— the cancellation of a debt, charge, or penalty

— a formal forgiveness of sins

— the reduction of a prison sentence, especially as a reward for good behavior

— a realignment of purpose; a second calling

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Long before the term “remission” became associated with cancer, it was used in contexts involving forgiveness, releasing debts, the unburdening of sins, the lessening of punishment, the release of obligations, and the realignment of a calling or vocation.

All of its meanings encompass a common theme: something that once held power over you is loosened, reduced, or released.

“Remission” comes from the Latin remissio: a ‘sending back, releasing, relaxing, or letting go’.

re- meaning back or again

mittere meaning to send, let go, or release

Together, remittere means to send back, loosen, release, or forgive.

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Most people hear the word ‘remission’ and think of the absence of detectable disease. When I accidentally discovered this lesser-known definition, and dissected it to find the one about realignment of purpose, it felt like a puzzle piece that fit right into the way I approached my cancer diagnosis and understanding of my root cause. No, I don’t believe my cancer was a “penalty” for a “sin” - but I do feel a shutter of shivers in my core when I think about what I released and forgave in the last year, and how I have 100% redirected towards a second calling.

A tumor didn’t grow because I had something to atone for, but when life brought me face to face with my own mortality, it also brought me face to face with shadows I had pushed aside, refused to look at, or couldn’t even see, for the previous 40 years.

I believe my soul held itself in an invisible prison that I unknowingly built from fear, conditioning, urgency, perfectionism, the illusion of control, my inner teen girl crying for belonging, all of me begging for acceptance from my family, endless negotiations with my ego, old identities that needed to be shed, and holding on to emotional wounds. I believe my thoughts, patterns and shadows constructed the jail cell, and eventually my soul outgrew it so much that it was time I break through and walk through the fire to earn my freedom and step into my next evolution. I told my dad from day 1 of my diagnosis “This is not my contract with death.”

I knew from the beginning that it was part of my path of karmic, generational, emotional, ancestral, inner-child healing for my personal growth and maturity.

In the surrender and the softening, I began releasing things I didn’t know were holding me captive, allowing me to walk out of the jail cell, when the door had always been open.

Now I have an innerstanding that ‘remission’ means more than the absence of disease; it also means the cancellation of an old contract with the fear of facing shadows, the forgiveness of a self who didn’t know what she knows now, and the end of a sentence I never realized I was serving. It sent me on a journey of “re-mission” where my priorities and purpose have been refocused and pointing in a new direction, sharp as an arrow.

July 6, 2026 was my release date that I received my remission report, and I’m walking free with the sun on my face, thanking this Life every day for the chance to be discharged, healthy, and in pursuit of my dreams.

With love and lightning ⚡️

Elizabeth Anura

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Well fam, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve sat down to write this and share an “about me” post. I’m always trying to think of the right first sentence or a polite way to digitally handshake you, and honestly, I just keep getting stuck - because it’s complicated. Every time I open my computer, I stare at the blank doc, constantly sighing as the cursor’s anticipatory pulse patiently waits for something to pass through me and make its way to the page. A wave of inspiration moves through my psyche and I think I’ve finally gotten somewhere and my fingers slap and click away on the keyboard but then I panic and think, “no, I can’t say THAT” so my right ring finger rapid fires ‘delete’ 29 times.

For me, the question “who am I?” runs deep, and trying to find a way to describe myself feels like I’m dunking my hand into a pot of spaghetti and throwing a handful of it against the wall to see what sticks.

But today, I am going to say that and I’ll probably wake up with a vulnerability hangover.

Until now, I haven’t introduced myself, the human behind this name. I sidestepped that and introduced Green Fire Letters, the publication itself, (twice actually, because life threw me a cancer curve ball and then it was a whole new dissertation). No, this account is not a bot, it’s not a fake account, it’s not a masked influencer, or someone who maintains anonymity behind an ai profile photo or chatgpt copied and pasted essays. I am a real, but not-so-normal human ~ or rather, a spirit wearing a skinsuit trying to make sense of gravity and emotion, constantly redirecting my antennas to send and receive signals or messages about this weird earth walk.

I wish I knew how to introduce myself, but that’s a tall ask for a seemingly simple task.

The polite and basic introduction would be some niceties along the lines of, “I’m the youngest of four siblings,” or “I grew up in Virginia.” And while that may constellate facts about me, that’s preeeetty boring and wouldn’t tell you anything about who I be, how I walk through this world, the way my eyes see or the way my mind wonders and wanders, while i constantly ask myself what in the world am I doing here?

(Although, now that I think about it, my status as youngest sibling and my roots in Virginia do play a big part in how i got to be who i be, why I am the way that i am, and they definitely played a role in my cancer diagnosis 🤔…okay soooo we’ll circle back around to that later at some point.)

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For now, allow me to extend my digital hand and kind-of-sort-of introduce myself, except I don’t know what name to tell you. I’ve been about 7 different women over 41 years. Elizabeth, Beth, Betty, Ellie, Liz, Anura and recently Elizabeth once again. (My boxing coach calls me Lefty Lizzie when we practice southpaw, and Betty Right when I switch up to right handed.)

I can’t count how many times I’ve had to say my “name and date-of-birth” to the hospital system over the last year, and maybe that was a part of some grand plan from a spiritual search party to return me to my roots and reclaim my heirloom handle alongside the ancestral and generational healing that happened during the inquiry of my diagnosis. Maybe each one of those women is a story for another time, but to give you the gist of it, every one of those names holds a different version of me and who I was during that phase of my life. Yes, from party princess to free-spirit to DJ to cancer patient to wannabe homesteader and everything in between. Along the way I keep wanting to change my name because they start to feel too tight, too constrictive, like a skin that needs to be shed.

There’s one name that’s stayed consistent for me over the years and that’s the name of my game here on earth: Evolution. Through the messy, chaotic parts of myself, the uncomfortable conversations of pop-culture, and the hidden (now obvious) agendas of politics, right alongside the ayahuasca purging, the festival dancing, the belly giggles with new friends and the tears of gratitude watching sunset.

So while Merriam Webster points the definition of ‘evolution’ towards a movement of a population: “the process by which populations of living organisms change in their inherited traits over successive generations,” I’m applying it to myself as an individual - a microcosm of evolution inside the macrocosm of evolution.

I refuse to be stagnant, and will forever be growing and learning. I love being a student of life, and find it quite funny that the second I graduated from college, I actually wanted to learn. (I applied only to colleges that didn’t require an essay to get into. How ironic, given that all I want to do these days is write my little/big heart out.) I can’t remember one thing I learned in college, except for the calculations on how to be a beer pong champ and cornhole queen, and I look back now to see that sorority girl had been wearing a costume for 4 years, simply trying to belong.

I got social smarts and street smarts, I did not get book smarts.

I’ll take two out of the three, for the way I live my life, they’re ones I would want anyways. So it’s safe to say that institutionalized learning was lost on me, and I think it probably backfired on my dad when he taught me, “when everyone else jumps, you don’t jump,” -cough cough covid vaxx - dodged a bullet on that one through individualized thinking. (Oops, there’s an example of “no, i can’t say THAT,” but today, yeah, i said that. It actually takes more energy to filter myself just to ‘keep the peace’ and I’m kinda done with that.)

I’ve gone against the grain, swam upstream and dougie’d to the beat of my own drum since i was 16 years old. I am, so to speak, the tie-dyed sheep of the family.

But really, Who am i?

There are many things that make me…me. I’m a lefty, and a creative, and I viscerally miss the 90’s. I have about 70 house plants, no allergies, and hadn’t gotten sick for more than 10 years before a liiiiiittle thing called CANCER flipped my world upside down and turned me inside out. I’ve traveled to 74 countries, most of those solo in an unconscious heroine’s journey, avoiding myself, searching for a place to call home (and unknowingly wrecking my nervous system), only to move right back to my hometown 15 years later, after an Ayahuasca ceremony in the middle of an olive grove with Brazilian indigenous leaders on my grandfather’s 100th birthday (where he came to me and gave me the download about why our family is in this particular location and what my role is here).

I’ve done a lot of things that at the time I found exhilarating, but would absolutely never do again (sky-diving, biking the world’s most dangerous road). As you receive my newsletters, you’ll start to pick up on how much I love to meet my own edges. A few years ago, I took a 17-hour leaking canoe ride with two friends up the Amazon river to the border between Peru and Brazil to meet a cannibalistic tribe who had never seen foreigners before, because we wanted to learn about Kambo directly from the indigenous people who had known it for centuries. It just so happened that they have the reputation of being the most violent tribe in the jungle. Ooops.

I learned a thing or two traveling the world and also I learned that I don’t know anything.

I have a heart that craves depth, and surface level-conversations make me shrivel inside. I was raised in a pretty emotionally avoidant family constellation, where the little girl inside me cries, “give me more of you” to anyone who tries to talk about weather or pleasantries. If you want to talk about weather, I’ll probably test your waters by talking about weather-manipulation. I’ve gone deeper in conversation over 40 minutes with the lady who gave me a foot massage during chemotherapy than I have with some family members who have known me for 40 years. Sadly, it just is what it is.

So maybe this platform is the place where I get to share it all, spill my heart and bare my soul, and you, dear reader, who chose to subscribe and receive all of me, can hopefully find a touchpoint of humanity in the language of my innermost being, and I would love nothing more than to be in conversation with you about the deep stuff. (Please feel free to comment on anything I post and open a conversation - I’m so here for it!)

Alongside my search and craving for the full human experience, i find critical thinking to be a lost art - the same way common sense isn’t so common anymore. Somehow we’ve forsaken our inner authority, and started outsourcing our power, looking to others to find answers. To be REALLY FRANK - that just ain’t me babe, and you won’t find much of that here, but quite the opposite- you’ll find a lot of questioning and challenging of the status quo. I do things differently, in a rebellious way that makes sense to me. Maybe you do too and that’s why you’re here and that’s why we vibe.

I question everything, and don’t trust anything, (except myself). I like to research, and then I take that research with a shaker of salt because ultimately, my intuition and my body are the greatest sources of Truth for me. I surely hope that somewhere along the way through this substack and writing journey, you’ll discover or remember just how accessible, wildly intelligent, and spot-on your own internal navigation is in directing you along your path.

For the love of humanity, and in the spirit of honesty, I’m here to be a cheerleader for change, a writer of reckoning, and the flicker of a flame as we collectively and individually walk through a dark night of the soul, reaching out for the walls of anything to orient us in the uncertainty. It’s time we start questioning the narratives and the stories that we inherited as “normal” and pave the new way for future generations. It’s painful and horrendous out there, like humanity is going through the birth canal - and we’ve breached.

A moment of reckoning came for me last year, when after 12+ years living organic, low-tox and integrated with nature, I was surprisingly diagnosed Stage 3 of a “rare and aggressive” type of breast cancer, not long after I moved back to the US. Shocking, but also not at all shocking, once you understand how toxic this place is, aaaaand that I kind of signed up for it as part of my mission on Earth.

Oh, and did I mention, I moved right next door to my parents, and started feeling the lump a year later?

Yeah, I was suspicious, knowing very well that my cancer diagnosis was not random, nor was it the result of being physically unhealthy, leaving me no other option but to cross-examine my beliefs, the western medical system, my relationship with my family, the challenge of asking for help, the need to swallow my pride, the smackdown of softening my ego, and way I was going to walk through the doorway of the unknown. My diagnosis forced me to look in the mirror and face unfamiliar tests in familiar ways, while I leaned on my mindset, my practices, my rituals, and my skill for navigating murky, unchartered waters. I approached cancer in a very unconventional way and I’m emerging now with new wings, and a new identity, yet somehow more myself than ever before.

I invite us to lean into the unknown, and relish in the dissolution because there is wisdom in the darkness. We’ve been taught to try and control everything, to turn away from Trust, and to believe that we have all the answers…or we chalk it up to “random.” Well, I don’t believe in ‘random’, and you’ll find that I write about “destiny,” “fate,” “guidance,” and “God” - but no, that doesn’t mean a man in the sky, or that I’m spouting Bible verses. For me, it means that when I am on my knees being smacked down by life, I humbly remember that I am tiny, yet connected with everything through living consciousness, and my Trust is put in The Great Mystery, The Great Architect, Creator, the Earth as our Mother, and the Breath of all Life. Every human, every animal, every insect, every tree and every star are a part of the same infinite Source, and I don’t believe we are separate from divinity, but we are all expressions of it woven into one grand tapestry. So far it’s all worked out pretty well, so I think I’ll stick with it for a while.

