Episode Overview

As Breast Cancer Awareness Month comes to a close, I’m reflecting on what it really means to live in the middle of the good and the bad — the joy and the frustration, the gratitude and the grief, the healing and the pain.

This episode is deeply personal. I share what it’s like to navigate a metastatic diagnosis five years later, how I’m adjusting to new treatments, and why balance isn’t about perfection — it’s about allowing your energy and emotions to flow rather than stagnate.

We’ll talk about how unprocessed emotions show up in the body, the fascinating science behind psycho-neuro-immunology, fascia, and the vagus nerve, and how energy flow connects emotional healing and immune function.

You’ll also learn how to begin releasing stored energy safely — without forcing or re-traumatizing yourself — and how to create moments of calm so your body feels safe enough to resume repair and healing.

✨ In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• The constant dance between healing and managing side effects

• What “emotional flow” really means and why it matters for physical health

• How Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and neuroscience all describe the same truth about healing

• Simple ways to help your body feel safe enough to release stored emotion

💗 If you’re ready to reconnect with yourself and find your own flow, join me inside the Better Than Before Breast Cancer Metabolic Health and Mindset Membership.

When life feels busy or heavy, that’s exactly when you need this support the most. You’re always worth the time it takes to care for yourself.

Explore more support 

• Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership: https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/lifecoaching

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Join my email list and get resources for healing, hope, and living with intention after breast cancer.

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🎙 Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

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. Hey, friends, welcome to episode 435 of better than before breast cancer. This episode comes out on October 31 which is a very special day for many reasons. One, my daughter was born on October 31 she's a little Halloween baby. Two, it's the last day of breast cancer awareness month, which I want to talk about, because I think that that's got a lot of significance for a lot of us. Three, when you hear this show, I will be in Tulum, Mexico with all my kids, my husband, my sisters, my nieces, my nephews, for one of my nephews weddings, and I'm so excited that we're all going to get to be there together. It's just one of those really fantastic moments, actually, the first time that all of my children will be together on a family vacation with me, all, all of them, and so it's going to be amazing. I'm so excited. A couple of them are already there, so I'm kind of already having FOMO. I want to get there too. But when I think about this month and everything that's gone on this month, you know, this was my five year anniversary from my metastatic disease diagnosis. It's Breast Cancer Awareness Month. A lot of things comes up during that month with a lot of my clients. We hear tremendous stories of success and healing. We hear dramatic stories of struggles and troubles and trauma. All are true. All are important. I think all feed into the whole fabric of what we go through after a breast cancer diagnosis. And I think a lot about the the the constant dynamic of the good and the bad, the 5050 the ongoing energetic struggle, you know, the where is the body at? And this is whether you're managing metastatic disease like I am, you know, you're living with this chronic ailment that we're constantly focusing on, or whether you have no evidence of disease. But still, because you've had a diagnosis, there's something in the back of your mind that says, I have to put this energy into living my life this way, or doing these things, or having these practices, because I want to stay healthy and I want to stay whole. And we have that side of medicine, which is our traditional medicine, that is attacking cancer, and it's very toxic and very powerful, and it healed a lot of bodies and harmed a lot of bodies. So we've got the other side, where we're focusing on healing, where we're looking at, how do I support the healthy side of my body? How do I take in this medication? And I'll give you an example. So I have been on a medication in oral chemotherapy for two and a half years now, and I've talked about it before on the show. It's the load it causes hand and foot syndrome. And the hand and foot syndrome is getting to the point where it's no longer tolerable, and this medication has to be changed for me.

