Episode Overview

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month—a time when we’re surrounded by pink ribbons and messages of “hope for a cure.” But in this episode, I want to have a different conversation. Because while being “cancer-free” is something we all long for, healing is about much more than what shows up on a scan.

After 14 years of managing cancer, I’ve realized that even when the body is cancer-free, the mind can still be trapped in fear. Healing means learning to live fully, to find joy, courage, and gratitude right now—not when the next scan gives us permission.

In this episode, I share how shifting from fear to aliveness changes everything. You’ll hear stories of women who stopped waiting for perfect lab results to live, and how research shows that qualities like hope, gratitude, zest, and even laughter can boost wellbeing and immune strength.

✨ You’ll learn:

• Why being “cured” and being “healed” are two different things

• How emotional and spiritual healing can happen long before medical perfection

• The science behind joy, laughter, and gratitude as healing forces

• How to identify and celebrate your milestones beyond the scan

Your healing isn’t measured only in years—it’s measured in moments of meaning, courage, and joy.

Explore more support:

• Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership: https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/lifecoaching
• Creating a Life You Love in 168 Hours a Week: https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/168-hours-sp

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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 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. Hello there, beautiful friends, and welcome to episode 432

0:38
of better than before breast cancer. When this episode comes out, I will be in Tucson, Arizona at the metabolic health day conference. And I'm not only thrilled, so excited that I'm going to be there with this incredible group of people, these amazing, talented, brilliant speakers, that I'm going to just get blessed with their knowledge. But while I'm there, October 11, we'll be celebrating five years since I was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, and I'm so excited to get to celebrate five years. That's such a gift. And honestly, this is what's making me think about what we're going to talk about in this episode. You know, I said that I wanted October to be about aliveness. I wanted October to be inspirational and make you want to step into life so that we can kind of quiet down all those scary stories that are around us and really focus on where we're now, where we are at now, and what we want to create in our life. And something I think about as I think about going to this conference, it kind of blows my mind. I think one day, I picked up a book, the metabolic approach to cancer, written by Dr Nasha winters. I had no idea who this woman was. Read this book, and then fast forward over the years, go to a couple of summits where she's speaking, listen to her talk at a conference. See that she's training people that aren't doctors. See that she's training what she calls advocates in the metabolic approach to cancer. Enroll in that program to learn about it. End up having her review with another brilliant doctor, Dr Ahmed al saka, going over my own case in the Maldives with my sister, with my husband, joining me there in the most amazing healing experience I've ever had. Then she creates a more elevated program and advanced integrative medicine training I get in that training with her. I'm just thinking about the chain of events that have changed my life, that have changed what I can offer to the world and to other people, and how wild it is when we focus on life and say yes to it. And what makes me think about that is that in this month of October, when we're surrounded by pink ribbons and we're surrounded by hope for a cure, walks for a cure, and trust me, believe me, of course, I hope for a cure and I want for a cure every single day. But what I've realized over the course of the last 14 years that I've managed cancer in my life is that when we focus only on being cured. We can really forget that we are living right now. And we can kind of convince ourselves that life won't start again until a scan is perfect, when life is happening in this moment, in all of its glory, in all of its beauty, in all of its possibility, and I understand why that happens to us. Of course, we want that cancer free stamp on our medical records, on our lives, but there's something really powerful that I have learned, and especially I think that that lesson has come home even stronger over the last five years, that even if a body is technically cancer free. That does not mean that the person has healed, because healing and being cured or cancer free are two very different things, and healing is not only physical and it can't be measured only in a scan or in lab results. Healing is mental, emotional, physical, spiritual is the whole thing. It's all of it. And sometimes I've seen this a lot. I've experienced it myself. The imprint of cancer is so deep in our mind, the fear of that imprint, right, that we stay stuck in it, and we're constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, we get triggered and scared when we hear other people's stories of the other shoe dropping. And we can get so obsessed and put so much energy into that fear and into the need for the cure or the no evidence of disease that we miss the very moments of life that we're in so over the. Years, I have met many women who've come to me in this place, and, you know, it even surprised me. I mean, I've just learned so much over coaching women. For the last I don't know, it's been eight years now that I didn't even see coming, so much that I've learned, and I will see people come to me years after finishing their treatment, and they're still suffering because they haven't healed. They have no cancer in their bodies, and sometimes they even have a hard time accepting that and allowing themselves to believe that they're cancer free, but they haven't healed, meaning they haven't addressed what is inside of them that's holding them back from living fully in their lives. Then on the flip side of that, and