#393 The Art of Allowing - A New Perspective for a Better Life After Breast Cancer

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Episode Overview

In this powerful New Year's episode, I’ll share my personal journey from a "fighting" mindset to embracing a healing mentality after breast cancer. We’ll talk about how resistance can block your path to wellness and how allowing yourself to heal can create profound positive changes.

 

Key Points:

  • The difference between fighting disease and allowing healing
  • How resistance impacts our physical and emotional wellbeing
  • Research from the Heart Math Institute on stress hormones and healing
  • The role of positive emotions in recovery and healing
  • Moving from New Year's resolutions to intentional allowing
  • Understanding the subtle ways we resist positive change
  • Creating space for healing across all areas of life

 

Highlights:

  • The importance of releasing suppressed emotions while cultivating positive ones
  • How our thoughts about money, health, and relationships can create resistance
  • Practical tips for identifying and releasing resistance
  • Daily practices for allowing more peace, joy, and healing

 

Resources Mentioned:

 

Connect with Laura:

Instagram: @thebreastcancerrecoverycoach

Facebook Group: The Breast Cancer Recovery Group

Website: www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com

 



Read the full transcript:

 

0:00
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. Hello, friends. Happy New Year. You're listening to episode 393, and I'm your host, Laura lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach. This is my first episode of 2025 and I want to talk about something really important to set the tone for an amazing year. You know, let me give you a little bit history. When I first finished breast cancer treatment at the end of 2012 I really believed that healing was about going back to the training I had had thus far in fitness and nutrition and following all of the typical rules of what you should do, the Western ideology of what you should Do to cleanse the body and feed the body right? Calories in, calories out, of course, clean food. And I realized over the course of the next couple of years, as I focused on these areas and my body did not respond. It didn't respond the way I was taught that it was supposed to respond. And it became very frustrating. I At that time, I think, you know, I was still really bought into there was the mentality that comes along oftentimes with the breast cancer diagnosis of fighting, right? You're a war. You're whatever the battle language, the fighting, the fighting, the fighting. And it took me a long time to realize that I was fighting my body, that I wasn't accepting where I was at, that I was fighting for specific outcomes that I had in my head that I was supposed to be able to achieve, and that I was just determined, right? I was just hell bent on making this happen, making my body do what it was supposed to do, what I wanted it to do, what I believed it should do, and creating, I don't know, like the life that I thought that it was supposed to be right. It was all about what it was supposed to be supposed to do. And thank God. You know, I research and learn, and I'm a constant listener and reader and summit attendee, and constantly open to new ideas, and I think I've shared on the podcast before, it was really the book radical remission, written by Dr Kelly Turner, that started to shift my perspective on what I was going through. That that is the book that really changed my mindset from that fight mentality to a healing mentality. And it really opened my eyes to seeing those are not the same thing, right? Fighting and healing not the same thing, not the same energy at all. And I want to dig into that a little bit, because you might resonate with that as soon as I say it, or it might sound a little, I don't know, ambiguous, a little like, kind of thready, hard to grasp. So I'm gonna, I'm going to definitely go into that deeper. But one thing that I learned as I started to really think about, what does it mean to heal? What is the energy of healing, and again, in radical remission, right? There were the nine healing factors, which have now become 10, because she added exercise to that. And then from there, led me to Dr nation winters, the metabolic approach to cancer. And those 10 healing buckets, all of the terrain, 10 healing buckets, which, some are tangible things like changing your diet, and you know, looking at your genes and your epigenetics and others, are those things that have to do with our thought process and our emotions, our circadian rhythms being back in tune with life and with the earth. So as I went more and more and deeper deeper into trying to understand and apply to my own life, how people heal. I started to really see, okay. So then I read this other book by Anita Marjani, dying to be me, and in that book, it just comes to mind, so I'm not going to be able to quote her verbatim, but in that book, there was a line she shares her near death experience because of a cancer diagnosis. She, you know, goes through her whole life story and her healing. And I just remember in that book, she says at some point something to the effect of, it doesn't matter what you eat. What you do, how many supplements you take on and on something like that. What matters is, are you ready to just allow the body to receive healing? And I thought that's a very interesting concept. Am I? Am I willing to allow my body to receive healing. What does that mean? Do I want healing, right? But do I do I want healing? Or am I fighting disease? This can be a really subtle shift in energy. Then, as I studied this more and more and I started realizing that something very important to the way people support their healing is to be very future focused, right? This is when I start getting even deeper into manifestation, meaning, deciding what you want, getting clear on what you want, and then going through the steps of seeing what thoughts, what beliefs, what conditioned ideas you have that are blocking you from getting there. And this applies to every area of our life. It applies to finances, relationships, healing, you know, health, every single thing right. We have all kinds of conditioned beliefs, and we can slip into this very subtle, maybe not so subtle sometimes, but I think it can be also very subtle, this subtle, energetic of thinking we're concentrating on what we want when we're really resisting what we don't want. And there's a big difference there. So towards the pretty much the last half of 2024