3:26
Then this month, we also saw in my blood work little bit of fluctuation, some indications that maybe the medicine is not as effective as it has been, which happens a lot when you're having metastatic disease. Many people managing metastatic disease go through many different stages and rounds of different treatments, right? I can't even, right off the top of my head, tell you how many I've been through in the last five years. And you know, I think overall, we're mostly trying to put off ever going back to IV chemotherapy, because it's probably the thing that nobody wants to do the most. So whatever we can find, we want to do anything we can to support the healing of the body, to destroy cancer cells, and to stay away from IB chemotherapy as long as possible. And so the good and the bad in that, when I think about that, is like I have, is that every day we're seeing new things come up, right? So we've got breast cancer awareness month, we talk a lot about putting money into research, and there's some great things that have come out, both in in the integrative world, right? So in the complementary medicine world and in the standard of care world, there's a fantastic test, a garden 360 and or their next generation sequencing NGS tests, and there's multiple ones. But because of this test, I was able to do this blood work and get these, get the results of the genetic sequencing back that shows what's going on with the specific cancer that is in my body. And my oncologist sees and he says, Oh, here's a variant we didn't know about. And because we didn't know about this variant, we didn't know there was another treatment available for me, so we're able to switch over to this treatment that's shown to be very. Effective against this specific variant. That's awesome, right? And it bridges that gap, or lengthens that gap, and puts off any kind of IV therapy even longer, which is exactly what I want. But at the same time, that specific combination that targets that specific gene variant is known to cause diabetes, jeez, good and bad. So even more work goes into managing the metabolism, managing the health. The medicine is wonderful, and I'm grateful for it. And at the same time, is going to take a lot of energy to combat the side effects and keep my body healing and thriving and feeling well. And I just think about that so much this month, like the competing emotions of being so grateful for life and having a wonderful life, like we're surrounded by people that we love, we're hopefully doing things we love or hopefully enjoying every day of life. And yet, many of us are managing, you know, aromatase inhibitors and the side effects from that for a long time, people managing metastatic breast cancer, people going through treatment, and it sometimes gets so frustrating, right? Sometimes we want to throw our hands in the air and just say, I just want this to stop, please. I just want this to stop. I just want to be done with cancer, and I just want to enjoy life, and it's okay to feel like that. It really is. It's okay to hold space for all of the emotions that flow through us, whether it's looking at scars that remind us of our trauma, whether it's dealing with emotional PTSD, whether it's dealing with frustration or exhaustion from constant monitoring and supporting the health. It's okay, because on an energetic level, it's so important to hold space so that these emotions can flow right. It's so important to recognize that we don't always have to be happy. Things don't always have to be perfect. Things never will be. There will always be good and bad existing at the same time in nearly everything we do in this life, right? Great medicine, bad side effect, make a choice, right? Great life. Still have cancer, okay, good and bad. There's always something, and it's important that we recognize that, fortunately, we get to decide where we're going to focus our energy, because where we focus our energy when it comes to that good and bad, is going to result in how much we get to enjoy our life and when we allow our emotions to flow, and we don't judge them, right? We don't, we don't say like, I'm not allowed to feel like so I shouldn't feel like this, and we just allow ourselves to be like, Yeah, this is where I'm at right now, and I don't want to stay here, right? There's times when I wake up and I don't want to take another handful of supplements. I want to take another pill. I don't want my hands to hurt anymore. And I'm not going to indulge in that and stay in that space, not even for a whole day, but I'm going to let myself feel and say, That's a it's a realistic experience, right? It's real to feel that, because it is what I'm feeling, and I get to express it. When we do that, we support the flow of energy, and we support the processing of emotions, because when we don't, and this, this whole good and bad, it gets me to think of like Yin and Yang and the whole energy dynamic that comes with healing a body. And as I talk about a lot on the show, a lot of times, we get very focused on supplements and food. And I truly believe that's a disservice to us, that is minimizing what it takes to heal, because healing is so deep, I gotta tell you, being on this journey, there's always something else, right? You