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Indoctrination has severed our connection to the knowing that there is something else going on here, both in terms of a “Universe” (um hello, there are roughly 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, yet we’re totally self-centered), and from a perspective of being a mere homo sapien citizen of the world, observing the systems that have been put in place and now getting to watch them collapse as people finally wake up. Yes, the most awkward silence in the room right now is pro-vaxxers watching Fauci plead the 5th 111 times, as ‘conspiracy theorists’ sit back and watch with arms crossed and a smile on their faces, not needing to say “told you so’ - just a few months after the exposure of the Government and Hollyweird’s involvement with Epstein. (Isn’t it interesting that there haven’t been any consequences for anyone yet….🤔 no, not really.)

This is the awakening.

I’m here for it, and here to write about how I’m experiencing it and what our role is in it. The veil is being lifted, everything is revealing itself in its own time, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Those who won’t look at it or refuse to let go of the old way (and continue to trust the government 👀cough cough) will find themselves bamboozled and suffering in cognitive dissonance.

I let go of the shore years ago and now i’m floating in the middle, watching fluffy white clouds morph into the shape of a fire-breathing dragon.

I explore the challenges, triggers, and ‘coincidences’ (i call them synchronicities) of being human as I dwell in the middle of the intersection where most people insist on separating science and spirit, research and intuition, modern medicine and ancestral wisdom, individual sovereignty and community responsibility, human growth and ecological preservation. I don’t believe any of these should be partitioned, and as my identity crumbled through cancer, i went from “either/or” to “both/and.”

I’ve spent fifteen years in the wellness world, long enough to know that symptoms are rarely the beginning of the story and that we’re all starved for touch and connection. Big Pharma would probably go bankrupt if we could just look at each other (and ourselves) and say, “I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you.”

I’m spending my screen time on Substack now because other social channels have compromised integrity and succumbed to ads, over-used chatgpt, a distorted value system, and are simply not nourishing me the way Substack does. I won’t perform for an algorithm and I don’t care about visibility, but I do care about reaching many people to make a positive impact and to contribute something. I don’t have a gazillion followers, but I have a voice that I’m learning to use without keeping myself small. Sometimes I still want to be polite so I don’t ruffle any feathers, and other times I give zero f*cks.

(On that note, you’ll probably want to know that I’m a walking contradiction. If you catch me at a stop light, I’m praying one minute and spouting every word of Ludacris circa 2002 the next, followed by cursing the surveillance cameras the next.)

I’m slowly and intentionally paving my way as a courier of threshold literacy, and I seem to have a Master’s degree in alchemizing liminal spaces and leaning into uncertainty, which happen to be highly in demand as we find ourselves in this global collapse.

For anyone well-versed in Astrology, I’m 0° Aries, the first of the first of the astrological zodiac year (apparently I just couldn’t wait to get down here). I’m also Aries Venus and Mercury, Pisces Moon, Leo Rising, Scorpio south node, and you can read here how my cancer diagnosis was written in my stars. Leadership, death and rebirth, and fire are ALL UP IN MY CHART and I’m bringing that forward here into my ‘Stack. I came here to throw my heart into the sky like a spark and trust that somewhere in the dark, others will recognize the glow and flicker back in our own kind of morse code. I know we’re out there, and I know we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

I’m obsessed with fire. Literal and figurative fire. I want to dance with it, I want to sing to it, I want it to envelope me. Fire as transformation, fire as metabolism, fire as inspiration, fire is discipline. Biological, elemental, cultural, alchemical. Fire is destruction. Fire is initiation. Fire is rebirth. Fire is ancestral. Fire is our elder. I have walked through fire over and over again, and continue to stand on hot coals, though they’re simmering to embers now after I received my remission report. I’ve willingly flirted with the edges of myself for as long as I can remember, my only goal is to know myself deeper, and to perhaps lasso some wisdom from inside the flames of initiation to bring it back and share through storytelling and meaning-making.

In this space, you’ll find reflections on resilience and rebellion. I hope you’ll read my tears and hug my typos, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a lost piece of yourself in words that jump from the screen and land in the shy but curious corners of your soul.

I am not about quick fixes, optimization, advice, or hustle culture. Green Fire Letters is my encyclopedia of personal experience and exploration, begging to be transcribed and launched like fireworks into the virtual void. I can’t promise a certain amount of articles in any specific timeline, I write what feels most potent and alive inside me, then release it in a slow-drip fashion so you can savor every sip and syllable. I dreamed of slow-living for years, but never knew how I would deprogram myself to slow my roll and simply be more present. Of course it could have only been something as serious as a cancer diagnosis, which was a fairly brutiful experience, but gave me the nervous system reset my soul desired, and what a gift it is to not feel an underlying need to make timelines, rush through my days, or constantly be on my way out the door.

These days, I refuse to accelerate my pace to the societal speed of staying relevant, and my updated MO is to do one thing at a time, wholly and fully, with all of my love and presence, rather than many things at once that only receive the skimmed surface of me. (The less I’m on my phone and the more I people watch, I’ve calculated that we are, on average, doing two to three things at once. We can multi-task, but we will never be able to multi-presence.)

I’ve found Substack to be a portal where we can be vulnerable, messy, a little bit lost, trying to find our way, and sharing about the unspoken intricacies of our psycho-somatic corners.

Fall seven times, stand up eight times.

Think Phoenix energy in this space.

I have no doubt you’ve also been on your own hero’s journey, and i hope my words illuminate something that you see in yourself, like looking in a backlit mirror. I promise you, dear reader, that you will always receive letters holding integrity, originality, authenticity, and probably some sass in your inbox.

This is a place to pay closer attention, where the outside noise softens, and what whispers to you from within becomes easier to hear, so you can follow the guidance of your inner GPS, and you’ll know exactly how to get to where you’re going, with a little bit of blind faith, and a quite bit of YOLO.

Thank you for meeting me here at the hearth.

Welcome Home. 🐦‍🔥💚

P.S.

Full disclosure, I am not a formally trained or educated writer, and I use different prose in the articles i publish. Sometimes you’ll receive conversational, steam-of–consciousness pieces like this, with run on sentences and verbal vomit, and other times you’ll receive a more formal story-telling, descriptive, informational writing style with footnotes and published research. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.

I cannot thank you enough for being here, staying open, and wanting more depth. Hats off to everyone who wants to SCUBA and not just snorkel through the expanse of existence.

Thank you for subscribing to receive my whole heart as I emerge from the cancer chrysalis.

I hope you’ll stay a while.

P.P.S.

The audio narration of this piece is the first time I’ve recorded and shared my voice, which feel EXTRA terrifying to me.

Aaaand cue vulnerability hangover.

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Dear friends, please note:

This is a republish from the original article which was posted February 23, 2026. For some reason it’s glitched on the Substack app, and a few readers have let me know they weren’t able to access it. All backlinks will now be redirected to this article. Thank you for reading!

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There are some conversations we’re never taught how to have.

In fact, we’re rarely taught communication at all. We learn writing, reading, and maybe even public speaking in school, but effective, non-violent, open communication isn’t an available class on the schedule. Instead, we learn through observance, listening and experience in the household, for which the model of could be healthy, or very unhealthy… perhaps even avoidant, aggressive, closed or entirely unavailable.

Certain topics considered taboo, or not societally normalized to speak of, are the ones we shy away from on a day-to-day basis. We’re comfortable being comfortable, and most people aren’t equipped to sit in the discomfort of uncomfortable themes.

Even though we all experience death, grief, anger, and envy , talking about them isn’t normalized, and you can easily sense when someone shifts in their seat around these topics.

I’m also going to mention poop, which probably made you cringe just reading the word. (But seriously, talking about poop needs to become a normalized topic in the field of health because it’s one of the most obvious communicators of gut health and holds incredibly helpful information for us.) Let’s also take into consideration that every single human and animal on earth poops. If we can talk about food going in, why can’t we talk about the information coming out?

Death, mortality, and grief arrive to the conversation immediately after hearing the words “You have cancer.” It’s impossible to describe the amount of never-before-considered thoughts that flood in after you hear those words. There’s no knocking at the door, they’re just suddenly in the field, and not just from a distance, but with many detailed angles, faces, considerations, shadowy nooks and dark crannies.

The topic of death branches out to early mortality, timelines, fear of dying, what hasn’t been done yet, will a partner remarry, will children grow up without a parent, and what’s been put in place in case of such an event.

Grief takes on ten thousand faces and phases while it transcends all timelines: life as it was, the person who will never be the same again, body changes that were never asked for, identities that will dissolve and be transformed, future dreams or fertility may be taken away.

Anger is fueled by the question of fairness, betrayal by the body and resentment of the situation, or watching unhealthy people continue to live their lives unaffected by illness.

Envy may subtly show its face when talking to healthy people, watching the world continue on or seeing friends go on vacation.

And again, poop. I believe incredible amounts of healing happen through poop and tears (physical and emotional cleansing). One of the most common side effects of chemotherapy is digestive changes, constipation or diarrhea, and it should go without saying that the person experiencing the challenges needs to feel comfortable speaking about it, despite the discomfort the other person may feel.

Often, the taboo topics are wrapped up together in a little package delivered with a note that says “Shhh, I know you’re feeling all these, but don’t say any of it out loud.”

But why not say it out loud?

….Because it makes one or both parties uncomfortable, and we will do anything to skirt around discomfort.

Of course everyone is different in the processing of their diagnosis and their situation, where some people don’t want to talk about cancer or the hush hush topics at all, and others only want to talk about cancer and the taboo topics because it’s the thing happening in their life at that moment and literally nothing else matters but staying alive.

For someone navigating grief, loss, or a health crisis, feeling safe to express and share what’s on their mind is critical, and it’s up to the person engaging in conversation to create a baseline feeling of conversational and energetic safety to reduce feelings of isolation, loneliness or not being heard.

I can speak from personal experience that having a severe and surprising health situation put everything on the table and I am not afraid of leaving any rock unturned or un-talked about.

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As someone navigating a Stage 3 “aggressive and fast growing” breast cancer diagnosis, talking about all of these emotions and topics with friends has helped me immensely. I feel like I’m verbally processing in a way where dots are connected, puzzle pieces fit and some things just click that perhaps I would have never made the connection between if I couldn’t talk therapy it out. It helps me see and understand a bigger picture of the lessons I still need to learn in human form before death, while simultaneously considering death and moving through any fear of it.

If we’re uncomfortable talking about death, how will it be when our end of life transition comes and we’ve never even acknowledged it’s inevitability before?

Personally, I don’t want to be blind-sided by death. I want to be mentally prepared by having thought about it, talked about it, visualized it, and put myself in the moments of my death, so I can see what attachments I may still have, where my ego wants to fight, where I’m not ready to let go, and where still I’m white-knuckling my identities.

(This struggle of attachment and identity sounds very similar to how I felt when I needed to accept going into chemotherapy….hmm, coincidence?)

Some people won’t go there.

They’re not ready, nor do they want to face any of these topics. Many people are emotionally unavailable, and it’s like pulling teeth to try and feel any sense of their heart. Part of me feels sad I can’t have profound conversations with certain people in my life, which would surely be more meaningful and impactful than weather, politics or celebrities, which in some delusional way, have become the “safe” topics? I often feel disregarded, left alone, and unacknowledged when I want to get into deeper conversations, and the topic is immediately changed and redirected elsewhere.

Perhaps their comfort is more important to them than the courage and vulnerability it takes to have difficult or emotional conversations. I have a high threshold for discomfort and I’m able to sit back unfazed when most would start to squirm. I’ve learned to accept that some people are only available to their extent of comfort, and not to be affected when certain things go unacknowledged or un-talked about. I’m continuously learning to brush it off when someone won’t go deep with me, even though deep inside me I think it’s selfish when a loved one won’t even give up their comforts to go a few layers deeper with me.

(For example, not once did anyone in my family even sit down with me and say, “hey, I know this must be really hard for you. You’re the youngest in the family, you’re single, you’re the healthiest in the family, how does this feel for your?” Literally, I got nothing anywhere remotely close to any of that…and that’s the conversation that would have changed a lot for me.”

