How do you know whether it is time to push forward, hold steady, or give yourself permission to stop?

Most of us never ask. We just keep pressing, adding the next hard thing, without checking whether we have the reserves to carry it.

In this episode, I borrow a simple idea from metabolic wellness and show you how it maps onto the way we live, and I get honest about what it looked like to let myself pause without guilt.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is make space.

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Read the full transcript:

Laura Lummer 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 there, friends! You are listening to episode 477 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer. I'm your host Laura Lummer, and I want to set up the scene a little bit for what we're going to talk about today by introducing you to or talking about a metabolic framework when we look at our health. And although this episode isn't necessarily about metabolic health, I think this kind of sets the scene for the parallels that exist between this concept and the lives that we live. So, in metabolic wellness, and this is actually a concept that was put forth by Dr. Thomas Siefree, is a framework called push pause. And what that means is, before a naturopathic practitioner, before they add anything to a person's plan of action, they're going to think about basically three questions. Given everything that this person's body is carrying right now, what they're going through right now, the metabolic state of being, can we push it, or is this person steady? Right? Is are they doing well? Are they looking good? Is everything going well? And do we want to just hold here, right? Do we want to just not add anything, not take anything away? Let's hold here because they're doing good, they're stable, they're looking great. Or is this person's system so overwhelmed that they need rest, pause? That it doesn't matter how good the high dose vitamin C therapy, the hyperbaric oxygen, the mistletoe injection, whatever, whatever, whatever. No matter what a wonderful treatment that is, that person's system is not ready for it. Cannot take it because there is at its limit. It's all it can take, right? So when you ask a body to do something hard when you're pushing, so you're you're telling it to move, to work out, to sweat, to maybe fast, go without food for a period of time, and to be in the heat, to be in sauna, right? The body can respond to that temporary stressor by coming back stronger, so the stress is the point, and then the body adapts to that stress by increasing its capacity to handle it. But that only happens if there's a foundation to build on, right? The same stress, if you deliver it to a body that doesn't have any reserves, that doesn't have a strong foundation. It is not going to build on it. It is going to deplete the body. It's going to take more than the body has to give. And so, essentially, it's not the treatment is good or bad, but is the treatment well timed? Is the person's body ready to handle whatever the treatment is? And one of the things that's really important to look at is you don't push a body if its exits are closed. Let me give you an example of that. If you were to speed something up before the body can handle what you're speeding up, what you're stirring up, that can really make things worse. Again, not because the therapy was wrong necessarily, but the body wasn't ready for it. And I think a perfect example of that is I'll hear this a lot. People will come to me and say, "I need a detox, or you know, I've heard everybody has parasites. What kind of parasite cleanse do you recommend? And I'll ask them a couple of questions first, like what makes you think you might have parasites, or what makes you think you need a detoxification protocol? How are you feeling? How's your appetite? How's your gut health? Are you going to the bathroom regularly? And nine and a half times out of 10, I'll hear, "I'm lucky if I go to the bathroom once a week.