get the food in check, and sometime you have to just check that list off and say, Okay, I got the food piece down. Now what else? And now what else? And we have to be willing to go into the things that are very difficult. And I'll tell you, it is that flow of energy in the body that I come back to more and more as I get further and further along this journey of exploring and learning, how do you support the body's ability to heal? So I started thinking a lot about, you know, what is what? What else can I explore? Right? What? What does breast cancer mean on an energetic level? What does lymphedema mean on an energetic level? Because I believe that our body is profoundly intelligent, and that it's not only always wanting to heal, but it's always wanting to protect us. And I think, what are the energetics? What are the energetics of the body? What are the energetics of the breast? They're the energetic center of giving, of nourishing, of mothering, of pouring out, right? They're literally positioned over our heart. They're our emotional core. And I think about how so many women are conditioned from girlhood to love outward before they love inward, to anticipate the needs of everybody around them before anybody else's needs are even spoken as if it's our job to keep everybody. Emotionally balanced and comfortable. We're taught to soften our own truth with the false belief that doing so might keep the peace for those around us, and we're taught to protect everybody else from discomfort by holding discomfort in ourselves, and I say holding very specifically, because when we don't allow the emotional energy of the body to flow. Our body stores it right and it stores it where the story lives, in the tissues that symbolize self nourishment or the absence of it. So I'm constantly doing work to examine that. What am I holding on to? What am I holding on to that's hurting me? What else can I let go of? And trust me, I'm gonna be 62 years old next month. There's a lot of shit that I've held on to over my life, and the more you let go, the more you see you can let go of. More I think about the lymphatic system. I think about the the energetic meaning of the lymphatic system, and what is it? It's a release channel, right? Physically, definitely. It's cleansing. It's releasing. The lymphatic system needs to flow, but energetically, it is also a release channel. So if we think about, what does that mean, how do we allow emotional drainage? When we think about really hard truths that we never speak, we think about grief that gets swallowed, that we don't allow ourselves to hold space for and express. We have to think about resentment that feels justified to us, right? And so we hold it instead of feel it and think through it and process it. We think about heartache and heartbreak and how maybe we made sense of it, right? We metabolized it intellectually, but never really emotionally. And there's a big difference there between making sense of something intellectually and really processing it emotionally. And so the lymph becomes a place that holds it, because the release is never completed, and it's not because our body is failing us, it's not because our body is betraying us, but it's because it's carrying what we cannot yet consciously carry and process. So from my experience in my own journey here, I'm healing my body, and from so many clients that I work with, I mean, you can eat the cleanest diet in the world. But if your body is still living in emotional self protection, and you've not learned how to let energy move instead of just being mentally managed, your body is always living in defense mode. And I think it goes back to the Body Keeps the Score by besser van der Kolk, where he says, What cannot be spoken cannot be healed and what cannot be moved energetically and must be stored. So I think about everything that you've experienced, not only this month, but throughout your life, throughout the year, how do you begin to let it flow out of you? How do we un store it? How do we make peace with it? How do we decide to allow ourselves to not be re traumatized, to get the right support so we're not re traumatized, but get the right support to process in a healing way and let our body finish what it began years ago, letting go of stuff, letting go, letting go, and then letting ourselves listen to the language of our bodies without letting our Mind edit what is true for us. And you know, I come back to this over and over, what is true for us, what is. It's so difficult. It's so fascinating, how difficult it is for our human brains to accept what is. And I had this conversation with my husband the other day, so he and I both had birthdays in November. He'll be 69 I'll be 62 and he said to me, I don't feel like a 69 year old. And I laughed at him, and I said, Well, honey, you do feel like a 69 year old because you are 69 so whatever it is you're feeling is what a 69 year old feels. And I said, it's not the story you have of what a 69 year old is, but it is the truth. This is how a 69 year old feels, because that's your that's your body, and it's your unique body at 69 experiencing it, right? But this is how we go through life. It's like we want to deny that flow of energy by not looking at what is. We want to