Other people in my life are open books, ready and willing to explore any and all topics, to the oceanic depths of our hearts, minds and spirits because they don’t do small talk or surface level conversation when the human experience is so rich, intricate, intimate and individual. Many friends, and even strangers who have come to visit, are wildly curious about the crevasses of my mind, what hidden thought processes are hiding there, and what this is teaching me. We can easily go down rabbit holes together. I learn so much from those who are willing to enter into this exploration with me, leaving me feeling mentally enriched and conversationally satiated when the tea time is over.

I have some friends who are so aware of the sensitive nature of conversation, they’ve prefaced with “I’m not sure I’ll ever know the right thing to say, so you tell me what you want to talk about.” (This response gets a green check mark from me in the supportive cancer conversation guidebook.) ✅

Then there’s another kind of person who, when I tell my diagnosis, immediately responds with, “oh, my ____(insert family member here)____ died of breast cancer.” (This gets a big red X from me in the supportive cancer conversation guidebook.) ❌

It was the same friend who told me she’ll never know the right thing to say, who encouraged me to write this “conversational roadmap to supporting someone with cancer.” So I thank her dearly, for always being willing to learn, grow and explore when it comes to sensitive topics.

1. Offer Choice Before Depth

People with cancer spend a lot of time talking about their cancer and answering medical questions after it becomes the most obvious topic in the room. Sometimes we don’t want to talk about it, and sometimes we do. And when we do, rarely are we looking for advice, we’re just needing to vent or process.

Some helpful options could be:

• “Do you want to talk about cancer, or literally anything else?”

• “Do you want advice, listening, or just company?”

This small consent check restores autonomy and prevents the automatic (but well-meaning) advice avalanche which is the natural response for most of us.

Research on emotional validation shows that simply reflecting someone’s experience without trying to fix it reduces physiological stress markers. Being witnessed without correction and heard without interruption are medicine in their own way.

Have you ever told someone something sensitive and vulnerable, only for them to immediately tell you a similar story from their life? It flips the script and makes it about them, which is not helpful or supportive in a grief or cancer conversation.

(Maybe it’s an entirely separate post about how we are never truly taught active listening.)

2. Be more specific than “How are you?”

When someone is living inside a diagnosis (or a deep well of grief), the question “How are you?” can seem overwhelming and too far to grasp. It’s too wide, too loaded, and too impossible to answer without either minimizing or completely unraveling. The universal standard response to “how are you” is “I’m fine,” which is a polite way of brushing over it. I once heard in a movie that “fine “ stands for Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional. That’s probably a more accurate truth and translation of the word.

So instead of “How are you?” try narrowing the focus to a moment, a layer, or a choice.

A few alternatives could be:

• “How’s today feeling in your body?”

• “Is this a high-energy day or a low-energy day?”

• “What’s been the hardest part of this week?”

• “What’s felt surprisingly okay?”

• “Are you in a talking mood or a distraction mood?”

• “Are you feeling more anxious, more angry, more numb?”

• “Is this week more mental or more physical?”

• “Is there anything you’d like to verbalize?”

These questions give the person something specific to reach for while communicating awareness that there are multiple dimensions at play: physical, emotional, logistical.

Studies in affect labeling show that naming emotions reduces amygdala activation and how language helps regulate the nervous system.1 The right questions can literally lower stress. Language greatly influences experience.

(Check out this post about how neurolinguistics and psycho-neuroimmunology play a huge role in how we handle treatment and side effects.)2

3. Ask About Agency, Not Just Suffering

One of the most disempowering parts of cancer is how quickly people get reduced to a diagnosis. While the treatment plan is the most overt topic and suffering is assumed, there’s so much more that occurs within the treatment timeline, including an ever-unfolding amount of self-inquiry, reflection and discovery (if that person is willing to look at the mental/emotional work).

Instead of orbiting solely around treatment, you could suggest questions like:

• “Is there anything that’s helping you feel steady?”

• “What feels within your control these days?”

• “What’s giving you strength lately?”

Giving your friend, partner, or family member an opportunity to verbalize strengths, agency, and independence will offer them small wins of feeling empowered.

Small wins make a big difference.

4. Ask About the Human Beyond the Diagnosis

Cancer can become socially totalizing. Every conversation tends to drift back to labs, scans, protocols, the progress, the plan. I’ve learned there are some people who see me simply as someone with a cancer diagnosis and there are those who see me as curious opportunist going all-in on this experience in the pursuit of personal growth. Everyone has a story, everyone has a root cause, everyone has an emotional process through chronic illness, grief, etc.

It’s part of being human. We’re not just living as text on paper.

To support someone in their humanness, ask:

• “What are you reading or listening to lately?”

• “Have you had any good laughs this week?”

• “What are you craving more of right now?”

• “Is there something beautiful you’ve noticed recently?”

• “Is there anything giving you deeper insight these days?”

• “What are you learning about yourself right now?”

These remind someone they are still a full person and not just a patient, a number or a statistic. The doctors and the medical system do enough of the numbering, so it make a big difference when we can be treated and respected as a human.

Small rant on my personal story and the need to be understood as a human:

One thing I’ve become aware of in my personal situation is that the conversation of root cause has completely been brushed over and bypassed by my doctors (and family members). Maybe it’s because they don’t want to hear something that would challenge their comfort or what they’ve been taught, maybe they don’t care, maybe they don’t have the capacity, who knows.

Root cause is something I’m personally fascinated with, and you’d think with a cancer diagnosis, it would be a topic of conversation, especially for someone who’s lived an organic, vegetarian, sober, nature-based and low-tox life for the last ten years - yet none of my doctors or “statistic + science minded” family are asking about it. (My doctors and some family members seem to be on the same team of seeing me simply as someone with a “random” diagnosis.)

But my friend group, other (more open-minded) family members, and I have excavated all of it. I’ve talked it out with 20+ of my closest friends, and even strangers who have come to visit me. I’ve been able to have deeper conversations with total strangers than with some people who have known me for all my 40 years. People with whom I can share that after my diagnosis, I did 6 ketamine sessions, a deep dive of mushrooms, 3 Ayahuasca ceremonies, 2 hypnosis sessions, and probably 100 guided visual meditations - all because I wanted to know my root cause. I went there fully because I believe if we don’t heal the root cause, there will be recurrence, and I’m not trying to do this again.

I have a deep understanding what my root cause is after all that psychic exploration, and yet, neither the doctors nor family members have asked me anything along the lines of “Hey, how does it feel to be the youngest and healthiest in the family and receive a cancer diagnosis? What do you think that’s about?”

And truly, that conversation would be healing in its own way for me.

(Side note: there’s nothing wrong or bad about who will or won’t go there with me, it’s simply an awareness of who’s emotionally and conversationally curious and available.)

Okay, back to the conversation…

5. Acknowledge the Reality Without Catastrophizing

If you don’t know what to say, it can be easy to bypass any particulars while offering generic phrases. And while they’re well-meaning, it’s probably best to skip over statements often come from avoidance, such as:

• “You’re so strong.”

• “Everything happens for a reason.”

• “You’re going to beat this.”

Instead, model language of attunement with active listening like:

• “I can’t imagine how complex this must feel.”

• “I’m here with you in whatever this is.”

• “You don’t have to perform strength with me.”

Simple empathic support is immeasurable.

What Not to Do

One thing I noticed when I was telling people about my diagnosis is that after delivering the news, I often ended up having to hold space for them as they processed what the word “cancer” meant to them, while every example of death-by-cancer in their lives came flooding back in. This is where I learned to be discerning about who I told, and kept it within my family and very close friends network for about 3 months.

So in the interest of keeping it respectful for the person experiencing the grief, the cancer, the loss, etc. I would avoid:

• Trauma dumping your own cancer/death stories unless invited

• Comparing stages or outcomes or someone else’s story

• Forcing positivity

• Making it about your own fear

• Sidestep, bypass, ignore it, or not say anything at all

What we really want to hear is stories of hope.

Hope is the glowing light that we recognize and follow in the darkness.

Hope is truly what we hold on to.

It’s inevitable that cancer introduces conversations our culture avoids. If we can widen the conversational field to include grief, mortality, anger, and the “hush hush" topics, we can reduce isolation and create a field of safety, which helps heal way more than avoidance.

One of a thousand things I’ve learned through this experience is how I want to show up for others on the other side of this once I’m in the clear.

It has completely redefined what ‘support’ means to me.

When someone texts me to check in, drops off a meal on the front door, or just comes to sit and have a cup of tea with me - those are the most meaningful moments of simple presence that truly mean so much.

If you’re a family. member, friend, or caregiver to someone experiencing loss, trauma, grief, or a diagnosis, I encourage you to ask yourself what your threshold of conversational, emotional and mental comfort is and whether you’re willing to soften your edges and be flexible for the healing of someone else who’s heart needs to be held and words need to heard.

May we walk with trust through the darkness, and find our ground in the unknown. 👣

with love,

anura | green fire letters

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References:

I first heard this word when I was reading Untamed, by Glennon Doyle, and it became a well-used term in my vocabulary, my writing, and a common answer after I was asked, “how are you?” during my cancer journey. (Side note: Don’t ask people with cancer ‘how are you?’ because it’s way too big of a question. ) The definition that follows is not that of Glennon’s, but it’s one I created in attempt to fully encompass my embodied experience of the word.

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Nature knows this pattern well, and teaches us through natural disasters to witness the life and beauty which come after devastation:

↠ A wildfire scorches a forest to the ground, and in that same act, cracks open the seeds it left behind, seeds that were never able to grow until the fire came for them.

↠ A drought kills off everything shallow-rooted, and what’s left is only what had grown roots deep enough to survive it. The devastation and the deepening aren’t two separate events, but the same event, two sides of the same coin.

For us mere little humans, where emotions are involved, I believe these catalyst moments offer us a touchpoint to soul, to spirit, to an understanding of the great web of connection, and perhaps even to some form of ‘God.’

↠ A relationship ending that devastates you in the moment, then turns out to be the exact rupture that reoriented you toward who you were meant to become.

↠A loss that hollows you out, where the grief that follows is what softens the heart enough to let more love back in.

For me, it showed up at the halfway mark of chemo, when my soul kitty died suddenly from widespread cancer.

It absolutely shredded me, and my heart shattered into a million tiny pieces. It happened so fast, without warning. Within just one week she went from healthy to unable to breathe because of a collapsed lung. She started acting different the day after my 10th chemo, and died just after my 11th and final of my first series of Taxol/Carboplatin.

I experienced her departure as the ultimate sacrifice of unconditional love, a soul contract of sorts. I adopted her from the streets almost 3 years earlier and she saved me from cancer. I believe she took it from me, as her soul purpose (animals are truly incredible the way they’re attuned to their humans) and my heart cracked wide open after many years of having a wall around it. She opened a doorway I would never have found on my own, descending me straight into emotional traumas and inner child wounds I didn’t even know were there.

She saved me. And that experience, her departure, my breaking, everything that came after, was one of the most brutiful of my life - if not the most brutiful. How is it that we can experience such a traumatic event and deep inner healing at the same time?

But that’s one thing I love about this word. We don’t have to choose between calling something devastating or calling it meaningful. It lets both be true, at the same time, about the same event. The wreckage isn’t the price you pay for the wonder. The wreckage is how the wonder gets in.

So tell me, fam. What brutiful experiences have you gone through, or are you walking through right now? What’s cracked you open? And what’s come through the crack? Because we know that the cracks are where the light gets in.

May we walk with trust through the darkness, and find our feet in the unknown. 👣

with love,

anura | green fire letters

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My guess is that three things are happening, which is why it went viral:

1. cancer rates, especially breast cancer, are higher than they’ve ever been,

2. the age of diagnosis keeps getting younger every single year, and

3. more people than ever are looking for treatments outside the western medical system

This post is aimed at sharing my experience, offering resources, information, and published research about bee venom therapy and breast cancer. Because it’s a sensitive topic, with some personal and potentially identifying details, it’s just for paid subscribers.

I’m not paywalling this to gatekeep anything, especially because I know so many women could benefit from it, but rather to keep reverence for a sacred practice, and to make sure that those seeking this path are met with the same intentionality and protection that I’ve found in my own journey. I also want to prioritize cultivating a community and creating a dialogue of supportive connection instead of combative narratives, (which tends to be the general vibe of Substack vs Instagram - and one reason I love substack).