Laura Lummer 4:28
Well, the last thing you want to do with someone whose elimination systems are backed up is release toxins, or God forbid, parasites, because if the body doesn't have any way to eliminate them, then that toxic buildup is going to create a lot more problems. So you got to prepare the body first. You have to create the capacity to handle the therapy, right? So you get the foundation working, you go slow, and then you add at the right. Time, and the reason I wanted to share that with you, the reason I wanted to talk about that, is because I think that the parallels for that, for this perspective of metabolic wellness and this, you know, metabolic approach to wellness, align so much with our lives, I think I don't even think I know that many women take on really big things like the new business or the caregiving or some kind of project before they've really built the capacity to handle what that thing will ask of them. And now sometimes, especially when it comes to caregiving, there's no option on when you start. Right, you may need to start right now, but even as you start, even if you're starting something that you feel you have no control over, that just started and needed you, then it's still a time to say, "Okay, I'm going to take this on. What else can I release? Right? Is the system clogged? Is this new thing that is going to be a stressor in my life? Is it going to be too much? Do I need to take other things off? Do I have the capacity and the strong foundation to manage this, or do I need to set myself up for success first before I cause harm for myself? Right. So the ambition isn't the problem. The compassion isn't the problem. It's just really like the order of operations. How are we going to set ourselves up for success? And not only that, but when can you admit you're at your nervous system's limit? And the reason I think of this is I'll share with you a story. So I've shared on the podcast before that it's been a long time now. It's been since March, early March this year, that I've either been dealing with pain, sometimes really intense pain, or recently, as of the last almost a month now, the inability to move my right arm, and again, I'm dealing with all that. I've got the doctors all lined up, but I'm working on it. But it takes an emotional toll. You know, the things that we go through behind the scenes that people never see-it takes an emotional toll, especially pain. Pain takes a lot of energy, but if you're someone you're out there working, you're doing a great job of your life. No one knows what's going on at home, who you're worried about, what you're going through with your teenager, what's happening with your aging parent? You know they don't see that side of you, and not that they need to see that side of you, but do you recognize it? Do you recognize when enough is enough, and you need to pause? Can you see the pattern in your life of press, push, hold steady, and pause. And I'll tell you, this last week, again, you know, I was in the hospital. What is it? Two weeks ago now, but my breathing hasn't returned to normal. Still, again, working on that. I'm sure it'll work out, and even though I know I'm going to figure this out, being in the process is taxing, right? So you may be going through something in your life, and you're like, I know I'm going to figure this out. It's really a struggle right now, but right now, when it's the struggle, how are you finding joy in your life, right? Sometimes life is really fucking hard, and yet we want to live it and enjoy it as much as we can in that moment as well. And sometimes we need to say, "My nervous system can literally not take one more thing, and I got to that point recently. And we were coming up on the weekend, and you know, we like to go do things with friends and family on the weekend, and like to go out to dinner.

Laura Lummer 9:12
But I said to my husband at the beginning of the week, "Hey, I have cut back on my schedule, on you know what I'm doing and people that I'm working with and projects that I had want been wanting to do because I'm I'm at the end of what my nervous system can handle now and it's this weekend I need to do nothing like nothing I don't want to answer the phone like currently I have, I have like 20,000 unread emails. I have dozens and dozens of unread text messages, and I'm okay with it because just looking at them, my brain says I can't right now. I can't. You'll have to wait. I've had to look at my schedule and say I am in a pause. I am in a pause because one, I want to support myself, my nervous system, and it's going through a lot, and my body is working really hard to heal, and I want to support. That is the main thing. Like I am well aware of the fact that I have metastatic cancer, and my options here are support your ability to heal, make this body a priority, or potentially die. I mean that's not a joke, and that's not an overstatement. And so, for me, in this state that I'm in, that has got to be the priority. Listening to my body and to what it needs. So when I feel like I'm in the push, it's got to be a really positive push, and it's got to you know increase my capacity, strengthen my ability in a great and positive way that causes my body to feel like it's flourishing, like it's thriving, right? If it's a push, like for instance, now dealing with physical issues, dealing with pain, and then still deciding I'm going to push, that is not supportive right now. But the hard part is, how do you decide you're in a pause? How do you decide? Like over the weekend, I got phone calls and text messages. Hey, you want to go out for sushi? Hey, you want to come over and hang out with us? And no, the answer was no. No, I don't. I literally want to be here in silence. Maybe read a book, you know, or just sit on my patio and enjoy the view, but my nervous system cannot take any more than it's already dealing with. Even my husband came home on a Saturday afternoon, and he came in and he said, "I hope you're feeling like sushi. And I just felt like this deflated balloon. Of course, I don't want to disappoint him because he sounded excited to go out to sushi. But I just the the thought of just sitting in a restaurant, sitting in a chair, and I don't dealing with ordering food and waiting for the check to come was more than I could even process. And I looked at him, and I just said, "So sorry. Honestly, I'm not up to it. I don't even think I can go and mind my manners right now. Like I'm just not up to it. I just need to really do nothing. But how do you surrender to that, right? How do you surrender to the needs of your body? Surrender to the needs of your nervous system. Surrender when you recognize that you are in a season of pause, and yet know that you're not giving up hope. Know that you're not just giving up any kind of drive, right? I still know things that I want to do and create and invite into my life, but I know I've got to set the foundation first. I know that where I'm at now with what I'm dealing with now, I can't invite anything else in until I've dealt with this appropriately, right? So coming back again to that detoxification analogy, that I need to open up those channels, right? I need to open up those channels so that I can invite something else in, and so that comes back to me to resistance. You know, I'm an active person. I'm an ambitious person. I've got lots of goals and dreams, and I love to be outside. I love to be around people, and my body has just not been up to it lately. So, how do you move from resisting that, right?