6:44
it with my clients and in my membership, I've just been going deeper and deeper and deeper deeper into very intentional living, into what it means to manifest, what it means to create the life you want. And you know, if you listen to this podcast, you know that I work with people on their neutrogenome, how their body responds to food and life. I lifestyle. I work with them on labs. I look at very tangible things, but I truly believe that when we try to create change, even in those tangible things, we have to be very careful about thinking from our future and not from our past, because when we think from the past, we fall into traps like this. That's never worked for me before. I've tried that. It didn't work, and we're thinking from a pet. This is resistance, right? This is that subtle energy of resistance. As we talk about the future, what do you want to create? And sometimes people say, you know, they want to create a new business, or they want to somehow have a shift in their relationship, or something, some kind of passion about their life that they want to stoke the fires on, right? They want to really create change, but they have a difficult time thinking from that future version of themselves that lives the life that has that kind of health, that has that kind of relationship, that has that kind of job or business or belief or confidence or self compassion or whatever it is that they desire. And the more I start coaching people on this, the more I would see how very, very subtle it can be when we believe we're putting energy into creating something but we're really putting energy into resisting what we don't want in our life. So a couple of weeks ago, the end of December, we did a workshop on intentional living for 2025 on how to really focus on developing the skills, honing the skills. Because the whole the last quarter of 2024 I worked with my clients and in my membership on step by step, 12 weeks worth of intentional living, right? Living your life on purpose. And it was really interesting, because one of the things that we have to let go of, or understand even, is to look at our lives, and if we're not living the life we want, if we don't have the things we want in our life, the feelings we want in our life, the friends we want that whatever it is if you don't have something, then a question we have to ask ourselves is, what am I thinking? What do I believe that has stopped me from already having that in my life? So as we went through this workshop that the intentional living workshop we I had people work on some different steps to help them kind of grab onto a word, a word of how did they want to feel in 2025 so for instance, you want to feel at peace, if you want to feel curious, if you want to feel like you're growing, whatever the word is, and then we build from there, right? So here's your word. This is how you want to feel. Well, what kind of things help. You to feel that way and slowly again, a lot of times, things bubble up. Well, I can't feel that way because this thing is happening, or I haven't been able to feel that way because this person does these things in my life. And those are other things that are indicators of resistance, right? We're fighting ourselves. We're saying, I want this, but I can't have it, right? I was coaching a woman the other day. This is, I think, a really prime example coaching this woman, and she is going through breast cancer, and she is very upset about the financial piece of it. She's struggling a lot financially. Now she has a couple of opportunities to increase her financial her finances right to make more money, to invite and allow more money into her life, but when we start to coach on those topics, she gets very frustrated. Immediately shuts herself down because she's got a condition belief system that says it's bad to want to have money. So it's a really interesting thing, because here she