I also don’t want my facilitator to be flooded with accusations, aggression, or misunderstanding about her practice. I can handle those myself, and I don’t want to put that on her, since it isn’t her job to play racquetball with the debate between western medicine and alternative medicine.

This space is built on trust and the slow, deliberate work of healing from the inside out, instead of extraction and fast-grab, insta-everything, which is the foundation ‘Insta’gram is built on. One of the major lessons I’ve learned during this year of cancer has been the beauty and necessity of slowing down. So to honor that, I am reprogramming myself to do less, but better, and deeper.

There is only so much info we can get from watching a 60-clip on a 6-inch screen. The following essay is a deeper dive into my personal experience and reflections receiving 58 honeybee stings for my breast cancer diagnosis, personal excerpts from my journal on how and where the stings were placed, what it felt like, and how I believed it helped and supported me - with referral links, resources and research.

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“When the safety of the familiar confronts the yearnings of the soul, it is time for initiation. It is a time of disruption and eruption as the demands of the soul make themselves known.”

- Frances Weller, In the Absence of the Ordinary

Three months into chemo, I cracked.
It was the end of February, I had just buried my fur baby cat (who died of cancer), and the flood of tears that endlessly streamed were enough to soften the soul of the devil. One night, I was curled up in fetal position by the fire, sobbing, when it hit me.

“I know this place” I thought. “I’ve been shredded like this before.”

And by “this” I mean,

“I’ve completely dissolved into the cosmic goo of metamorphosis, descending so deep to the shadowy place of my soul where everything I know is being ripped out from under me.”

Yes, right down to the nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and absolute identity crisis, a light bulb lit up over my head as I thought, “I am fully in an Ayahuasca journey right now,” except instead of it being a six-hour long journey, it was a six-month long journey. Somatic, physical, psychological, mental, emotional, metaphysical, and metaphorical, all of it - just like the caterpillar that completely liquifies in the chrysalis of transformation, not knowing it will emerge as a butterfly.

As someone who questions everything, has a tendency to play connect-the-dots with every layer and dimension of life, and who happens to live through synchronicity, symbology and meaning-making, the lightbulb that appeared over my head also sparked a realization in my belly: The oldest plant medicine on earth and the most aggressive weapon in modern oncology might just be the same initiation.

Suddenly, I have a deep knowing: The chemo chair and the ceremony mat are the same altar.

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Now I know.

I’ve always been drawn to the oppositional intimacy of a word that means two things at once, making us hold duality and paradox in the same breath. The English language is full of these doublings, where a single word holds a verbal, conceptual yin and yang that we use every day, most of us without ever inquiring into the profundity or feeling the featherweight of. Take stroke, for example, which is both a blow to the body and a tender gesture of the hand. Terminal is an ending, and therefore a beginning, as well as a place you depart from. Spring is the season of blooming renewal, the resilient coil that returns to its shape, and the source of water rising up out of the ground. Current is the movement of water, the flow of electricity, and the present moment. Patient is the name for a person who awaits medical treatment, and the capacity to accept delay and suffering without totally losing it.

I love different faces of language, particularly neurolinguistics, etymology, and when a single word holds more than one meaning. In the case of ‘Cancer’, I keep having these jaw-dropping a-ha moments, because this one word shares two wildly different meanings and merge back together in the place where they meet in commonality. While writing this, something clicked for me, and I turned the page to find that my cancer diagnosis was literally written in the stars, under the sign of Cancer.

The Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC), credited as the father of medicine, used the Greek words for “crab,” karkinos and karkinoma (later “carcinoma”), to describe tumors. According to medical historians like Howard Markel, ancient physicians noticed that tumors were hard, caused a pinching pain, and dug into the surrounding tissue the way a crab burrows into sand. Cancer is both the zodiac sign whose mascot is the crab, and the diagnosis no one ever wants to get, the same creature curled at the center.

Cancer and cancer are both symbolic of a protective form over a soft body underneath.

I received my cancer diagnosis during Cancer season last year. After hearing the words, I spent a few hours staring into the void ruminating on that synchronicity, remembering how for the last few years, anytime someone spoke about the astrological sign or season of Cancer, I’d feel an uncomfortable clench in my belly just from hearing the word. It was the exact same feeling I’d get over the mention of breast cancer. Somewhere inside, my body already knew this was coming.

On July 16, 2025, the shadowy twin of Cancer presented itself to me, spoken across a desk under fluorescent lights, met with blank stares, and followed by many, many tears. The Universe continues to show me it’s twisted sense of symmetry and ironic sense of humor, and I often find myself thinking “You really can’t even make this shit up.”

Up until then, I’d only known the zodiac Cancer through friends whose birthdays fell between June 21 and July 22. For a couple of years I made digital collages twice a month for the lunar phases, and as every sign’s season rolled around I’d study its elements and characteristics to know what to add into my design. Zodiac Cancer has a tender, homey seat in the sky, is ruled by the moon, represented by the crab, and its main associations are home, nurturance, and intuition.

The whole reason this piece is bursting out of me right now is that I’d just started making a “Dear Cancer” graphic based on my A Love Letter to Cancer, and the next time I opened Instagram, a suggested post appeared that began “Dear Cancer...”

I thought, whoa, wait a minute, someone else is writing a letter to cancer too? I read it intently, in awe of its poetry and depth, and it wasn’t until halfway through that I realized it wasn’t written to the diagnosis at all. It was a letter to the zodiac sign.

I had an “a-ha” moment. Something clicked.

Cancer and Cancer don’t just share a name. They hold the same wisdom, and offer the same teachings.

I didn’t think I had a single placement in the sign of Cancer. But after I saw that post and began writing this, I went back to my birth chart and found one: Anti-Vertex, smack dab in the middle of Cancer, in the 12th House. I had to translate that out of astrology and into English, followed by some deep research to understand what that actually means.

The first sentence of Google results said: The Anti-Vertex is a highly sensitive, karmic point in astrology located in the East, exactly opposite the Vertex in the West.

Two parts of this one sentence jumped out at me: “karmic point” and the mention of opposites. Well shit.

The Vertex, sometimes called the “Electric Ascendant”, represents what happens to us - the fated encounters that arrive from the outside world, beyond our control. The Anti-Vertex, its opposite point, represents our inner drive, how we rise to meet those fated moments, and the instincts we have to develop on our own to find our way through. One is fate, the other is destiny. One is what comes at us, the other is the utilization of the lessons from our personal growth to navigate it when it comes at us. My Anti-Vertex in Cancer sits in the 12th house, the realm of the subconscious and the unseen, the house some astrologers call “the house of self-undoing,” where old psychological debts have to be faced before one can be “reborn.” This was spot on. So much of the last year has made me face the skeletons in my closet, unlearn a lot of my self-inflicted conditioning, shed beliefs I’ve outgrown, and rewire both the thoughts in my head and the patterns of my days.

This is where the two different meanings of Cancer merge back into one, because my astrological placement of Cancer in Cancer brought into reality the lessons that both of them teach.

Cancer in Cancer came to slow me down. I knew, even while I was in the height of chaos of trying to avoid chemo, that the teachings for me lived in those six months of moving like molasses. And for someone who’d been dreaming of slow living and putting down roots, it could only have been something as serious as Cancer to finally get me to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n.

It was truly a portal to the present moment that pulled me out of the noise and back into my body, which, after fifteen years of nomadding around the world, I’d been driving like a vehicle for getting through life, always in forward motion, always going somewhere, rather than the place I actually lived and felt safe in.

From the ages of 25-37 I was all over the place, chaos in sixth gear. When I moved back to the States in 2022, I downshifted to third gear, committing to have a home base and creating more stability. In 2025, Cancer put me in park and took the keys, like I was a teenager who got grounded, lost her driving privileges, and was told to go to her room and “think about what you did.”

And that’s exactly what happened. I thought about what I did, and then I undid it.

The first of Cancer’s primary teachings is about the home, emotions and nurturance. During 6 months of chemo, my physical home turned into a healing sanctuary, while my body home became my temple. I relied on the foundation I had cultivated from the inside out to keep my head from spiraling, rather than reaching for it out in the world. I’m not exactly sure when the inner voice of criticism formed, but for many years I’ve spoken harshly to myself with engrained perfectionism. But this voice would have never carried me through cancer, and I unlearned that rigidity towards myself early into treatment. Instead, I practiced how to nurture and care for myself, being gentle with my words, thoughts, and actions, holding myself delicately through every phase, until it became my new way. With every strand of hair that fell off my head, to the unstoppable tears that rolled down my face, I held myself tenderly, like a baby feather.

The second salient teaching for me was vulnerability. My 12th house placement accurately suggests that I guard feelings and hide them away. I hadn’t fully realized until how much I had firmly fronted the “strong, independent, I can do it all myself” identity, where I had unknowingly, year by year, brick by brick, built a wall of protection around my heart. This year invited me to take off my armor, soften the hard shell around the unguarded body, and let people in. It gave me the opportunity to let myself be seen throughout the entirety of the process, instead of only on the other side after I’d put myself back together. I know a lot of women have difficulty with this, but for me, the vulnerability in being seen from beginning to end was part of the ‘self-undoing’. It was time to take off my mask of perfectionism, and let myself crumble into the arms of my people.

The third major teaching was release. The 12th house holds inherited tendencies and ancestral echoes, and with my Anti-vertex in Cancer sitting there, so much of the emotional weight I’d been carrying belonged to the stories I had created around family, belonging, and acceptance. The little girl inside me wanted to cry “I’m the baby, take care of me!“ while the 40 year old woman in me deconstructed resistance and rebuilt a dream of what a future family might look and feel like. Always feeling so different, and like I never really fit in with my family, a lot my work was breaking subconscious generational loops so I could evolve in my own authentic sense of belonging, by both releasing the need for acceptance, and knowing that self-acceptance created my own belonging.

The astrological Cancer teaches that home and self nurturance are both sacred and foundational for survival, the inner world is where the real work lives, and our intuition will guide us through our days. Outside of therapy, psychedelics, self-help books, and biohacking, Cancer the diagnosis drops those teachings down from the head into an embodied and embedded place, where they can finally reside.

I learned firsthand that rest is not just a trending concept which I’d never picked up, but a way of being that the soul deeply needs. I rewired my wake-up and bedtime routines to prioritize deep sleep, which is critical for immune surveillance, cellular healing, and Cancer survivorship. I learned that my surrender to Chemo was not defeat, it was actually the only hammer strong enough to smack down my stubbornness. I learned the wisdom and the necessity of retreating into my shell, tending to my temple, and opening my heart. I learned how much I want to show up for the relationships that I cherish, and how deeply my heart desires to have a home filled with laughter, game nights, and family dinners.

I got to push the reset button in body, in mind, spirit and nervous system.

Like a chrysalis, Cancer(s) invite you into the cosmic goo of metamorphosis to be reborn.

I think the diagnosis makes literal what the zodiac sign has been teaching us all along: that we are not the form, not the hard shell, not the skin that surrounds us, but the soft, tender thing evolving within it. We can protect our home and our hearts, and we can retreat inside when the external becomes chaotic, but eventually we’ll need to touch base with the inner parts of us that are begging to slow down and soften.

I’ve come to believe this life has a curriculum, just like every class in grade school did, and I like to look at it as if it’s all just Earth School. Astrology isn’t something to hand all of our power over to, but it isn’t something to disregard either. Cancer was part of my curriculum. Astrology was a roadmap, and one more breadcrumb on the trail.

And the trail is always, always, guiding us home.

