of inner peace that hopefully you want for yourself, Right and that supports your ability to be in this moment in your life and enjoy it. Let's be clear that inner peace is not about pretending everything is fine or ignoring challenges. That is not what this is about. That's what's referred to as toxic positivity. Inner peace is actually about building resilience. It's about creating a steady, calm place within yourself that allows you to respond to life stressors, rather than to react to the fear or the stress. So for those of us on a healing journey, this piece is essential, because it's not about feeling good, but it's about supporting ourselves our health and our body. So research actually shows that when we're stressed or anxious, our body is in a constant state of fight or flight, and this state increases inflammation. It weakens our immune system. It can interfere with our healing directly. And when we're healing from cancer, when our intention is to reduce our risk of a cancer recurrence. The last thing we want is a bunch of inflammation and constant fight or flight. So finding ways to reduce stress and create that inner calm is like giving our body permission to rest, to renew, to repair and to thrive. So how do we navigate these stressors? How do we navigate negativity and the fears that come along with everything that goes on in the world, in addition to what we're already dealing with to support our health? Well, first we have to make a decision. I actually, I think first we have to come to an awareness. We have to come to awareness of what I'm thinking right now about whatever these stressors are, is causing me to feel a certain way, and this way I'm feeling is a way I don't want to feel. So first we have to have an awareness of that, but then we have to make a decision, and that decision is, will you allow fear to control you, or will you work to create a foundation of peace, to help you move through the fear, rather than being paralyzed by the fear? So again, that does not mean that you ignore the world around you, but instead it's you learn to choose what you allow into your mental and emotional space. We live in a world where we're constantly bombarded again, news, social media, and we're also exposed to a lot of whelming people who don't fully understand anything that you're going through at this point in your life, right? They don't get your perception on what you may be dealing with. So setting boundaries is one of the most powerful tools that we have. When we control what we choose to consume, we give ourselves space to recharge and to protect our peace. We get to decide. We get to say, You know what I don't want to talk about that. You know what I've heard enough of that. You know what I'm I'm not going to listen to that right now. And so I think that one of the practical tip in doing that is to consider creating what's called mindful moments for yourself, what I call mindful moments in your day. And this is something that's just as simple as noticing, like, Okay, I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling out of this centered place of finding my inner peace. And when you feel that, it really is important to just stop for a moment and give yourself a pause, to take a few deep breaths, to make a decision, to limit your exposure to information that's coming at you in that day, necessarily, and to ask yourself, is what I'm thinking right now, is what I'm reading right now, is what I'm listening to right now? Is it bringing me peace, or is it pulling me away from Peace? Space, right? So those mindful moments, those little breaks where you hold space for yourself to consider these things and ask yourself these very important questions, is a tool, a skill, that can be very helpful in supporting your ability to consistently create inner peace. Another critical piece, another critical practice is the practice of self compassion. Now I know that for many of us, it's so easy to criticize ourselves, and we think we should be stronger. We think we should be more positive, but the truth is that self compassion is like a muscle, and we need to build it up over time. We need to keep working at it. We need to keep giving ourself permission to treat ourselves with care and compassion. So when you're feeling overwhelmed, it's so important to talk to yourself. I have clients who say, I'm just talking to myself all day long, and I say, awesome, good. Keep talking to yourself, because we've got to talk ourselves through things sometimes, like you wouldn't go to a friend who was struggling with something, who was feeling anxious, who was feeling fearful, who was feeling depressed or betrayed or let down, and you wouldn't go to them and say, hey, just get over it. You know, be stronger. You would listen right? You would offer understanding, you would offer kindness. And it's really important to offer yourself that same thing. It's really important to build that habit of self compassion so that you can create a peaceful and supportive internal environment to help you stay very steady, to give yourself permission to come back to inner peace, right? And another step that you do to help yourself with that is only focus on what you can control. Okay, our brain will go all over the place, on who's doing what and why someone's doing what, and what's probably going to happen, and what happens if that happens? I mean, we can create some amazing stories in our mind, and most of it we have no control over, but when we come back to what we can control, and we say to ourselves, truthfully, you know what this is, what I have control over, and I will decide to let go of everything else. Doesn't mean that thoughts of other things you don't have control over won't pop up, but what it means is create awareness of when your brain is offering you things you don't have control over, to become aware of that and literally, once again, talk yourself through it and stop yourself and say, You know what? Stop I have no control over that, like we have control over this, this little corner of life that we live in, the people we come into contact with, the people that around us. We have control over the things that we say and the way we react and the way we respond. But outside of that, we have very little control over the way things happen. So will you choose to put energy in the things you don't have control over, or will you choose to bring your thoughts back to what can I control here that allows me