as people do this work, as I've just kind of described this story to you, we see these unexpected gifts, right, these blessings that come into our lives after a cancer diagnosis, stronger relationships, a clearer sense of self or of purpose, or the courage to make changes that you put off for years. And I also want to pause here before I start digging into looking at these gifts and seeing these unexpected gifts in our life, because not everybody feels that way, and you may be hearing this and you're not in that place right now, because cancer causes a lot of pain and suffering as well a cancer diagnosis. And honestly, I think that when we go through the growth to be able to look back at the blessings, it's only because we've come through that pain. But what's important, and I want you to hear, is that you don't have to force yourself to find blessings, right? You don't have to force yourself to be in a future place. Healing unfolds over time, and sometimes it takes that time, it takes that distance, to give you enough perspective to see the gifts. And so my invitation to you, if that's where you're at, is to just simply keep an open mind and trust in that power of time, okay, I've seen this transformation again and again. I've seen women move past or move from these places of pain and fear into lives that they never thought they could have. And I want to share just a couple of highlights of some of those stories with you. I have a client who is dealing with a stage four diagnosis, and not that long ago, because of treatments she was going through, she was in so much pain she couldn't even drive more or be driven more than a couple of miles in a car. But today, this amazing person is out hiking and canoeing and camping under the stars for days at a time in like, really wilderness, like wild wilderness, more wild than I would be brave enough to sleep in. And she did not wait for her labs to give her permission to do that. She decided to live her life because life matters right now I have I can think of one client in particular, but I can think of multiple who've been through this experience where they felt really stuck in jobs that were filled with stress and negativity, and decided to just shake up their world and find something that lit them up. And they didn't stop themselves by worrying about, what if I get cancer again? What if I start this job and I get a new diagnosis? You know? What if it's not all the way gone, because one is nobody else's business. You know what you're going through, but I can think of one who did not wait and now works in a job that truly is fulfilling and lights her up, and others who have now started businesses for themselves and moved out of jobs that were just bringing them misery. And I'm not encouraging everybody to go quit their job. I'm just sharing stories with you of how these blessings, these milestones in life, can show up because of what we've gone through, and because we can realize the value of being here right now and not waiting to make the change to invite the joy in. I think about the moments that I've had as I just talked about, like, I can't believe that I actually mentor new students at the metabolic Training Institute of Health, or metabolic region. Now the educational piece of it, it's like, I think about, wow, picking up that book a few years ago, and now here I am a part of this organization, and it's a part of my business, and I am blessed and honored to get to work with these people, but to attend these case studies and these trainings and learn so much about how we can support the health of our body that it's allowed me to live way beyond and with the most incredible quality of life than my doctor ever thought I could possibly achieve when he first met me and gave me the diagnosis that I had five years ago. Okay, so when I look back and I think of the trips I have taken while my body had cancer in it, well, it still does. So all the trips I've taken over the last five years, the certifications, the way I've grown my business, the joy, the birthday parties in. Bursaries, so many milestones, and so I think that when we focus too much on the cure, too much on the scans, too much on the lab results, that that those milestones become blurred, and I want to bring them back to the forefront for you, because I know we've all had them. I know we've all had moments where we chose to live and if we haven't, if you haven't, I hope this encourages you to do so, to choose joy, courage, to choose rest, even, you know, in the middle of uncertainty, because we live with a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of times we busy ourselves when we feel uncertain, and that busyness is just filling in these spaces that we could use to heal ourselves and to find more happiness. So that's really the big idea here is that healing is not measured only in numbers, but healing is found in milestones way beyond scans and labs, in those milestones that are everyday wins, everyday breakthroughs, every day waking up. Now, I don't mean to minimize numbers here at all, because, trust me, I'm in the game. I want a clear scan. I like good labs. Numbers matter, and the importance of those numbers give us valuable information, but they do not tell the whole story. Right? They cannot capture what it feels like when you wake up feeling energetic, feeling empowered, feeling like you just made a great choice for yourself and stood up for yourself, feeling thrilled that you were able to get everybody together and step into a room of people that you love and spend some time together right numbers and scans and labs don't measure the freedom that we can create for ourselves in living lives we love. So healing for in my opinion, is much bigger than just being cured. Healing is much bigger than just what shows up on paper. So I want to encourage you not to wait for permission to live based on test results, not to put off joy and rest and laughter. I want you to think about, are you waiting? And what if you stopped waiting in some area of your life, in any area of your life? I've heard everybody. I've heard stories of waiting on everything from taking a trip to getting a certification to remodeling a room in a house, right putting off things, waiting for things, because what if, but what if we let