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Footnotes

1. Howard Markel, on the etymology of “cancer” and ancient physicians’ crab analogy. (Science Diction: The Origin Of The Word ‘Cancer’ : NPR)

2. On the Vertex as the “Electric Ascendant,” representing fated, external events. (The Vertex — sade jackson) ↩

3. On the Anti-Vertex as the “Auxiliary Ascendant,” representing inner drive, hidden desires, and our active participation in our own destiny. (https://tameera.com/fated-love-and-soulmates-revealed-through-your-vertex-in-astrology)

4. On the Vertex pulling us toward external circumstances while the Anti-Vertex acts as an internal anchor. (https://tameera.com/fated-love-and-soulmates-revealed-through-your-vertex-in-astrology) ↩

5. On the 12th house as the house of “self-undoing,” where psychological habits and debts must be faced before rebirth. (https://bonniegillespie.com/astrology-the-12th-house-your-undoing/) ↩

6. On 12th-house placements guarding and hiding emotions. Bonnie Gillespie — https://bonniegillespie.com/astrology-the-12th-house-your-undoing/ ↩

7. On the 12th house, past-life echoes, and inherited tendencies. The Inner Wheel — https://theinnerwheel.com/synastry-q-a-the-vertex-anti-vertex/ ↩

8. On the Vertex/Anti-Vertex axis drawing 6th-house encounters in service, health, and daily life. Hella Namaste — https://www.hellanamaste.com/blog/vertex-the-destiny-point ↩

I saw my diagnosis as a messenger; an opportunity for me to do a self-audit, and to take a good, honest, uncomfortable look, as if cancer was the magnifying glass, and my life was the ant.

After you hear the word “cancer,” you’re thrown into the lion’s den of appointments, scans, results, doctors, bloodwork, and everything moving at lightning speed as life flashes before your eyes, while you remain slightly stunned, a little bit frozen, and still attempting to listen and make decisions. Within this whirlwind of paperwork, unknown phone numbers, and insurance, I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable under the fluorescent lights and sterile waiting rooms. Every moment of it was overwhelming. One thing I knew I needed to do, and wanted to (for a future book!), was take lots of notes.

I began writing and recording every day. All the research I was doing, all of my thought processes, every IV, supplement, meal, emotion, and phone call with a friend. Journaling my way through my diagnosis, I began evaluating unknown aspects of myself that seemed to be encoded in my daily existence and living unseen in the shadows of my being. Cancer handed me a silver platter of time, space, and circumstance to question my belief systems, emotional traumas, thought patterns, and stories I had defaulted to for so long without questioning.

Through the looking glass
As someone who believes in treating the root-cause, not just the symptom, I approach the mind, body, and spirit from a holistic (”whole”-istic) perspective and believe that we cannot heal one without healing the others. I hold a solid, unwavering belief that cancer is a symptom of something out of alignment in the ecosystem of the mind, body and spirit, and a tumor is a self-contained, solid calcification of that misalignment, being brought to our attention. We are responsible for excavating and uncovering our root cause in order to go into long-term remission. You can cut, poison, or burn through the trilogy of conventional methods all you want, but if you don’t reach the root, it comes back, because the mind/body connection reverts to the same conditions that created it the first time.

I don’t believe cancer is “random” or “roll of the dice.” I don’t believe my body mutated on itself with no reason, like the medical books and doctors will tell you. I believe there is a reason, and my body is trying to communicate with me: to work with me, not against me. She’s letting me know there’s something I need to pay attention to. Since the beginning of homo sapiens on planet Earth, our physiological mechanisms have evolved with one installed template: keep us alive. Our bodies are, by their very nature, designed to heal. If anything, self-healing and repair are processes they know best, aside from breathing.

I believe with every challenge there is a gift, or many gifts, and no matter what it is that we go through, whether it be illness, loss, trauma, etc, that challenge is intentionally designated for each of us individually, to present us with the teachings we’re meant to learn here in Earth School.

Is it terrifying? Yeah, absolutely.

Does it hurt? Of course.

Do we learn from them? Always.

It’s a part of the cosmic handshake: being human means feeling and experiencing the full spectrum of emotions. If we can experience love, joy, and laughter, we can also experience pain, grief, and devastation.

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Your practices cultivate your mindset

Fifteen years of mindful and intentional practices like meditation, yoga, somatic regulation, building nervous system resilience have set me on a unique path; and from these practices, I approached cancer with a very different mindset than most.

I will never wear pink, I never once called it a “disease,” I’m not in the “fuck cancer” movement, and I never used fight language.

I won’t make decisions from a place of fear. (When we’re in a state of fear, we’re weak, neurotic, irrational, and unreliable. Maybe this why people always run up the stairs instead of out the front door in horror movies?)

I trust there is a purpose in it.
I believe it’s happening for me not to me. I follow my intuition when she pings me, and I trust the intelligence of my body infinitely.

(Except, there was one very important, life or death time the voice of my intuition was loud and clear, and I silenced it. But I’ll get to that...)

From a very young age, most of us were taught to override the body, not consult it. We were trained and taught to push through being tired, ignore the tension, hold back tears, and keep producing, even when everything in us was asking to stop. We often get injuries from running, sports, etc, but instead of listening when our body is clearly asking for a break, we push it further, telling it to shush because our minds have set goals for marathons, tournaments, etc. We silence what the mysterious innermost part of us truly wants for something that is measured by the brain. Most of America is burnt-out and exhausted because we push aside every bit of communication from our bodies, so we can try and keep up with the pace at which this society is running. (This is not a you problem, this is a conditioned systemic problem.)

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Think for yourself what is true...
As we grow into adulthood, we often don’t trust ourselves or understand why we feel so disconnected. We’ve been taught and are continuously being brainwashed by institutions, religions, the patriarchy, and social media to ignore the greatest source of wisdom available...the inner compass that’s evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to guide us through life, like our own north star, inviting us to follow the path it’s laying out for us. These days, everyone is trying to sell you a solution or a cure to your problems. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the instagram world is an icky, icky place of self-proclaimed health gurus trying to sell you everything under the sun with their discount codes. The noise is everywhere, trying to convince us of something outside of ourselves. Often, we’re so numb, we can’t feel the difference between what’s actually true for us and what someone is telling us is true.

My north star is a rock star, and I “walk to the beat of my own drum.” By following the flicker of her guidance, I’ve only ever been led to incredible things by grooving with that beat.

When I’m in my body and listening, I have access to information that isn’t available any other way. It’s as simple as entering into a room and noticing there’s tension between those already in there. Or walking at night and that feeling little nudge that says, “don’t go down that dark alley.” The wisdom in the body knows before I’ve formed a conscious opinion about a situation that my logic would have talked me out of noticing. There’s a felt sense in moments like these where a ‘yes’ comes as an expansion, and a ‘no’ feels like a tight contraction, both notifying me faster than thought, rationale, intellect or logical deduction.

This is accessible and available to everyone, it’s not just “me” and “my body,” rather it’s “us” and “our bodies.” But most of us put this embedded, hardwired technology in airplane mode for years, repeatedly ignoring it or shushing it, because we’ve been taught to distrust it. There come moments in time though when that inner voice begins to reclaim itself, eventually becoming so loud we can’t ignore it anymore. When it comes to the abusive boyfriend we shouldn’t be dating, or the job we’ve stayed in too long, the guidance inside us is likely begging us to leave.

At some point, we may get curious about it again and start hearing whispers, considering a reconnection to the circuit that was always there. But once it’s been ignored for so long, it takes time to reconfigure and rewire. It’s not like rebooting a wifi router, where we just plug it in again, and after a few minutes the signal goes out to every room in the house like it was before. Quite the opposite actually, because rebuilding trust in the body, especially after times of trauma, illness, etc, is a slow, intentional relationship, happening one tiny glimpse at a time. The key is honoring what we hear and feel instead of talking ourselves out of it. The more we ask, listen, stay with it, and respond accordingly, the more that inner compass sharpens, the north star flickers brighter, and trust is rebuilt. The connection slowly fills the house again, one room at a time.

Using your inner guidance
When you receive a cancer diagnosis, there may be a rupture of the trust within the body. Many people feel like their bodies betrayed them. This is a crucial moment where a wide open space presents itself, inviting you to fall, crumble, curl up in fetal position, throw a pity party and enter into victim mode...which many people do. It’s so easy to give up your power, and forfeit any sovereignty.

I beg everyone moving through chronic illness or diagnosis not to give away their power, but choose to be an active participant, and meet it with curiosity.

There are many great authors, poets and philosophers who all point in the same direction: our response is more important than the situation.

For example, the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, famously stated:

This is right along the same lines as the writings of psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, where he wrote:

So while some may crumble, or chalk up a diagnosis to “random,” I beg to differ and smoothly shift gears, having embedded into my human operating system a baseline of curiosity, with the inquiry, “what is this here to teach me?” instead of “why is this happening to me?”

Cancer taught me many invaluable lessons, but one of the things it highlighted for me was my strength in self-trust and trust in something much greater than me.

Except that one time I ignored it...

When it came down to cancer, surgery, chemo, radiation, and voluntarily submitting myself into the western medical system, I was hella resistant. Especially to chemo. It made no logical sense to me to weaken and attack the immune system instead of strengthening it. I honestly could not believe that people would voluntarily inject a biochemical weapon and go through all those horrid side effects.

To me, it made sense to strengthen the immune system, weaken the cancer cells, and target the tumor from a healthy metabolic state. Cut it, poison it, burn it was not what I wanted to do to myself and the body I loved and trusted for so long. That felt like self-betrayal.

Having done 10+ years of psychedelic therapy, exploring the crevasses of my psyche, and experiencing many moments of magic, mystery, “coincidence” (I call it ‘synchronicity’), and existential teachings through altered states of consciousness, I can say that I appreciate and respect the literature and the proven methods, and I take it all into consideration to make informed decisions, but for me it doesn’t stop there.

One of my favorite childhood writers, Roald Dahl said,

I won’t put a glass ceiling over myself. I say with certainty that there’s intangible information available to us beyond the measurable, and greater than what we can perceive with our five senses. I deeply believe there’s a force greater than us, a dimension of the “unseen” that guides each of us on our way. I believe in signs and synchronicities, and that higher power leaves directions and guidance for us.

Yeah, try explaining that to an oncologist.

I had been sober off alcohol for 7+ years, vegetarian for 10, living low-tox and integrated with nature for 12+ years when I heard the words “it’s cancer.” I have a whole list of what I did do (eat my organic vegetables) and didn’t do (get a root canal) over the last 15 years that could have possibly contributed to a cancer diagnosis. I went through a process of deductive reasoning, and while doing so, received a gut punch with a knowing in the core of my soul that my diagnosis wasn’t physical. It was emotional, spiritual, and energetic, and it was here as a messenger for a much deeper reason. This was the intersection of reason and intuition.

At one point, I even told an oncologist friend of my parents that I was “suspicious” of the cancer, to which he responded, “You mean you think you were mis-diagnosed?”

Clearly we spoke two different languages.

But there was one little thing...
My intuition pinged me from Day 1 of my diagnosis that chemo was the path for me....that chemo was where I would receive the teachings of the messenger. But, stuck in my concrete beliefs, I ignored the inner flag being raised, pushed that voice aside, and my stubborn ego set off on a path of “proving I could heal it naturally.”

After four months of alternative therapies and trying everything I possibly could to avoid chemo, I finally moved from resistance, through surrender, and into acceptance.

The hard-to-swallow-pill…
What I surrendered to wasn’t chemo. It was myself.

What I really surrendered to was the voice I’d shushed from Day 1 of my diagnosis, and the one who was poking at me like an insistent toddler, saying “chemo, chemo, chemo, chemo.” She pinged me before I even got to the waiting rooms or did my research. She was the voice in the background simply saying, “chemo is the way through.”

I had spent four months drowning her out, and actively going against her with a fiery, certain, determined, egoic conviction.

But conviction and intuition are far from the same thing, and that’s one of the most salient lessons cancer has taught me. My intuition had been pointing me to walk through the one door my ego had bolted shut. My north star was leading me straight to the trailhead of everything I’d built an identity out of refusing.

And oftentimes, intuition doesn’t tell you what you want to hear, especially when she points toward the very thing that makes you shutter. But it isn’t a reason to doubt her. That’s the paradox, and we’re living in a world of paradox these days. It can be “both/and” and not “either/or.”

My tumor quadrupled in size during those months of alternative therapies because I wasn’t getting the message.

For me, it was thoughts and beliefs (my head) vs existential teachings (my spirit). And what I understood is that by packing my schedule from sunrise to sunset, running myself into the ground with daily IVs, detoxing, juicing, fasting, exercise, supplements, and alternative therapies, I was continuing to fuel an overly jacked up nervous system, a story that I could “take care of it on my own,” the long-term programming of chaos and constant movement which was the very cycle of a way of being that had gotten me there in the first place.