wants to have more money to help with her treatment and her life and the way she's living. She has an opportunity to allow that to happen and put energy into making that happen in her life, but she's got a very strong resistance to allowing money to come to her, because she believes it's a bad thing. Okay, this is, I want to bring up this topic because it's the new year, and what happens at the New Year, we think about what we want to invite into our life. We think about what we want to create, whether we call that, well, actually, so here's a great point. We call that resolutions, and it's interesting, if we start to think about resolutions, what are resolutions? Most of the time, there's something we're going to give up. We're going to stop having so much sugar or soda or whatever, or there are things that we commit we're going to do. We're going to put willpower into we're going to do this right? We're going to exercise more. That's a top one. We're going to lose weight. But then, when we're going to lose weight, what do we tell ourselves we can't have things? We put our mindset much more into what we can't have and what we can't do, and what is that? It is a state of resistance. So I was looking into this because I think it's just a fascinating psychological concept. And what I found was some research from the Heart Math Institute, and it showed that when we're in a state of resistance or a state of fear, our bodies actually produce stress hormones that can suppress our immune system, and their studies demonstrated that positive emotional states can actually enhance our body's natural healing abilities. So for instance, I'm going to go back to the client that I was just referring to when I asked her, How does it feel when you think having money is a bad thing? And she describes her feelings. It's not good, right? There's nothing joyful, light, inspirational, motivational about that. But when I asked her to imagine that it is okay, and that receiving blessings and abundance into your life is a birthright, and you're entitled to it, and you can have it, how does that feel? And then everything changes. And then she's more inspired to go and do the things that need to be done in order for her to have more financial stability and to better support herself. So think about this for a moment, when we're in a state of fighting against of saying, I don't want cancer, I don't want to be sad, I don't want to feel these feelings. I don't want to be anxious. We're actually putting energy into that thing, and we're actually creating stress in our body. So this reminds me of, again, I'm going to go back to radical remission, because I just think that the research that Dr Kelly Turner did in that book was fascinating, and so she studied over 1500 cases of unexpected healing, and she came up with nine factors that she saw all of these people who had experienced incredible recoveries, these things that they all did, and one was releasing suppressed emotions, and the other was increasing positive emotions. And this is exactly what I'm talking about it, because it's not about denying our challenges. Releasing suppressed emotions means allow yourself to feel what's there. Allow yourself to say, I'm scared because I'll hear my clients often say, I don't want to be fearful anymore. Well, you're a human, and there are some things that happen in life that will naturally bring up fear that's normal. So when we say, I don't want to feel something that's normal, we're resisting just even just being who we are, right? There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with feeling fearful. It's normal, right? When it comes to life changes, experiencing new things, it's it's normal that fear or apprehension might come up. But when we notice it, we can put a lot of energy into it and build fear. Build fear and feel stuck, or we can notice, yeah, that feels a little scary.

