THE YUMMY WAY PODCAST

066_Living With Cancer — Living in the Emotional Rollercoaster

February 14, 2022 Danét & Lar Palmer
THE YUMMY WAY PODCAST
066_Living With Cancer — Living in the Emotional Rollercoaster
Show Notes

In today’s episode we’re talking the emotional journey we’re experiencing living with cancer and about staying in the conversation as emotions shift and change. Low grade depression, grief, moments of elation and the constant acceptance of life as it’s showing up at this moment.

Lar talks about some specifics in his physical health and his responses: confusion, resistance, surrender and ultimately acceptance. He talks about how the docs immediately offered antidepressants to manage his moods. What we did with this is bring it into our ongoing conversation. It’s like once you become aware of something, you realize you’re already allowing it, so now you can actively accept what is.

We invite everything into conversation.
Here we question what the true motives are behind choices we’re making on a daily basis. Am I using my cancer to avoid things I think I should be doing — or even things I want to do, but don’t seem to be taking any action toward? Or do I actually have depression?
By bringing it all into the conversation an ease about it takes over.
In accepting that yes, I maybe I am depressed and that has been using up vital energy — that’s the way of it right now.

The cool thing about facing and owning that depression is part of what’s going on —that it shifts the energy — ever so slightly, but continually none the less.
The result has been a renewed simplicity in naturally taking small incremental actions we’re now feeling aligned with… And that is enough.
The energy is now circulating. It might be a completely different pace than what you’re use to, but this is the now normal — and this now normal will shift again. Accepting the shifting and changing is key. Everything is about accepting what is —right here and right now.

We can’t control what cancer’s doing. But we can make choices about the attitude by which we approach it.  By being in the present moment and being willingly intimate with what’s happening, we notice all the little subtleties than can easily be passed over. Just acknowledging what’s happening stops what the ego’s trying to do. The ego’s job is to take you out of the present moment and create an imaginary problem, that it can get you to fixate on fixing something. 
It’s not just depression, it’s grief about an imagined future that perpetuates the cycle. But acknowledging it, brings us back to presence. Once present, we see this is fine. It is enough. We are living with it.

We’ve just accepted the BOLD invitation from cancer to be extremely present moment focused and now we can laugh about the tendency to futurize…

Noticing this ego dance dispels it’s power, and brings you back to the present moment. That, we can deal with. We can be with what’s happening emotionally, embrace it and all answers to come. And sometimes, there are no answers.
And you’re always embracing the unknown.

Part of life’s dance we’ve been experiencing simultaneously has been my experience being an author and bringing a new book into the world. There’s a lot more unknown than known for me. Bringing myself present when I notice myself getting caught up in ‘what I need to to’ and away from the excitement of the journey, has been a big part our conversation as well.

Bringing it into our conversation brings me back to the knowledge that only the right thing is going to happen. Because joy is my guide. Everything goes my way.
If it doesn’t feel yummy, I’m out of alignment with my true self — the yummy loving being that is ME!
By breathing, presencing and bringing myself back to myself, and inviting the circumstances that lend themselves to being out of alignment, into our conversation, it brings everything back to the present and we laugh about the crazy shit the mind gets up to.
Just as it is with cancer in our lives!

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