Episode Overview

How many times have you said, or heard yourself think, I did all the things?

We follow the protocols, take the supplements, change the food, and quietly believe that if we just do it well enough, we will be safe. So what happens when the body does something we did not sign up for anyway?

In this episode, I sit with three truths that sound heavy at first and actually set a lot of us free.

The goal is not to convince yourself that nothing bad will happen. It is to become the woman who knows she can live fully without knowing what comes next.

Resources Mentioned:

Download for iPhone: 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kajabi/id1485646310

Download for Android: 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kajabi.kajabiapp&hl=en_US

Work with Laura:
https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/health 

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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 480 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer, and I am your host Laura Lummer, and I want to talk with you today about something really important. As I'm thinking about what I'm going to talk to you about, the whole three truths and a lie thing kind of came to my mind. But we're not going to talk about lies. We're going to talk about truths. And the first thing I want to do is share a story with you. You know, I am at an age where myself and my friend group are getting cardiologists. Right? We're at that age. We're like, we should know a cardiologist. And I actually have a friend who she sent her husband to a cardiologist, and they found a widowmaker. They saved his life just arbitrarily. The guy was having no symptoms at all, so that was amazing. But I had another friend who went to the cardiologist, and she's super healthy. She's in great shape. She doesn't look her age. She doesn't act her age. You know, we're in our 60s, and she's just amazing. And she went to the cardiologist, and he said, "Well, I'm hearing from all my friends. Go get a calcium score test, so we get a baseline on you. And she did, and she expected this test to come back perfect because she does a lot of work, which we consider healthy. She follows all the rules that the they put out there, and it came back that her calcium score was not zero, but it was higher than what she expected, and it was not a problem, right? It was not anything scary, but she was so disappointed, right? She was so she was literally in tears. Why, why do I have calcium deposits? I do all the things, and then if I had a dime for every time somebody said to me, or I heard myself say to me, I did all the things, and I think that what we're going to talk about today are three fundamental what I believe are truths, and the I did all the things falls into them. I think when we can look at these things, the three things I'm going to talk about, and we allow ourselves to accept these truths, to really sit with and say, yeah, that's true. We can let a lot go, and we can reduce a lot of suffering in our lives. Now, before I talk about these three truths, I want to preface it with something. What I'm about to tell you, you can take one way or the other, right? As as with anything in life, we all have our own story about the words that we hear. So, I want to tell you that the words that I'm going to use are here to make your life easier, create more room for you to love yourself, create more room for you to bring joy, allow yourself to let go of some of the things you think about, and focus on happiness and fullness and beauty in your life. There's no intention of creating fear here, all right. So we are going to share the truth. So, and I think a lot of times to to accept what is true means that that's scary, right? But it's only scary if you make it mean something scary. So let's have this conversation. Let's talk about three things I think are very important. Number one, there is no guarantee for a cure for breast cancer. Now, that does not mean people don't experience a cure, and I'm going to talk about that in a minute. That doesn't mean that some are very curable. Some diagnoses very, very curable, meaning the disease disappears and no one ever gets it again.