justify and edit everything that goes through us and say, Okay, I don't want to feel sad, which is totally fine. Of course, we don't want to feel sad, so we look at things and we decide what information we let in. But when we know we have something to process and we don't know how to hold space for it in a healthy way and allow it to flow, it stagnates in us and it gets stuck. And I think this is a really important thing to look at when you come through a month that may have been really emotionally challenging, not devastating necessarily, but challenging in a way where you're like, oh, you know, I'm frustrated and I'm tired of dealing with this, and then I shouldn't feel like that, because I should be grateful. You know, there's a field called psychoneuroimmunology, which I absolutely love. I even when. Of the name, because psycho, our mind neuro, our nervous system, the movement of energy and flow in our body, and immunology, the strength of our immune system. There are over 100 published studies on psycho neuro immunology that show that unresolved emotional stress changes immune cell behavior, inflammatory signaling and even how tumors behave. And we have fascia research. What is fascia, but that like Saran Wrap, for oversimplification, that goes around our muscles. We have an interstitium, which is a this honeycomb network of fluid moving through our body. We have data on the vagus nerve, that the vagus nerve literally can turn off inflammatory cytokines when our body feels safe. And that's not just this woohoo energy work. That's where energy and real science come together, and it's called a cholinergic anti inflammatory pathway. It's actually measurable. So when we look at things like Ancient Studies, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and we look at that, and we see that what it tells us about energy is that disease begins in TCM, traditional Chinese medicine, Qi, stagnation. Ayurveda says unprocessed experiences become Amma. Amma is a toxin that they're not speaking metaphorically. They're describing exactly what we now understand through scientific studies. So when we think about cancer in the breast, cancer in the limbs, why there? What does that mean to us? What is it signifying? And we think about the channels of emotional processing and nourishment that the breast sit on right the liver, the spleen, the heart and our liver governs emotional flow, especially anger, resentment, self abandonment. This fleeing governs nourishment and what about our heart? Love? In our Ayurveda, the breasts are considered part of what's called a rasa Datu, our emotional plasma, our nutrient and love distribution system. It's governed by an energy called kapha, which is love and caring, but it turns stagnant when we give outward and never receive inward. And I don't mean just from people around us, but from ourselves. When we look at it from a Western perspective, the fascia around our chest and our heart is one of the most richly innervated emotional processing regions in the entire body. Trauma researchers call it the emotional fascia, lymph nodes, our body's clearance system, emotionally and physically. And when you cannot release emotionally, your lymph mirrors that block physiologically, obviously, as someone with lymphedema, I give a lot of thought to that. What does that mean to me? What can I do? What kind of work can I do to help support the healing and letting go of any emotional suppression in my body? Because there's research that shows that high emotional suppression scores have measurably different immune profiles, including elevated il six, which is an inflammatory marker and CRP, which is an inflammatory marker of the heart. So why our breasts? Why our limb? Why should we pay attention to the energy we're putting out and taking in? Because this is the area that is most affected when we live in giving mode, refusing to receive, and I there's nothing wrong with giving. Please, don't mean that. I'm saying that we don't want to give and love to give, but when we hold on to things instead of speak our truth, find our authentic self and our authentic voice, we override our truth to tell ourselves the lie that we're keeping the peace. So the message here is not You did this to yourself, but it's that your body is doing everything it can to protect you, is holding on to what we can't let go of and release. And so our work is never to fight. Our body is to hold space for ourselves, and it's to let what was never metabolized start to move. And that means somatic too, right? That's that's energy. So it's our neuro immune system. It's mechanical, it's miserable. And we don't want to just rip lids off, as I said, we don't want to re traumatize ourselves. We want to do things safely and restoring the flow of our body, our emotions, our nervous system, hold the space for all the good and the bad that exist at the same time and honor what's actually being experienced, right? That's very metabolically supportive. And there's something that's very important here. There's actually a couple things that are very important here, but one thing you have to think about is the body has to feel safe. It has to be allowed to complete what it began, letting go of something. And this is where most women