Laura Lummer 13:58
From saying, I don't want to feel like this, and surrendering to that fact that I do feel like this, whether it's in sadness, in grief, in pain, in exhaustion, right? And saying I do feel like this, and I'm going to hold space for myself without the fight. I think that this has been one of my biggest lessons, especially definitely over the course of this year, is that the resistance creates so much more tension inside my body. Right? If I one get in that space where I'm fighting myself, I'm like, I don't want this. I'm sick of this. I'm so over this, and then I look at that feeling and be like, I don't want to feel like that. I want to feel joyful. I want to feel like I'm having fun. I want to feel like I'm inviting great things into my life. The truth is, I don't feel like that right now, for the most part. Right? Not all the time. And so, how do we just accept all of that in the pause? How do we allow ourselves to just say, "I'm going to be here with all of this, and you know what? Right now, this sucks, and it's okay to hold space for the fact that it sucks, because if I can say that to myself, I can be like, "This isn't what I want, but I'm not pushing it. I'm just recognizing and acknowledging this isn't what I want in my life right now, and yet this is what my life is right now. And so I'm going to honor that. I'm going to allow myself to feel what I feel. I'm going to say I feel frustration, and it's okay to feel frustration because the situation sucks. I feel sadness, and it's okay to feel sadness because the circumstance sucks. I feel like I'm grieving, and it's okay to grieve because I feel like I'm losing something. It's when we notice that we feel these emotions that are always labeled as negative emotions, and we push them away, and we say, "No, no, no! I don't want to feel that. That's when we we push them even more deeply into the tissues of our body. People ask me all the time, like, "What does it mean to process an emotion? Like, how do you do that? And the truth of it is, is you recognize it, and you hold space for it, and you say, "This is true for me right now. How does this feel in my body right now? Okay, how do I show up for myself? And you know, I always like to use the analogy of looking at your body as if it were your your most favorite person in the world, your baby, your best friend, whoever, but you love that body so, so, so much that you're just going to look at it and hold space for it, just as you would if you would look at your child and you'd be like, "I see you're sad. How can I show up for you? Right? I see you're not feeling well, my best friend in the world. How can I show up for you? And when we can finally do that for ourselves, when you can finally say, "I don't feel good emotionally, physically, spiritually, you're in a deficit. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But to recognize it and allow yourself to look at it without pushing it away, and allowing it to be a part of you right now, and just saying this is a part of me, and it's okay. And then once we feel it enough, we say, "Okay, but I don't want to get stuck here, right? Someone throw me a lifeline. Like I need a lifeline. What do I need here for support? Maybe you turn to someone in your life because I deal with my husband. Say, "Here's what I need for support. I need you to be with me in silence, like we need some quiet time. We need some checkout time, right? You can do that for yourself, but we do it in in a very loving way. And I'll tell you, after I've having a few days where it's just like I'm going to take a nap if I need to, I'm going to rest if I need to. It was a great recharge.