I wasn’t here to “prove alternative therapies work” or “heal it naturally.” My soul work was much deeper than that, and I was being guided into chemo for 6 months of rest, stillness, surrender, family healing, and to move through a few lifetimes of repressed tears.

The process of surrendering and saying ‘yes’ to chemo was one of the most excruciating moments of my life, and yet underneath my crumbling ego, was a soul and a spirit that trusted the guidance.

Of course there were glimpses of fear that I was betraying and abandoning everything I believed in, and hundreds of apologies to myself that I was handing my body over to a system I didn’t trust (and a biochemical weapon derived from mustard gas). There was also a deep feeling that I was being hypocritical, becoming one more person stepping into the system that pays itself from keeping people sick...the exact system my community and I actively work towards getting out of.

But underneath all the hesitation and worry was something steady and peaceful that had been there the entire time, waiting for me to stop twirling, arguing and negotiating. It was the part of me that said “trust me, there are teachings in this for you that are meant to bring you to your highest potential, and you know that.”

It was the North Star that’s always guided me in the right direction.

The following is an excerpt from my journal, when I turned to Ayahuasca to face the decision of going into chemotherapy:

“I shed hours of tears in the medicine just holding my myself and repeating “Ho’oponopono” to my body:

I’m sorry, I love you, thank you, please forgive me.

I love you, thank you for taking care of me, for bringing me this teacher and doing everything to contain it as you know how to keep us healthy and strong.

I’m sorry, and please forgive me for the decision to move forward into chemotherapy.

I love you and thank you for working with me, for this incredible collaboration of life, for being this most beautiful temple to experience humanness in.

I’m so sorry and please forgive me, I tried, I tried so hard, I’m doing the best I can in every moment.

To the little girl inside me: you are so loved, I’ve got you now more than ever, don’t be scared. Love is overflowing as we take care of us, together.

To the adult woman inside me: you are so loved, I’ve got you now more than ever. Love is abundant, we are not alone, and your breasts will continue to be healthy, and beautiful and loved on the other side of this. (And maybe those gorgeous curls will grow back even more luscious than before)

To every version of me in between: I love you, I’ve got you now more than ever. This has all been ninja warrior training. We are so prepared and resourced for any and everything.

Now I learn how to soften. I learn to slow down. I learn how to ask for help. I learn how to receive help.

This is where strength and softness merge within me. From a grounded, centered, loving and still place, the peaceful warrior is birthed.”

Those six months of chemo were some of the most profound of my life, and while I sailed through without side effects, the emotional processes and lessons I learned changed my life. I am a completely different person now than I was before entering chemo.

What I had to do was find the willingness to challenge and deconstruct everything I believed to follow my inner knowing, even when that knowing contradicted the person I was so sure I was.

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The grief portal opened when my cat Nali died suddenly, halfway through my chemotherapy, and I completely broke open. She was my fifth pet to pass, and every single time, grief reaches places in me that nothing else can even come close to touching. Places that hold caretaker stuff, mother stuff, child stuff, all shadows and sorrows that need to be acknowledged and held.

When Nali passed, I found myself drowning in tears that went far beyond my loss of her. It was every loss, every fear, every moment I had ever needed my mother, or my grandmother, or the comfort of the Earth and didn’t know how to ask, and didn’t know where to find them.

Cancer lowered all guards I’d ever put up, until I felt like I was four years old again, small and scared, having just lost my fur baby, and feeling emotionally stripped, baring all vulnerability. I felt the little girl inside me needed to speak, ask questions, and receive answers that on some other timeline I would ask and answer myself.

And while I’m not a mother to a human child in this life (not yet at least), I wrote this as a trifold-letter.

It’s from my inner little girl to the current woman in me: 4 years old to 41 years old.

It’s from me as a mother talking to a daughter I don’t have.

It’s from me as a little girl talking to my mother and what I imagine she would say.

It’s also a conversation with the voice of God, the voice of the Great Earth Mother, the loving mother of all, who holds all of us, her children, whether we know it or not.

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“It’s cancer,” the doctor flatly stated with a stone-cold face that was surely trained not to express empathy in such an announcement.

Time stops.

I give her the side-eye.

I’m immediately suspicious.

Cancer?

I don’t trust the western medical system, so therefore I don’t trust her.

My nose turns up at her.

I haven’t gotten sick in ten years.

There’s no way I could have cancer.

First of all, I have no breast cancer in my family and tested negative for BRCA genes.

Secondly, cancer is reserved for old people. (Hah, not these days, honey.)

Third, “it could never happen to me.”

Fourth, cancer is for people who smoke like chimneys, drink like fish, and treat their bodies like dumpsters.

Fifth, I’m healthier than probably 90% of the population (and I don’t mean that in the competitive Aries type of way, I mean that in a nutritionally honest kind of way).

I was vegetarian for 10 years. I was sober off alcohol for seven years. I’ve been living low-tox and integrated with nature for 12+ years. I exercise regularly, I eat my vegetables. I don’t eat processed foods, aside from a good sourdough every now and then. I’ve had a mindfulness practice for the last 15 years and have been intentionally working with plant medicines and psychedelic therapy for 10 years. I avoid plastic when possible, haven’t even used a microwave or taken a prescription medication in ten years, and I definitely didn’t get vaxxed when everyone else was lining up for free donuts.

I could not find a reason for this diagnosis.

When you hear the words, “you have cancer,” there is absolutely nothing that can stop the tsunami of emotional response that follows in the next seconds, minutes, days, and weeks.

That moment is profoundly tender, where life seems to have lassoed you, tightened the rope and dragged you off the high dive into the deep end, against your will.

For most of us, it feels like a death sentence. All we’ve ever heard are stories about people dying from cancer. An uncle, a friend’s parent, a co-worker. Come to find out, a common response to your news will be, “oh, my (insert family member here) died of cancer.” Great thanks, way to hold space. I mean, we all know we’re going to die, but damn, give a girl some hope at least.

On hearing my diagnosis, my mind went completely blank as time seemed to come to a record-scratching pause. I kept it together for my mom, who accompanied me for the biopsy results, and throughout the evening as I handed over the paperwork to tell my dad. I held surprise, suspicion, disbelief, and denial in for about 18 hours until I woke up the next morning flooded with the reality of the situation. As soon as my eyes saw daylight, my brain pressed Command + T and my mind was taken over by a browser window with 100 tabs of questions, assumptions, resistance, anger, fear, and of course the most important thought, “who’s going to get my cat if I die?”

In that moment, all of my identity was confronted and challenged within a matter of milliseconds. And we know that our ego and identity do not like to be challenged.

(Okay cancer, I see your scary reputation, and I raise you a curious mind.)

Our minds are not just where thoughts happen (or in my case where 100 tabs open), but it’s also where reality gets interpreted, filtered, and often distorted. If we don’t consciously question or examine it, it dictates our lives like an automatic script written from chatgpt.

We move through our days in routines we’ve carefully constructed for ourselves; a meticulously curated Groundhog Day where predictions built on past experience become the tracks we run on, leaving little wiggle room. Our minds love safety and familiarity. They nestle right on in, finding comfort in a perceived sense of control. That is, of course, until cancer waltzes on in and everything we think we know is strong-armed out the same door that cancer just came in through, like a VIP celebrity just breezed into the club without ID and all the peasants had to leave.

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Show me what I can’t see.

For years, I felt a constant nudge from deep in my belly that said, “there has to be more than this.” I followed that curiosity and began intentionally exploring psychedelics (note: ‘intentionally exploring’ is very different from ‘recreationally enjoying,’ which I was already pretty good at). Psychedelic spaces became the place where I brought my questions, not just my hoola hoop, wanting to see the unseen, excavate the crevasses of my mind, and retrieve information I would never be able to find through traditional talk therapy or meditation.

Psychedelics do something incredibly beneficial that most of us spend a lifetime trying to do and rarely achieve: they interrupt the script. Remember, the one we unconsciously wrote?

The grip of the ego loosens, the rigidity of identity softens, and a window is opened where the mind can be seen rather than inhabited (think: watching the sky with passing clouds as opposed to being in the sky as clouds cover you). This is exactly what I needed after I heard the words, “It’s cancer.”

Over the course of four months, I consumed three different types of psychedelics, each one uniquely guiding me in their own neuro-influential ways on how to work with my diagnosis for the deepest understanding of my own personal path.

Each ‘medicine’ served a distinct intention at a specific stage in my journey. This time, there was no recreation or escapism about it, but a curious plea for more information beyond what my rational, logical brain was racking itself trying to find.

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One year ago today, I was in Tepoztlán, Mexico with 4 other kambo practitioners, taking on a self-prescribed 40-point Kambo initiation for my 40th birthday.

What other way to also celebrate World Frog Day?

Yes, I’m an extremist. I love to push my own edges.

Skydiving. Biking the world’s most dangerous road. Swimming in Antarctica. Taking a leaking canoe 17 hours up the Amazon River to visit a cannibalistic tribe who had never met westerners before….yeah, I’ve done some crazy things.

I was born at 0° Aries. Fire is my everything. I’ve had this “warrior” thing going for a while. It’s what fuels my drive, motivation, inspiration, creativity, intuition, prayer, and service as a Kambo facilitator.

The path of the fire warrior is my North Star.

And at the center of that path, specifically: Kambo.

I’ve never been more dedicated or devoted to anything.

If you’ve sat with Kambo before, you know two opposing yet complementary things about it:

1. Kambo is going to do what Kambo wants to do. It will go where it’s needed, whether we like it or not.

On the flip side of the same coin:

2. The more clearly you hold your intentions, the more precisely it can get to work with you on your specific processes.

During those 40 points, I held clearer intentions than ever before. I spoke with precision, vision, and direction, like an arrow. I committed to the medicine that I was ready for whatever was required of me for the next step in my life.

And I believe Kambo agreed I was ready.

I believe it offered me the next threshold to move through, turning my discipline, devotion, and dedication fully towards myself.

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One month after this initiation, I suddenly had a tumor and a mammogram that followed up with biopsy, and a cancer diagnosis that came out of nowhere.

I’ve spent 15 years living low-tox, organic, and nature-based.

10 years working with sacred medicines.

7 years sober from alcohol.

I know in the core of my soul that this diagnosis is not environmental or lifestyle-based.

This came to me as a messenger, a spiritual assignment and catalyst for personal growth. After 4 months attempting to heal this naturally, the tumor quadrupled in size and I realized I could not detox my way out of emotional trauma, or parts of myself that I had never looked at before. They needed to be healed with family and in community. I was already “clean” and have been working alongside nature for 15 years. It’s always helped and supported me. This time, it was my belief constructs and identities that were going to be shattered and cracked, so I could emerge as a brand new being.

I don’t believe in “random.”

I don’t believe in “bad luck” like many western medical doctors will tell you about cancer.

I believe this diagnosis was intentionally designated.

When we consume a plant or receive Kambo’s secretion into our skin, we are merging with all of nature as a synergistic matrix. Every molecule, every compound, peptide, alkaloid, terpene, flavonoid, and polysaccharide produced exists because it solved a problem: repelling a predator, attracting a pollinator, repairing cellular damage. It’s billions of years of compressed intelligence, encoded in chemistry.

There’s nothing “random” about it. Kambo’s secretion, and the entire ecosystem of the jungle was helping me to solving a problem.

So maybe I accidentally got myself into this. But I believe it’s all working for me, to actualize my potential, and to bring me into the next level of who I’m meant to be in this world.

This may all seem “woo,” but we are reaching a point where science and spirituality are understood not as separate, but as integrative.

Through research into neuroplasticity, interoception, and the predictive processing model of the brain, neuroscience is demonstrating that how we orient internally, through our attention, our beliefs, our nervous system state, genuinely shapes our perception of and physiological response to reality.

What’s become clear through lived integration of sitting with this medicine is that its effects begin as a ripple through the body, the nervous system, and the mind, and grow into something that can alter our entire reality.

There’s a reach way beyond what we can easily measure.

We know through Kambo’s peptides that it works not only on physical and mental levels, but also on metaphysical and multidimensional ones. The medicine is a merging, not just with a frog secretion, but with every microorganism of the Amazon, the largest living, breathing ecosystem on the planet.

We are not separate from nature. We come from nature. We are nature.

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This entire cancer process has felt like a medicine ceremony.