unknowingly get stuck because they're trying to process emotions from a regulated mind and a dysregulated body, right? So we journal while we're still clenching our jaw. Go to therapy while the breath is still stuck in the upper chest, and we talk about what happened in. From the point of you agree with me, right? I have a right to be pissed about this, but we don't soften. There's no emotional release without giving the body permission to feel safe and letting that go. So what does physiological permission look like? How do we tell the body it's safe? We practice regulating our breath by taking deep breaths, exhales become longer than inhales, allow our shoulders to physically drop. Hold space for ourselves, white space. I talk about the program I have creating a life you love in 168 hours a week, and it's all about creating white space for yourself so you have time for your mind to stop scanning for the next thing, to manage and start feeling safe in this as it is now, right? And when this shift happens, that vagus nerve starts to activate, and the vagus nerve literally tells your immune system, stand down, we're safe. You can resume repair, right? And that's when release becomes possible. And it doesn't always have to be a big, dramatic event. You know, people tell me they don't want to work on release, because they'll never stop crying. And it's not always about crying. In fact, a lot of times it's just allowing yourself to sigh, allowing yourself to just shake and let go of energy, right? It's allowing yourself to just notice when a lump in your throat arises, and notice what you're feeling and just move through it, right? Or allowing yourself to talk through tears, because tears are feeling like a release and not a breakdown or a psychotic episode, right? We want to be gentle with ourselves, so we may look at the processing and the flow of energy and emotion through different things. In traditional Chinese medicine, it's getting the QI moving again. In Ayurveda, it's Agni. It's digesting what was previously undigestible. In neuroscience, it's autonomic discharge, different languages, same event. So we don't begin by digging into trauma, ripping open boxes, looking at suppressed memories, re traumatizing ourselves. We just try to support ourselves by creating moments of safety and release, 10 seconds of uninterrupted breathing, right a moment where you feel like your posture can relax, or a moment where you just hold space for yourself to tell yourself the truth and let the truth be real for you, and allowing it to be there, and allowing it to be real, and acknowledging it without feeling like you have to immediately fix something right? Elite, release begins with permission. Flow is gets permission, not pressure. So as we listen to this, we think about ourselves. We think about, you know, November starts tomorrow. When this podcast comes out, November is going to start tomorrow, and this is the season, once again, I talked about this recently, that we need to be uber intentional about taking care of ourselves, so we don't lose ourselves when we go through months where things are challenging, or we go through episodes in life where things are challenging, which always will be right again, Good and that will exist at the same time, all the time. It's important that we allow ourselves the flow of that energy, the recognition of that energy, and the space to just let it be and recognize what is true for us that is such an incredibly powerful practice. So as we wrap up Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I know that in the bigger world, that's about early detection and looking for cancer, but for me and for us, I hope that it's about learning to love yourself and learning to be in your truth, and learning to accept what is for you right now without judgment, so that you can love yourself more, love your body more and support its ability to protect you and its ability to heal. That's what I want for all of us. I'm working on it all the time. I'm here for you, if you want to work on it too. We're in this together. You can find me at the breast cancer recovery coach.com and I invite you and a lot of people I know at this time of year about, Oh, I'd love to be in the better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset membership, but I'll do to the beginning of the year like this is a busy time when it's a busy time, it's even more important to commit to yourself so that you can take care of yourself in times where we lose ourselves, right? You are always worth the time, and I think that's a very important thing to begin to embrace. Why put off taking care of yourself another day? So come find me on Instagram, Facebook, the breast cancer recovery coach. Check out my website. I've got lots of free downloads to support you on that as well, and I will talk to you again very soon. Next week, I'll be sharing the experience on an amazing wedding vacation in saloon, and I can't wait. All right, follow me on Instagram, and I'll post some pictures for you. I'll talk to you soon.

24:51
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.

25:09
Give it all you got no hesitating.

25:12
You've been waiting all your

25:21
life. This is your moment.

25:40
This is your moment.