to cultivate my sense of inner peace? When we do that, we really reclaim our power, and when we reclaim our power, we always feel calmer when we realize this is all I have control over, and so this is all I'm going to put my energy into. It brings us a sense of calmness. So ask yourself when you're feeling out of control, when you're feeling uncentered, ungrounded, out of this internal place of peace. Ask yourself, what can you control today? Sometimes it might be I can control what I put in my body so I can nurture myself through nourishing food that's going to keep my, you know, immune system, strong and steady, instead of a lot of or not having my glucose and insulin spike so I'm feeling weird and having energy crashes. So I can control nourishing myself. I can control moving my body so that this energy that's in my body, right? Energy, anxiety, depression, anger, frustration, all of that is energy. I can move my bodies in ways that release energy, right? I can set aside time for that, or if I'm feeling very drained, then I can set aside time for rest and decide this is a time for rest. You can focus on small positive actions to shift your perspective from fear and helplessness to empowerment by deciding what you have control over and what you can do for yourself. So it's a simple shift, very, very simple, very, very small. What can I control today? But that small shift can make a world of difference in how you feel. All right, reconnecting with nature, honestly. This is so important, finding joy in. Little things, being outside, feeling fresh air, feeling sunshine, it changes the way our brain reacts. Going outside and taking a deep breath of fresh air, looking up at the moon, looking up at the stars, looking up at the sun, the sun, this gun nature has a very magical way of helping us reconnect with ourselves. So spending its time outside and being very intentional about even if it was just a few minutes a day, it reminds you of the beauty and simplicity of life sitting in a garden. I will never forget this one day I just I could feel emotion coming up as I think about it. I was maybe halfway through radiation. So I'd done two or three weeks of radiation on my hip. I think I'd finished the radiation on my hip. So 15 rounds, and I was heading into another 15 rounds on my spine. I was on crutches. I couldn't put any weight on my hip. I was exhausted, and I remember getting out of my car and looking at the building that I had to crutch over to to get my radiation, and thinking, I can't, I can't do it like I just don't even have the energy to get there. I feel the emotion come up, right? Ellen comes back, and next to me, where I parked, was this beautiful little serenity garden that the hospital had built for people who come out of their lunch break and just sit and I looked at that serenity garden, and I thought, that's as far as I can go. I can't get to that building. I literally don't have it in me right now. And I went over to that serenity garden, and I sat there, and I just watched the waterfall, and I watched the koi fish, and, wow, and wow, it's powerful. And I just thought, there's so much right Dang, there's so much going on right now. And I'm so scared, I'm so tired, and I just want to sit here, and I just want to, I just want to sit here like I just need a break. I need a breath. And in that moment, in those few moments that I sat there and I just took in the beauty of that place and of that garden, and it was very restoring, I will never forget that day. And I decided, and in that moment, I held space for my brain, and I was able to say, I can get through this. This is what I've made a decision to do, and I can get through this. But it was like being outside and being connected and being in that small moment. It was everything to me. So think about those things that help you right, being outside and being in nature, being at the ocean, those kinds of things are always like where I feel most connected to that voice inside myself and that ability to restore myself. But what is that for you? Is that a time when you listen to music? Is that a time when you wake up in the morning before everybody else, and you just have a good cup of coffee or a lovely cup of tea? Is it a moment where you're like, you know what I'm getting out of this house? Going outside, I'm gonna do something fun, like, what is that thing that always brings you joy? And can you just decide to do that for yourself? Can you decide I'm going to intentionally create some freaking joy for myself today, because that joy will fuel the inner peace
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practicing gratitude when we see things around us in the world that bring us stress, that are stressors, right? Because the feeling of stress is what comes from the way we think about the stressors. So when there's these big stressors in our life, it tends to overshadow all the hundreds, 1000s, maybe, of all the little things that are amazing. So really making a precious I saw this fantastic Post this morning. I follow this incredible woman. Her name is Jordan, is my lawyer, and she has a podcast that's called unbiased, and she gives a lot she does unbiased reporting of facts. So it's like a news podcast, but it's not partisan in any way. It's just facts. And I love that about her super smart, super smart young lady, young woman, I should say, and she had a great post today where she asked all of her followers, where she's got 1000s of followers, and she asked people, can you send me a message of something good that happened for you today? And then she just posted pages and pages and pages of screenshots of all of these simple, little lovely things that people said. And I was reading them, and it was like, I got a raise today. I woke up today. I got engaged this week, and people were just putting all of these tidbits of wonderful things that were happening in their lives. And she's like, let's choose to remember that no matter what is going on in the world, there are always good things that are happening in our life as well. Let's make sure to give them energy. Let's make sure to express gratitude for them, because when we do, it helps to bring us back to a sense of peace. It doesn't make. Problems disappear, but it does help us to see that even when things feel really hard, there's good in the world and there's good in our lives, and that's so important. So I've got two more to go. One more tip, accepting what we cannot