An initiation, to say the least.

I’m being shown old stories, outdated belief systems, and false identities in need of reconstruction. I’m facing shadows I didn’t know I was carrying. I see exactly why Kambo and cancer are working together to bring these to the surface.

The lessons I’m receiving are some of the most beautiful, albeit challenging, teachings of my life.

I’m meeting parts of myself that had been hiding, but could no longer remain unseen in the pursuit of and in devotion to my potential.

Looking back to one year ago, and looking forward to the goals, dreams, visions, and projects I carry for myself, my life, and my legacy, I needed this exact moment to bridge the gap between who I was and who I am becoming.

I have learned more about myself in one year than I ever thought possible.

In these times, darkness is being exposed by light, on a global and collective level, as well as each of us on a personal, individual level. Kambo and I have been working together on exactly that, dedicated to this mission for ten years now.

I chose not to play victim to my diagnosis. I chose to stand in my power and see this as an opportunity for growth and expansion.

My work now is moving into softness and gentleness, as I complete my warrior path of mastery in these last weeks of treatment.

I believe everything is working for us and with us.

I am infinitely grateful to be on this path, as challenging and triggering as it is. Grateful for the medicines which have guided me, and taught me how to trust.

So, happy birthday to me.

And happy World Frog Day to all Kambo enthusiasts and nature lovers.

A deep bow in humble respect to this medicine.

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References:

1. Gaia theory: Earth as a living system

The Gaia hypothesis, proposed by James Lovelock and co‑developed with Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, models Earth as a self‑regulating system in which life and the physical environment co‑evolve to maintain conditions favorable for life (such as temperature and atmospheric composition).

Lovelock and Margulis describe the biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soils as tightly coupled through feedback loops, leading Margulis to say that, at least in terms of these processes, Earth’s surface is “best regarded as alive,” an idea often interpreted as pointing toward a planetary‑scale organism or Self.

Reference links:

• Overview (PDF, Harvard)

• Classic article (PDF)

• Archival copy of Lovelock & Margulis text

2. Deep ecology and the “ecological Self”

Arne Næss’s deep ecology and “ecosophy” argue that our identity can expand beyond the individual ego into an “ecological Self” that includes the wider living world, challenging the sharp separation between humans and nature.

Næss defines “identification” as a spontaneous process in which “the interests of another being are reacted to as our own,” and suggests that genuine self‑realization means realizing this broader Self that crosses boundaries between human and nonhuman nature.

Reference link:

• “Self‑Realization Beyond the Human: Arne Næss and Norwegian Deep Ecology”

3. Biophilia: our innate bond with life

E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis proposes that humans have an inborn tendency to focus on and emotionally affiliate with life and life‑like forms, grounding our love of nature in evolution rather than mere cultural preference.

Biophilia is operationally defined as both fascination (“focus upon”) and affiliation with living beings, suggesting that human minds are biologically wired into the broader community of life, rather than standing apart from it.

Reference link:

• “Biophilia as Evolutionary Adaptation: An Onto‑ and Phylogenetic Framework for Biophilia”

4. Cosmopsychism: one cosmic consciousness

In recent philosophy of mind, cosmopsychism holds that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe as a whole, with individual minds arising as aspects or fragments of a single cosmic consciousness.

Instead of seeing consciousness as a late‑emerging product of matter, cosmopsychist models treat the universe itself as the primary subject of experience, with human and nonhuman minds as partial localizations of that universal field of awareness.

Reference links:

• “What Is Cosmopsychism?” (The Monist)

• Accessible essay on cosmopsychism and quantum mechanics

5. Non‑dual awareness in cognitive science

A 2026 paper in Neuroscience of Consciousness models non‑dual awareness (NDA)—experiences where the subject–object split dissolves—as a particular dynamical configuration of the brain, in which higher‑order predictive control relaxes while self‑organizing local dynamics remain coherent.

Using the framework of “constraint closure,” the authors argue that in NDA, the system’s organization persists without rigid hierarchical control, aligning with Buddhist notions of emptiness as “dependence without intrinsic nature” and offering a scientifically tractable account of experiential oneness.

Reference link:

• “Modeling non‑dual awareness via constraint closure”

There are some conversations we’re never taught how to have.

In fact, we’re never taught communication at all, it’s something we learn through experience within the household, for which the model of could be healthy or could be avoidant, aggressive, closed, etc.

Certain topics considered taboo, or not societally normalized to speak of, are the ones we shy away from on a day-to-day basis. We are comfortable being comfortable, and most people aren’t equipped to sit in the discomfort of uncomfortable themes:

Death, grief, anger, and envy just to name a few. Even though we all experience these, talking about them isn’t normalized, and you can easily sense when someone shifts in their seat around these topics.

I’m also going to mention poop, which probably made you cringe just reading the word. (But seriously, talking about poop needs to become a normalized topic in the field of health because it’s one of the most obvious communicators of gut health and holds incredibly helpful information for us.) Let’s also take into consideration that every single human and animal on earth poops. If we can talk about food going in, why can’t we talk about the information coming out?

Death, mortality, and grief arrive to the conversation immediately after hearing the words “You have cancer.” It’s impossible to describe the amount of never-considered-before thoughts that flood in after you hear those words. There’s no knocking at the door, they’re just suddenly in the field, and not solely as the overall umbrella topic but with many detailed angles, faces, considerations, shadowy nooks and dark crannies.

The topic of death branches out to early mortality, timelines, fear of dying, what hasn’t been done yet, will a partner remarry, will children grow up without a parent, and what’s been put in place in case of such an event.

Grief takes on ten thousand faces and phases while it transcends all timelines: life as it was, the person who will never be the same again, body changes that were never asked for, identities that will dissolve and be transformed, future dreams or fertility may be taken away.

Anger is fueled by the question of fairness, betrayal by the body and resentment of the situation, or watching unhealthy people continue to live their lives unaffected by illness.

Envy may subtly show its face when talking to healthy people, watching the world continue on or seeing friends go on vacation.

And again, poop. I believe incredible amounts of healing happen through poop and tears (physical and emotional cleansing). One of the most common side effects of chemotherapy is digestive changes, constipation or diarrhea, and it should go without saying that the person experiencing the challenges needs to feel comfortable speaking about it, despite the discomfort the other person may feel.

Often, the taboo topics are wrapped up together in a little package delivered with a note that says “Shhh, I know you’re feeling all these, but don’t say any of it out loud.”

But why not talk about it?

….Because it makes one or both parties uncomfortable.

Of course everyone is different in the processing of their diagnosis and their situation, where some people don’t want to talk about cancer or the hush hush topics at all, and others only want to talk about cancer and the taboo topics because it’s the most important thing happening in their life at that moment and literally nothing else matters but staying alive.

For someone navigating grief, loss, or a health crisis, feeling safe to express and share what’s on their mind is critical, and it’s up to the person engaging in conversation to create a baseline feeling of conversational safety to reduce isolation and loneliness.

I can speak from personal experience that having a severe and surprising health situation put everything on the table and I am not afraid of leaving any rock unturned.

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As someone navigating a Stage 3 “aggressive and fast growing” breast cancer diagnosis, talking about all of these emotions and topics with friends has helped me immensely. I feel like I’m verbally processing in a way where dots are connected, puzzle pieces fit and some things just click that perhaps I would have never made the connection between if I couldn’t talk therapy it out. It helps me see and understand a bigger picture of the lessons I still need to learn in human form before death, while simultaneously considering death and moving through any fear of it.

If we’re uncomfortable talking about death, how will it be when it comes time to die and we’ve never even acknowledged it’s inevitability before?

Personally, I don’t want to be blind-sided by death. I want to be mentally prepared by having thought about it, talked about it, visualized it, and put myself in the moments of my death, so I can see what attachments I may still have, where my ego wants to fight, where I’m not ready to let go, and where still I’m white-knuckling my identities.

(This struggle of attachment and identity sounds very similar to how I felt when I needed to accept going into chemotherapy….hmm, coincidence?)

Some people won’t go there.

They’re not ready, nor do they want to face any of these topics. A lot of people are emotionally unavailable, and it’s like pulling teeth to try and feel any sense of their heart. Part of me feels sad I can’t have profound conversations with certain people in my life, which would surely be more meaningful and impactful than weather, politics or celebrities, which in some delusional way, have become the “safe” topics?.

Perhaps their comfort is more important to them than the courage and vulnerability it takes to have difficult or emotional conversations. I have a high threshold for discomfort and I’m able to sit back unfazed when most would start to squirm. I’ve learned to accept that some people are only available to their extent of comfort, and not to be affected when certain things go unacknowledged or un-talked about. I’m continuously learning to brush it off when someone won’t go deep with me.

Other people in my life are open books, ready and willing to explore any and all topics, to the oceanic depths of our hearts, minds and spirits because they don’t do small talk or surface level conversation when the human experience is so rich, intricate, intimate and individual. Many friends, and even strangers who have come to visit, are wildly curious about the crevasses of my mind, what hidden thought processes are hiding there, and what this is teaching me. We can easily go down rabbit holes together. I learn so much from those who are willing to enter into this exploration with me, leaving me feeling mentally enriched and conversationally satiated when the tea time is over.

I have some friends who are so aware of the sensitive nature of conversation, they’ve prefaced with “I’m not sure I’ll ever know the right thing to say, so you tell me what you want to talk about.” (This response gets a green check mark from me in the supportive cancer conversation guidebook.) ✅

Then there’s another kind of person who, when I tell my diagnosis, immediately responds with, “oh, my ____(insert family member here)____ died of breast cancer.” (This gets a big red X from me in the supportive cancer conversation guidebook.) ❌

It was the same friend who told me she’ll never know the right thing to say, who encouraged me to write this “conversational roadmap to supporting someone with cancer.” So I thank her dearly, for always being willing to learn, grow and explore when it comes to sensitive topics.

1. Offer Choice Before Depth

People with cancer spend a lot of time talking about their cancer and answering medical questions after it becomes the most obvious topic in the room. Sometimes we don’t want to talk about it, and sometimes we do. And when we do, rarely are we looking for advice, we’re just needing to vent or process.

Some helpful options could be:

• “Do you want to talk about cancer, or literally anything else?”

• “Do you want advice, listening, or just company?”

This small consent check restores autonomy and prevents the automatic (but well-meaning) advice avalanche which is the natural response for most of us.

Research on emotional validation shows that simply reflecting someone’s experience without trying to fix it reduces physiological stress markers. Being witnessed without correction and heard without interruption are medicine in their own way.

Have you ever told someone something sensitive and vulnerable, only for them to immediately tell you a similar story from their life? It flips the script and makes it about them, which is not helpful or supportive in a grief or cancer conversation.

(Maybe it’s an entirely separate post about how we are never truly taught active listening.)

2. Be more specific than “How are you?”

When someone is living inside a diagnosis (or a deep well of grief), the question “How are you?” can seem overwhelming and too far to grasp. It’s too wide, too loaded, and too impossible to answer without either minimizing or unraveling. The universal standard response to “how are you” is “I’m fine,” which is a polite way of brushing over it. I heard in a movie that “fine “ stands for Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional. That’s probably a more accurate truth and translation of the word.

So instead of “How are you?” try narrowing the focus to a moment, a layer, or a choice.

A few alternatives could be:

• “How’s today feeling in your body?”

• “Is this a high-energy day or a low-energy day?”

• “What’s been the hardest part of this week?”

• “What’s felt surprisingly okay?”

• “Are you in a talking mood or a distraction mood?”

• “Are you feeling more anxious, more angry, more numb?”

• “Is this week more mental or more physical?”

• “Is there anything you’d like to verbalize?”

These questions give the person something specific to reach for while communicating awareness that there are multiple dimensions at play: physical, emotional, logistical.

Studies in affect labeling show that naming emotions reduces amygdala activation and how language helps regulate the nervous system.1 The right questions can literally lower stress. Language greatly influences experience.

(Check out this post about how neurolinguistics and psycho-neuroimmunology play a huge role in how we handle treatment and side effects.)2

3. Ask About Agency, Not Just Suffering

One of the most disempowering parts of cancer is how quickly people get reduced to a diagnosis. While the treatment plan is the most overt topic and suffering is assumed, there’s so much more that occurs within the treatment timeline, including an ever-unfolding amount of self-inquiry, reflection and discovery (if that person is willing to look at the mental/emotional work).