ourselves celebrate the healing that's happening right now, and that every time we make a decision to do one of those things that we're afraid to do, that our human brain says, Well, maybe you shouldn't do that, that every time we step past that, we Find more strength and more courage and more joy, and we create very real milestones to look back and give us more power and more empowerment. And that changes us. I think that changes us even more at the numbers on a page. And you know how much I love research, so of course, I look to see, well, does research validate how I feel about this, and I'll tell you what I found a study of women in Spain living with breast cancer, and they looked at what's called character strengths. They looked at Hope, gratitude, zest and love. And what this study found was that women who engaged more with those qualities reported higher life satisfaction and lower levels of anxiety, depression and stress, nothing in their medical situation had changed, but their inner resources created a completely different experience of life. And when it comes to laughter, there's even science there too. There's a study that's called the effect of a mirthful laughter on stress and natural killer cell activity. And this study found that laughter reduced stress and boosted the activity of natural killer cells in the immune system. So something as simple as human laughter, something you could share with a friend or experience through a funny movie or one of my favorites, looking at the funny things dogs do on Instagram reels that actually has measurable benefits for your health. Okay, so while we go to our doctors and we get scans and labs and tests that measure our survival in years, I suggest that we decide to measure our survival in moments, in moments of meaning, in moments of connection in moments of courage, and that we celebrate those moments, and we value them every bit as important in our healing as the numbers that come from the lab. So I want to really connect back to here. Let's think if we're sitting in this room together, I want you to take a moment and maybe even close your eyes if you can, if you're not driving somewhere, or you're at a place where you can and think about this. What are your milestones beyond scans and labs, right? When was the last time you celebrated something that was so special to you? Maybe even something small? Maybe it was the first time that you found yourself laughing or being silly or. Dancing around your kitchen to one of your favorite tunes while you're making dinner. Like, when did you notice joy came back into your life? And when did you feel strong enough to do something that you hadn't done in a while, or told yourself that you always wanted to do? Right? Maybe you did little things, like taking a walk that was a little farther than you had done before, carrying groceries without help as we get our upper body strength back, these are milestones, right? Feeling steady enough in your wellness to go away and plan a trip. I love travel. I love trips, and I'll tell you what trips take. A lot of mind work, because we have to be willing to invest that money in ourselves. Traveling is not cheap, right? We have to be willing to invest that time. Usually, we've got someone else, so there's energy that goes in there, right? It takes a lot of courage to plan a trip, and so that's a big milestone, but some of my favorite milestones for people are when they find their voice, when they finally start speaking up for themselves in ways they never have before. When you finally give yourself permission to rest without guilt, right to say, I deserve this, this is like a foundation of everything. When I work with women who start saying, I worth this, I deserve this, that is a free milestone and that is a moment and an achievement that is worth celebrating. So to keep you grounded in this life, to keep you grounded in this idea of celebrating and aliveness, I have an invitation for you this week, sometime this week, take a moment and write down at least one milestone that has nothing to do with numbers that has happened for you, maybe it's a big one, like a vacation. Maybe it is just, maybe you just had a meal without worrying about what you were eating and what the macronutrients were, right? That's a milestone. Making peace with food. Put it down on paper, look at it for yourself and say, I did that. That's big honor. That for yourself, celebrate yourself, celebrate these milestones that are so meaningful, because that is the story of your healing. That is the story that numbers can't tell. All right, so I want you to carry this with you. Think about this. Think about healing isn't just about years added to your life. Healing is about life added to your years. It's about noticing your milestones. It's about embracing your moments. It's about reminding yourself, I'm here. I'm living. I'm creating a life that matters right now, right celebrate those milestones. Write them down, share them with someone you love. Come and find me on Facebook or Instagram. Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach, share them with me. I would love to hear them and give yourself credit for how far you've come. When we put our energy into this, into celebrating these milestones, into giving ourselves credit, then our energy is tied up so it's not being focused on the external stories that are triggering us and scaring us. All right, if you want more support with that, this is exactly the kind of work and the kind of moments that we create in the better than before breast cancer mindset and metabolic health coaching membership, so come to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com and check out the programs that can support you in creating a life you love. All right, I will talk to you again next week, when I will fill you in on the experience of metabolic health day, which I'm so excited about. And until then, keep choosing life right now and remember you are healing every single day. I'll talk to you soon.

18:45
You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before, your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door. At the door.

19:03
Give it all you got

19:06
no hesitating. You've

19:09
been waiting all your life. This is your

19:15
moment. This is your moment.