Laura Lummer 3:56
And number two, I think as within this story that I just told you, as my friend, whether it's heart disease, cancer, or anything else in life, prevention, risk reduction, is not the same thing as a guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong with this biological entity that our spirits dwell in. This body is a biological creature susceptible to the rules of the earth that it lives in, impacted by the environment that it lives in and thrives in and wanders around this earth in. And that environment means everything from from toxins to relationships to food to everything, everything, everything, right? And so, because we are biological creatures, we're susceptible to these rules and these laws in our life. And I think that when we get caught up in the "but I did everything right, we set ourselves up for failure. And I'm going to talk about that in just a second, because the third thing is that I firmly believe that our. Job here on this planet is to live this life fully and joyfully and kindly. I believe that we are here to learn to love ourselves, and from that love, to let it grow outward and learn to treat each other with love. And that sounds really simple and beautiful and cool, and it's really hard and a lot of work. So let's dig into these three things, because again, I want to make sure we understand them, and then we're crystal clear on what I mean when I'm talking about them, so that we can let go of a lot of stuff and have more room for that joyful life and focusing on anything that gets in the way from living joyfully, fully, and kindly, and spreading that love. Okay, so can we agree that no one in the conventional world of medicine, or the naturopathic or integrative world of medicine, can hand us something and say, "Here, do this, take this, and I guarantee your cancer will go away and never come back. No, nobody can make that promise. Now, that promise doesn't mean that people don't heal from cancer. It doesn't mean that many treatments don't work, or all the treatments don't work. It doesn't mean that there aren't women who are treated and never experience cancer again, of course there are, and I hope to be one of those women. But there's the truth is that no one can just hand us something and say this is a guarantee. It's kind of the whack-a-mole approach, right? So we look at the people who did get a complete cure, who have no evidence of disease for years, and we look at them and we get hope from them. I know I get hope from them. We hear somebody's story and we say, "How did you do that? Whether it's cancer related or health related, right? How did you lose all that weight? How'd you train for that marathon? How did you get so good at this, right? Tell me what you did because I want to do that too. I know I did that. Tell me how you healed. How much can I read? How much can I watch? Who can I talk to? Tell me how you healed, and then maybe we start doing some of the things that they did. Maybe we do all the things that they did. Maybe we do all the things that all the books say. We take all the supplements. We spend a hell of a lot of money on them. We take all the supplements. We do all the exercise. We do everything right. We meditate. We reduce our stress. We change our environment. We buy the bamboo chemical-free sheets, right? We follow the metabolic approach. We do the inner work, and sometimes we get the outcome we hoped for, and sometimes we don't, because you can take the same action as somebody else and have a different outcome. You have a different body, different genetics, different exposures, different treatments, different life experiences. You're a different biological creature, and there's so many variables involved that we just simply can't control for all of them, right? And I think this is where we create so much unnecessary suffering for ourselves, you know, beating ourselves up. Why? Why? Why? Why did this happen to me, right? Why am I going through this?

Laura Lummer 8:16
And then that worked for them, and I tried it, and it didn't work for me. So was the protocol wrong? Is it a broken protocol? Does it not work? Am I broken? Right. That's where we start to go. Maybe I didn't do it right. Maybe I wasn't positive enough. Maybe I didn't meditate enough. Man, how many times did I say to myself, "What else can I do? God, just tell me the one thing, and I'll do it. Haven't I done it all? Right, and suddenly, on top of what other health issue we're dealing with, now we're dealing with shame and blame, and the idea if I could just figure it out, I could control the outcome, and that's just a huge burden to put on yourself. We get to want the outcome, we get to envision the outcome. I've shared it with you just how many times. I'm a woman who's healed from metastatic breast cancer, and I use that future vision to help me make the choices today that I hope will lead me to that, but if I get attached to that outcome, and I don't get that outcome, like for instance, next month, October, october 11 will be six years since I was diagnosed with widespread stage four cancer, and by six years, man, I was really hoping I would have no evidence of disease, but I don't. But I have a lot less disease, so I still hold on to the hope, and I still am grateful for the blessing that my body is healing. Right? Didn't heal in my timeline, but is still trying to heal. So it isn't that our choices don't matter. Our choices matter tremendously. Treatments matter. Nutrition matters, movement, sleep, stress, connection, emotional health, the environment we live in-all these things support our health, and they influence risk. But here's number two: influencing risk is not control. It's not prevention is not a guarantee, and I think that we get really caught up in this word prevention. We hear prevention, and we end up where my friend is. What we hear is, if I do these things, that thing will never happen to me, and that's where we get ourselves into a bunch of trouble. We get into some hot water because we use prevention as though we're making a deal with life. Right? I'm going to do these things, life, and because I did them, none of that bad stuff is ever going to happen to me. Only problem is, it's a one-sided deal. Yeah, the contract didn't get signed on the other side. People, life never said, "Okay, I'm in on that. Right? It said, "Well, you'll reduce your chances. It's called risk reduction. Everything that you did reduce the risk. So, my friend, maybe if she hadn't done all the things that she has done, maybe she would be in a really bad state right now. Maybe she'd be in full-blown heart disease. Maybe she would have had a heart attack. I don't know. I often think I had such a healthy lifestyle before my stage four cancer diagnosis that if I hadn't had that healthy lifestyle, maybe I would have been dead, right? So I could look at my healthy life and say, "Why, why, why? I did all the things. Why did that happen to me? Or I could look and say, "Thank God, I was doing all those things to reduce my risk and improve my outcome. Because six-I was going to say six months, six years later, I'm still here, baby, and I'm still healing. So I think it's important when we think about the terms prevention, risk reduction, we understand that very clearly, right? If we understand that there's no guarantee for a cure, then we know the game we're playing, right? And if we accept it, if we accept that there's no guarantee for a cure, then we know the game we're in, right? If we believe everything we do is going to lead to a cure, and it's not leading to it, or it's not leading to it as fast as you want to, whatever health area you're working on, that leads to frustration, shame, and blame. Okay, risk reduction, preventative measures are not guarantees. They're not e-tickets. They're not saying whatever you hope you're preventing will never happen to you.