Laura Lummer 18:09
So even though when the next week started, I was still having the physical symptoms, I had allowed myself to pause long enough for that little bit of a recharge, and for that feeling of I'm taking care of myself here, so now I can still look forward and I can face this day and I can say, Oh, here's the energy that I have to move forward now, little bits at a time, honestly, to look and say I may not be in full 100% mode, but I really needed that pause, so I think it's so important for us to think about this concept: Are we in our body, in our life, are in our relationships? Are we in a state where we can push, and we can say, "Let's take this to the next level, right? Let's go in. Let's connect more. Or do we need to clean some shit up here? Do we need to open some channels in our life? Release. Let some stuff go. You know, with my clients right now, with my members in the Better Than Before Breast Cancer membership, we're going through my four pillars of breast cancer recovery. We're in this release pillar, and that to me is such an important pillar, and it's so critical to start. I think nearly everything we do in life with release, because the question is, do I have the space and the capacity to take this thing on? We cannot fill an overfilled cup, just like we can't give more from an empty cup. And I know that sounds cliche, but cliches are created for a reason because there's some kind of truth to them. Yeah. So are we at the point of having the gift enough of self awareness to say in any area of. My life, am I ready to push? Is gonna is it is the foundation set? Is the foundation ready? Is the space there? And I'm ready to press forward. And may not be hard, may be stressful, but I'm ready. I am ready to take it on. I am ready to face it. Are we at the point where like okay, I did a lot of pressing. Is good. I've created something. We've connected. We're good. Let's let's like hold on to this for a minute. Let's take a breather, right? And let's just stay steady with whatever it is we figured out is working for us. And then, is there a time where we say, "Wow, we press. really hard. Things have been good, and I'm feeling now like I need a pause, maybe for reflection, maybe for healing, maybe just because the nervous system has taken all that it can possibly take, and that's okay. When you recognize that, that's a beautiful place of self-awareness, and allowing yourself to check out in calmness without guilt, as an act of love and compassion towards yourself, I think is absolutely critical. And I'm always fascinated by when we look at supporting the metabolic wellness of our body, that energetic these processes align so much with life and the way that we approach life. Life is not easy a lot of the time, but it's also amazing and beautiful at the same time when it's not easy. And in a world where we have more and more things stacked on us, emails coming in, text messages coming in, information pouring into our heads. We have to decide how we're going to care for this container of our life. Is this container ready for more? Does it need a pause? Does it need some clearing out? So as I go through my pause in preparation for inviting in a lot more healing, because I'm looking forward to the push, the press that I have coming, the push that I've already planned for my life and for my business, and I see it at the end of the tunnel. So I know that right now I can surrender to what I need, because I know it's temporary, and I can be here without pushing it away. I can be here in it because this is one of the things I think we do when we recognize that we're overwhelmed. We don't allow ourselves really to just be in it and process it. We often think like, how long is this going to last? What am I going to be done with this?

Laura Lummer 22:41
When am I going to get to move on? And that just creates more stress, right? That's the resistance that I'm talking about. So we can resist something, we can not like something, or we can not like it and say, "I don't like it, but I'm going to be here for it. In knowing that, like everything else in life, is temporary, and so we're going to show up for ourselves in this temporary state of pause, in this temporary state of being, while we still hold on to the fact that we know life is always a series of processes and transitions. Has been a powerful lesson for me. We are always in process, you know. Life is this dynamic force that keeps changing and evolving, and we're along for the ride. And there's no question that this is the same way it is for everybody, right? What I do as a transformational life coach, as a metabolic health specialist, is I support people through these transitions, and I work with those who have had a breast cancer diagnosis because I think that adds this extra layer to life. You know, life already comes with its challenges, and then breast cancer is another layer to those challenges that adds more to our life that we need to be aware of, right? That we need to handle with care, and that we need to make space for everything that it has created in our life, in our minds, and in our body. So I invite you to just take a moment today and ask yourself: Where am I at? Am I in a stage of life where I compress? Am I in a stage where it's all good, and I just really want to hold steady. Am I in a place where I need to pause in the most loving and compassionate way, and be super present with myself so that I can clear things out and set the foundation for the next step in the process of this amazing life? All right, friends, if you'd like more help with that, come to my website, thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com. I've got a lot of self-paced programs that can really help you with any area that you're in in your life. And of course, I have the Better Than Before Breast Cancer Membership, where we have live coaching with me three times a month. We have 20-minute sessions. Three times a month, and you also get great pricing and discounts on private sessions with me as a member. So go to my website, thebreastcancerecoverycoach.com, and check it out. Come and find the Living Well After Breast Cancer community that also lives on my website, and that is a free community that you can join and ask questions and talk about maybe something you've heard on the podcast, something you want more information, or share a success that you've had. All right, I will talk to you again next week, and until then, be good to yourself, and expect others to be good to you as well. Take care.

Speaker 1 25:33
To rest, your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your future's at the door. Give it all you got. No hesitating. You've been waiting

Unknown Speaker 26:00
all your long. is your moment in time. This is your moment in time. This is your moment. This is your moment to shine, to shine, to shine.