change. So I talked a minute about, what do you have control over? And there's a little bit of a difference here, right? There's recognizing what I have control over and what I don't. But if you recognize you don't have control over something, then accepting the fact that you can't change something you don't have control over. So a tremendous gift we can give ourselves in this life, in every category of our life is acceptance, right? Life is unpredictable, and we wish we could control everything. I mean, I've had a lot of great ideas that would make the world a better place, if only I was in charge, right? But cancer, I think, has been a huge reminder of how fragile and how precious and how tentative life is. So when I catch myself fighting and mentally and emotionally fighting about things that I cannot change, feeling myself get angry, feeling myself get stressed, I have to catch myself. And of course, it happens all the time, and I catch myself and say and I do talk myself through and I call myself, I'm like, Laura, there's nothing you can do about that. What the hell? Stop it. And I will tell myself, stop it, right? This is what is. You don't have control over it. Make peace with this, right? I can still do whatever I can and the things I have control over to impact whatever things in my life and relationships in the world that I may want to impact, but I can just also accept what is I've talked about this so many times on our podcast, on this podcast, and it's when it comes to health, when it comes to relationships, when I'm coaching clients, I will often say, tell me about this, right? Tell me about your relationship, tell me about your sleep, tell me about your nutrition, tell me about your work. And I'll ask them, tell me. And even when they go to tell me, they'll say, Well, I kind of do this, or I should do that. I haven't done that in a few months, and there's no judgment, right, where I'm gonna co it's a judgment free space, so they don't have to pretend that what they're doing. It's usually better. It could be better. It isn't really what it looks like. It's perfectly okay to just say actually, I haven't exercised in probably three and a half years. Actually, I don't have a really bad nutrition plan, but I probably haven't eaten a vegetable in like, three weeks, right? Which would have to accept things as they are. In relationships, when we're with people, right? But they're really they're a nice person. Okay? Nice people can do asshole things, right? So we can say, you know, in general, they're a nice person. But then there's all these qualities that these are what they are. And, yeah, I don't like that, right? We don't have to fight against what we cannot change. We don't have to fight against what is like. Acceptance and acknowledgement of what is is wonderful, because resistance will only create stress. It'll always create stress. When people say to me, I don't want to think this way anymore, I offer to them, Listen, your brain works the way your brain works. And now we can accept that. In fact, we can get really familiar with it. We can embrace it. We can say, Wow, this is how my brain works, and that's awesome, because then we can say, How can I reframe it? How can I teach it to work a little bit differently, but if you fight it and just say, I don't want to, I don't want it, it will never go away. So accepting life as it is, while we still do everything we can to move forward in the way that we want to move forward, doesn't mean we're giving up hope. Doesn't mean that we're giving in. Doesn't mean that we're pretending things aren't things that we don't like, but it means that we're finding peace in knowing that we're doing the best we can with what we have and what we have control over, and that we're trying to live in this moment, this precious moment that is the only moment we have, right here, right now, And then, we're trying to make it as good as it can be, right? I think the final thing I want to say is to find connection and support, to stay in that place of curiosity and openness and honest communication. We are not meant to do this life alone. We are meant to be parts of communities. We are meant to have friends, to understand each other, to extend empathy and hold space for people to express what they're going through. Right sharing this journey helps us to lighten the load so. Find people that are supportive, people that are caring, people who are willing to accept you for exactly who you are, because being a part of a greater community, a community that also wants peace, right, not a community of violence and anger and hatred, but a community of peace, a community of people who are like minded in the sense that they want to create the life the best way that it can be can be deeply calming and healing, right? So connection, connection is just so, so important. So I just want to wrap up this conversation today and and just remind you that creating inner peace is a practice. It won't happen overnight. It's a commitment that you must make to yourself every single day. It's a commitment that you must make to yourself, and it's a choice that you make yourself multiple times a day. As you go through the day multiple times, refocus your energy, refocus your mind, and be gentle with yourself, but find small joy in the moments. You don't have to be at peace all the time, right? It's okay to have days that feel hard, but know that within you there is always a place of calm and strength and that you have the power to return to it whenever you need to, right, and that's helpful for you. You know, share this podcast with someone else, leave a review for the podcast, leave a rating, leave a review, and if you want more help and more guidance with creating the tools, the skills and supporting yourself through building that practice of supporting yourself and creating self compassion and creating the life that you love, or understanding how to be gentle with yourself. You can come and find me at the breast cancer recovery coach com. You can become a part of my better than before breast cancer membership or work with me one on one in private coaching. I'm here, and that's the work I do to support you in creating a life that is better than before breast cancer, and it's there for you and it's possible for you, so why not reach out and make it happen? I'll talk to you again next week, friends. Until then, be good to yourself.
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