Laura Lummer 12:54
And I think that's really important to be clear on, because I see women cross that line. You know, there's a condition called orthorexia where people have an unhealthy obsession with extremely healthy lifestyle. When I first heard that, I was like, really? Now we're afraid of being healthy, but then I've seen it. I've seen it in action, where the thoughts and the obsession over every minute thing is just so intense that life is not being lived, and then stress is more stressful because oh my god I'm stressed oh my god if I get stress I'm going to get cancer oh my god that really stresses me how to think about it I mean we could get caught up in a vicious cycle of wild thoughts, and little by little, that pursuit of health. If you're not watching this on YouTube, I mean, using quotes because that's not really health, right? That's not balanced, and that super uber, I'm so healthy, can start to take over the life that we're trying so desperately to protect, and that brings us to number three. I believe our job here is to enjoy the heck out of this life, to learn to live it joyfully without self-judgment, to learn to live it fully, to learn to live with kindness, to learn to accept others, to learn to decide how to what loving yourself actually means, what feeding your soul actually means, and when you do that, then you can put kindness out into the world, and the world needs kindness, needs a heck of a lot of kindness, especially right now. But if we get caught up in the little things, if we get caught up in anger and frustration because we interpreted language a certain way and life didn't, then we miss out on this lovely picture. We don't learn how to be in this incredible, imperfect, unpredictable human experience without requiring certainty before we allow ourselves to enjoy. Without requiring perfection before we allow ourselves to enjoy it, so for our population who's so focused on getting healthy and who has this very strong desire, asks themselves this question all the time: How do I make sure cancer never comes back? I want to offer a better question. If I cannot guarantee how long this life will be, how do I want to live the life that is here? Do I want to be certain? Do I want to be perfect, or do I want to be present? Because if you choose the former, you could keep searching endlessly for the thing that's finally going to make you feel safe. But if you choose the latter, then that brings you back to your life right now, and you get to choose to feel safe because you're present in this life today. And I certainly don't think that accepting uncertainty, accepting that there's no absolute guarantee, accepting that prevention and risk reduction are not promises. That doesn't mean we give up. We do the things we do to stay healthy and energetic because we love this life and we want to enjoy it. So we do the things that are right for these bodies that we love and that we exist in because we want them to have the most energy possible and to feel as good as possible, so we can go out and enjoy this life as much as possible, and then we can say to ourselves, "I'm doing this because this is how I care for myself. This is how I love myself. Rather than, "I'm doing this because if I don't do it perfectly, something terrible might happen. Those are two very different ways of living. I don't think the goal is to reach a place where you believe you've convinced yourself nothing bad will ever happen. I think the goal is to become the woman who knows she can live fully, even though she doesn't know what's going to happen. Yeah, that's the work, and that's the work that's available to us right now, and it's the work that makes sure that we don't lose a single day blaming our body for not performing the way we believed it was supposed to perform because someone else gave us a protocol, right? And we follow the protocol.

Laura Lummer 17:16
Damn it, you know, we we want to keep ourselves from falling into those crevasses, and I think part of the way we do that is look at what's really true, right? Look at what's really true, and then give ourselves credit for doing it. Say, good job, glad I did that because I'm sure that benefited me. So I'm going to leave you with this this thought. Can you consider the words that you use? Words like preventable, words like risk reduction words like guarantee, and think about what they actually mean to you. Are they setting you up to be really in touch with what's real, or are they setting you up for an outcome that you really don't have any control over? And maybe we need to realign that. And in that realignment, we make some space to let go of some fear, and we create some space to invite in more joy. All right, I'd love to hear what you think about that. So come and join me in the Living Well After Breast Cancer community and share your thoughts with me. It's a free community. It's on my website. There's a link here where you're watching or listening to this podcast. Come on over. Let's have a chat about the podcast, and I will talk to you again next week. Until then, please be good to yourself, and expect others to be good to you as well. Take care.

Speaker 1 18:38
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 all your

Unknown Speaker 18:56
life. This is your moment to go. This is your moment in time. This is your moment. This is your moment to shine, to shine, to shine. shine.