15:24
But I'm going to choose to increase the positive emotion also, because, you know, let's say that you want to create some change in your life. Let's say that you want to, I'm going to go the popular New Year's resolution and say you want to lose 10 pounds and exercise consistently. Okay? A lot of people, when I say to them, Well, tell me why you don't already exercise consistently. I hate it. It's a drudgery. I don't have time. It takes up my time, right? And when we look at these things that we're resisting, I don't want to put more time into it. I wish I didn't have to do it. It's too hard. It's uncomfortable, but then if we stop and think about it, why do you want to do it right? There must be some kind of a positive thing there, because you want to do this for yourself. And some of the reasons we want to do things like lose extra weight or exercise consistently is because we want to have more energy. We want to feel stronger in our bodies. We want our bodies to work better, and they do work better when they're at a healthy weight and they're moving on a regular basis, right? That's what bodies are designed to do. So we could choose to put the energy and attention into what we don't like about the change we say we want, or we can choose to put energy into thing. I want to have more energy. I want to feel like this. I love this, right? And it isn't about denying that there is some resistance there, but it's about choosing not to put the energy into the resistance. Okay? It's about changing how you respond to your thoughts and your challenges. So this can apply to every single area of your life, and I want you to think about right now in your life, where are you putting your energy into resisting something you don't want rather than opening yourself to what you do want? Okay, I was, I've been thinking about this a lot, and when we did the workshop, and I did my preparation for the intentional living workshop in December. You know, my word was growth for 2025 it was growth with kind of a subtitle of easy that would be easy on myself. I wasn't going to make it hard on myself. I wasn't going to stress out, but I want to continue its growth for me, for my business, for my health, for every aspect of my life. But honestly, I feel like there was this competing word, and this word was allow right, allowing things to unfold, allowing things and that doesn't mean sit back and do nothing, go what's gonna happen to me? No, but it means noticing more where resistance comes up. Because especially if you want to grow in areas of your life, that growth typically means change. Typically means challenging yourself. And when that happens, we can have resistance, and then we can buffer against that resistance, meaning we can get ourselves distracted or spend more time scrolling social media than creating something new, because we're resisting it. We're afraid of how people will respond to it, or that it won't be successful, or whatever, whatever someone you know won't engage with you in the way you think they should or want them to. And so we just don't allow things to flow into our life. We resist abundance with beliefs that say we can't have, that I shouldn't have, that I shouldn't want that we can resist healing by choosing the beliefs that I can cannot tell you how many times I hear someone say this, and it when it comes to breast cancer and many other things, this is incurable, right? This is incurable. And as soon as I hear that, I think, why would you choose to believe that right when it comes to me and having widespread stage four cancer? There's no freaking way that I think I'd be here where I am now, with literally almost no cancer in my body, and hopefully by my next PET scan. That's kind of one of my visualizations for 2025 the year I get no evidence of disease, I believe that I will have no evidence of disease. There's no freaking way I'm going to allow my brain to accept this is incurable, because that's not the future that I have planned for myself, I have a future of me being a person in a strong, healthy body, free of disease. I can't have this idea that this is incurable and have that resistance. If I'm going to create a life of a person who's completely healed from metastatic breast cancer, right? We can. Have unexpected abundance in our life if we hold on to the belief that money only comes to you from one resource, or that you can only make it in the way you've made it in the past, or that you know whatever it is that has happened in the past that has caused you to feel like you have to protect yourself or fight against something. We've got to see those and we've got to create space for healing by releasing the need to control what's going to come into our life by the beliefs that it can only be what it's been in the past. We have to start to trust ourselves more. We have to trust that we can allow good things to come to us. You know, oftentimes I'll be coaching people and things are going really great for them, and I'll just say I want to recognize and celebrate all the successes they've created, all of the wonderful steps that they've taken for themselves. And not all the time, but a lot of the time, what I'll hear from them is, I know I'm so proud I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Whoa, right? There's your work. You're waiting for the other shoe to drop. What does that say in your brain? It says, I think something bad is coming, right? And why is that? Probably from something past conditioning, and it's okay. But instead of holding that thought, going, Oh, I'm in this like I can be in this life going, this is awesome, right? My life is so good. I'm so grateful for so many things I've accomplished, these things that I've said I wanted to invite in my life, right? There's all this great stuff happening, but your brain is resisting allowing yourself to just completely embrace it and be in it with the thought, Look, this is too good to be true. Something bad is going to happen. Going to have it right? So I started thinking of this last couple of weeks. I don't know. I might just change my word up from growth to allowing, because, in my mind, allowing also includes growth, right? Allowing change, allowing new ideas, allowing new experiences, allowing myself to let go of beliefs that have limits to them, because I don't want to be limited by anything, right? So I want to come back to you again and ask you to really think about this. Go back to this, thinking, Is there something in your life that you're resisting because you don't want it in your life, and you think I'm moving towards what I want, but what you're really your energy is stronger in what I don't want. Okay, think about how that resistance feels in your body, if it creates tension, if it creates anxiety. And now let's flip the script on that. So if you're thinking, I don't want to be in debt, I have all kinds of medical bills, I don't want to be in debt

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that doesn't feel good, and I know I've been there many, many times that does not feel good, right? Because we're actually putting that energy into resistance, like I'm in debt, right? And putting energy into thinking debt and debt doesn't feel good. But what if we were to flip that script and say, I look forward to living a debt free life, or I allow myself to live a debt free life? How does that feel? Does it feel a little different? Will you take different actions if you think you'll allow yourself that. So when we shift from resistance to allowing, we actually can notice a big change. We can notice a big freedom, and we can notice more space, kind of space in our lives, more space to think right things don't feel so much of an uphill battle and that maybe we can open our minds to new ideas and new opportunities. So as you go into this new year, I want to offer you something that maybe this week, each morning, ask yourself, is there something that I am resisting today? Is there something that I'm trying to control or resist from coming into my life, and then allow yourself to have a gentle shift by offering what would it feel like to allow this to be more easy, more joyful, to allow more healing? And I don't just mean physical healing, right? More healing in whatever area it is, and in a relationship, in a job and anything in your life. What would it be like if this was easier and more joyful and I allowed this to heal? What would that feel like? Right? This isn't about just passive acceptance, all right, again, not allowing anything to happen my life, but this is when we're resisting. I want to say this to so and so, so I could be more connected, but they're just going to do this thing right? So we resist. We don't allow ourselves to have that space and say, You know what? I'm just going to admit this be easy, and I'm just going to allow myself to express what I need to and I'm going to let go. Of resisting anything else. Whatever comes up, comes up, right? How can I allow this to be easier and more joyful in the moment? And that takes energy that's not passive. So this whole experience is about creating an internal environment where healing can happen naturally throughout your life in any area, and healing in your relationship with your job, your relationship with money, your relationship with people, your relationship with your body, and trusting that when you let go of this grip, this resisting, I don't want it, I don't want I don't want it, then you open yourself to the possibility of anything. Right? Possibilities are endless if we don't listen, if we don't limit ourselves right, things that maybe you haven't imagined could happen. Could possibly happen if you didn't already decide on the way that everything is supposed to go. So I think I'm switching my word for 2025. From growth to allowing and just allowing more space in my life, allowing the ideas, allowing myself to try new things, allowing everything to be really and truly limitless. That feels really good, right, not limiting the ideas of what my body is capable of doing to what anybody tells me that it's supposed to do right, not limiting myself in any way, but allowing life to unfold, right? Can we welcome more of what supports peace and joy and connection, self compassion? Right? Allowing ourselves to mess up without beating ourselves up, allowing ourselves to try new things, right? So I'm just offering this to you as a way to start off your new year. Can you look at allowing all good things to come to you by recognizing where you might be resisting that thing you actually are telling yourself you want in your life and then putting that effort in to let it go every day, asking, how could this be easier? How can I let go of this resistance? How can I invite more of what I want into my life? All right, it's kind of a cool practice. I enjoy it, and I really believe that over the last couple of years, going deeper and deeper and deeper into creating that future version of myself, into really allowing myself to believe what I want to believe, to create the life I want to live, has had a huge impact on on just everything that I do and and the way that I feel as well, and so I want you to explore that for yourself. And you know what? There's actually a tool that I have that could help you. You can go to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com, you can click on the link to it here in the show notes for this episode, and it is creating a life you love in 168 hours a week. So it's a program you can download. I worked on this for three months with my clients, and as a bonus, I've also put in the recording of the intentional living in 2025, workshop, and the whole workbook that goes along with it. So I really believe that as you go through the guidebooks for both this program and the workshop, it will help you to examine those thoughts where you're telling yourself that life just can't be exactly what you want it to be, right, that maybe you are creating resistance so subtly you don't even realize it's there. And I think that the prompts and the workbooks and some of the lessons in in this program, and it's downloadable, you can just go and get it and started today, I think that they'll help you set yourself up for a pretty dang amazing next 12 months. I don't care if you're starting it at the beginning of a year or not, they're just tools to help you work on creating a life you really and truly love that's limitless. And I love that idea. So Happy New Year. Let it be one where you invite all good things into your life, and I'll talk to you again next week. Take care.

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