Instead of orbiting solely around treatment, you could suggest questions like:

• “Is there anything that’s helping you feel steady?”

• “What feels within your control these days?”

• “What’s giving you strength lately?”

There’s research in psycho-oncology showing that perceived agency and social support are strongly correlated with better mental health outcomes during treatment. Feeling seen and supported regulates stress responses, and chronic stress biology is important when the immune system is already taxed.

Giving your friend, partner, or family member an opportunity to verbalize strengths, agency, and independence will offer them small wins of feeling empowered.

Small wins make a big difference.

4. Ask About the Human Beyond the Diagnosis

Cancer can become socially totalizing. Every conversation tends to drift back to labs, scans, protocols, the progress, the plan. I’ve learned there are some people who see me simply as someone with a cancer diagnosis and there are those who see me as curious opportunist going all-in on this experience in the pursuit of personal growth. Everyone has a story, everyone has a root cause, everyone has an emotional process through chronic illness, grief, etc.

It’s part of being human. We’re not just living as text on paper.

To support someone in their humanness, ask:

• “What are you reading or listening to lately?”

• “Have you had any good laughs this week?”

• “What are you craving more of right now?”

• “Is there something beautiful you’ve noticed recently?”

• “Is there anything giving you deeper insight these days?”

• “What are you learning about yourself right now?”

These remind someone they are still a full person and not just a patient, a number or a statistic. The doctors and the medical system do enough of the numbering, so it make a big difference when we can be treated and respected as a human.

Small rant on my personal story and the need to be understood as a human:

One thing I’ve become aware of in my personal situation is that the conversation of root cause has completely been brushed over and bypassed by my doctors (and family members). Maybe it’s because they don’t want to hear something that would challenge their comfort or what they’ve been taught, maybe they don’t care, maybe they don’t have the capacity, who knows.

Root cause is something I’m personally fascinated with, and you’d think with a cancer diagnosis, it would be a topic of conversation, especially for someone who’s lived an organic, vegetarian, sober, nature-based and low-tox life for the last ten years - yet none of my doctors or “statistic + science minded” family are asking about it. (My doctors and some family members seem to be on the same team of seeing me simply as someone with a diagnosis.)

But my friend group, other (more open-minded) family members, and I have excavated all of it. I’ve talked it out with 20+ of my closest friends, and even strangers who have come to visit me. I’ve been able to have deeper conversations with total strangers than with some people who have known me for all my 40 years. People with whom I can share that after my diagnosis, I did 6 ketamine sessions, a deep dive of mushrooms, 3 Ayahuasca ceremonies, 2 hypnosis sessions, and probably 100 guided visual meditations - all because I wanted to know my root cause. I went there fully because I believe if we don’t heal the root cause, there will be recurrence, and I’m not trying to do this again.

I have a deep understanding what my root cause is after all that psychic exploration, and yet, neither the doctors nor family members have asked me anything along the lines of “Hey, how does it feel to be the youngest and healthiest in the family and receive a cancer diagnosis? What do you think that’s about?”

And truly, that conversation would be healing in its own way for me.

(Side note: there’s nothing wrong or bad about who will or won’t go there with me, it’s simply an awareness of who’s emotionally and conversationally curious and available.)

Okay, back to the conversation…

5. Acknowledge the Reality Without Catastrophizing

If you don’t know what to say, it can be easy to bypass any particulars while offering generic phrases. And while they’re well-meaning, it’s probably best to skip over statements often come from avoidance, such as:

• “You’re so strong.”

• “Everything happens for a reason.”

• “You’re going to beat this.”

Instead, model language of attunement with active listening like:

• “I can’t imagine how complex this must feel.”

• “I’m here with you in whatever this is.”

• “You don’t have to perform strength with me.”

Simple empathic support is immeasurable.

What Not to Do

One thing I noticed when I was telling people about my diagnosis is that after delivering the news, I often ended up having to hold space for them as they processed what the word “cancer” meant to them, while every example of death-by-cancer in their lives came flooding back in. This is where I learned to be discerning about who I told, and kept it within my family and very close friends network for about 3 months.

So in the interest of keeping it respectful for the person experiencing the grief, the cancer, the loss, etc. I would avoid:

• Trauma dumping your own cancer/death stories unless invited

• Comparing stages or outcomes or someone else’s story

• Forcing positivity

• Making it about your own fear

• Sidestep, bypass, ignore it, or not say anything at all

What we really want to hear is stories of hope.

Hope is the glowing light that we recognize and follow in the darkness.

Hope is truly what we hold on to.

It’s inevitable that cancer introduces conversations our culture avoids. If we can widen the conversational field to include grief, mortality, anger, and the “hush hush" topics, we can reduce isolation and create a field of safety, which helps heal way more than avoidance.

One of a thousand things I’ve learned through this experience is how I want to show up for others on the other side of this once I’m in the clear.

It has completely redefined what ‘support’ means to me.

When someone texts me to check in, drops off a meal on the front door, or just comes to sit and have a cup of tea with me - those are the most meaningful moments of simple presence that truly mean so much.

If you’re a family. member, friend, or caregiver to someone experiencing loss, grief, or a diagnosis, I encourage you to ask yourself what your threshold of conversational, emotional and mental comfort is and whether you’re willing to soften your edges and be flexible for the healing of someone else who’s heart needs to be held and words need to heard.

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References:

When we want to be well (or get well), it’s imperative to address what’s happening inside us.

I think of this as tending to the inner garden: roots, soil, sunlight, water, weeds, pests, flowers. The metabolic oncology field refers to our whole-body-system as “the terrain.”

It’s all metaphorical, but the question remains: What are we nurturing, and what withers into sickness when left unattended?

We are ecosystems made up of physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional elements working together as a whole. Our bodies have one evolutionary mandate: keep us alive. But it can only run on autopilot for so long, and eventually, if we avoid our emotions and neglect to nourish our needs, the whole system suffers.

Roots rot, leaves wilt, the mites take over, the weeds grow, and the soil gets depleted.

We know stress leads to heart attacks. We know that nervous system dysregulation, chronic inflammation, and immune dysfunction increase our vulnerability to cancer, autoimmune disease, and other chronic conditions.

Through my practice with Kambo, I’ve spent years working alongside clients and examining emotional availability, trauma, the stories we carry, how they shape our inner landscape, and how imbalance turns into disease.

I’m now experiencing it myself on a very deep level. Layer by layer, my cancer diagnosis is requiring me to excavate and dust off emotions, stories and beliefs I didn’t even know I was carrying, nor have I ever tended to.

There’s a metabolic cost to emotional suppression.

Holding things in requires effort. Jaw clenching. Shallow breathing. Tight shoulders. Hyper-vigilance. Control. Tension. More often than not, we’re unaware that we’re actively holding ourselves in this extent of tightness, and that effort could go toward healing through immune response, digestive function, hormonal balance, etc.

Emotional fluidity frees up the metabolic bandwidth and redirects it towards survival instead of suppression. When we’re not spending all day managing what we refuse to feel, that energy can go toward internal repair.

Many traditions and ancient holistic systems, whether they be religious, contemplative, or cultural, suggest that truth wants movement and expression.

When emotional honesty is blocked, life force stagnates. You don’t have to choose between science or spirituality to notice this: a body aligned with what is felt and expressed tends to function with less internal friction, and more with “flow.”

This is the intersection where science and spirituality meet.

Traditional Chinese Medicine has mapped this connection for thousands of years.

In TCM, each organ holds specific emotions: the liver stores anger, the lungs hold grief, the kidneys house fear, the heart carries joy and anxiety, the spleen processes worry.

In TCM, practitioners understand meridian points as the map and study these as literal pathways between emotional experience and physical manifestation, encouraging fluidity to avoid stagnation and therefore, sickness.

When these emotions remain unprocessed (or chronically activated), they create dis-ease in their corresponding organ systems. Unexpressed anger becomes liver dysfunction, unresolved grief settles in the lungs as respiratory issues or weakened immunity, and chronic fear exhausts the kidneys and adrenals.

Your inner narrative has physiological consequences.

Unprocessed emotions don’t just go away if you ignore them. In keeping with the metaphor of the terrain, I’ll say they ‘compost.’ Feelings you don’t tend break down underground and resurface as fatigue, reactivity, inflammation, or patterns you thought you’d outgrown.

Or if you’re consistently ignoring your needs or feeding your inner world negative emotions (stress, anger, resentment, etc), that directly alters nervous system tone, hormone signaling, immune function, and even gene expression1 in a detrimental way.

On the flip side, inner care turns rot into rich, usable soil. If we’re acknowledging our needs, tending to self-awareness, feeding ourselves awe, appreciation, gratitude, kindness, these positive emotions act like sunlight and water to nurture the soil so the flowers can bloom.

Dr. Emoto’s rice experiment

Dr. Masaru Emoto (1943–2014) was a Japanese author and alternative medicine practitioner best known for his water and rice experiment which tested the theory that human consciousness, emotions, and words can physically alter the molecular structure of water. By labeling jars of cooked rice with positive ("love," "thank you") or negative ("hate," "idiot") phrases and speaking to them daily for 30 days, he alleged that positive words caused crystalized water structures and fermentation while negative words caused rapid rotting.

If we as humans are made of up to 75% water, then this theory could also be true for the way we think, talk to, and feel about ourselves.

We are either crystalizing or rotting based on our thoughts and emotions.

When your inner terrain is tended, emotions are processed in a healthy way, and truths are acknowledged, your body has the resources to actually heal.

Immune function strengthens, inflammation settles, nervous system regulates, and balance is restored.

Ah, doesn’t that feel nice?

(Anyone can and should do this, not just for those in chemo!)

#tnbc #chemotherapy #stage3breastcancer #chemotips

One of the first supplements I came across was Berberine, a natural plant-based compound (most commonly found in goldenseal) and used in both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic medicine for centuries. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Ayurveda are both ancient, holistic systems originating thousands of years ago in Asia.

One (of many) reasons I love these traditions is because they focus on treating the whole person - and consider mind, body, and spirit, to be the “whole.” I respect this deeply because I believe symptoms are the messenger of a health issue, and we need to focus on finding and healing the root cause rather than the symptoms.

(As we know here in the US, allopathic doctors focus on making the symptoms go away, but they don’t even touch root cause healing.)

This is why my curiosity peaked when I read about berberine, which is now popular for helping to manage type 2 diabetes, cholesterol, and weight loss. I don't have diabetes or high cholesterol - I don’t even eat that much sugar, but Cancer is on my health CV now and my spidey senses activated when I connected a few of the dots between cancer, glucose and diabetes. I became interested in the pathways it affects and the underlying mechanisms that work with all these conditions.

What interested me was the how, not the what.

What Berberine Does

Berberine has been studied pretty extensively for blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity. People (myself included) compare it to metformin sometimes because they both influence how cells handle energy. Multiple trials and meta-analyses show it can lower fasting glucose, HbA1c, and markers of insulin resistance, especially if your metabolism is already struggling.

The mechanism that gets cancer nerds (like me) excited: berberine activates AMPK (5′-adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase), a cellular energy sensor that basically nudges your cells toward more efficient fuel use and away from the constant “grow grow grow” signaling that fuels a lot of cancers. Many tumors are glucose hogs - that’s literally how PET scans work. They light up areas consuming abnormal amounts of glucose. It’s called the Warburg effect, and it’s real.

(Why we don’t attach some kind of Trojan horse cancer cell killer when we do PET scans is a question I have for all the Big Pharma companies claiming to “research a cure”.)

Now even though we know the Warburg Effect has been studied and proven, we can’t just lower our blood sugar to starve a tumor. Cancer cells are smart fuckers. They adapt. They’re not sitting there with a glucose meter waiting for us to go keto so they can just give up.

So why do I take it?

I take berberine because stable blood sugar supports metabolic resilience and insulin signaling affects inflammation, energy, tissue repair. In a body already under siege and trying to figure out the good guys and the bad guys, metabolic stability is one of the few levers I can pull that doesn’t feel like I’m playing biochemical whack-a-mole.

Our bodies have evolved over millions of years, and the one thing they are biologically programed to do is keep us alive. Supplemental cancer care is about giving our bodies the best possible conditions to do what it's evolved to do.

Even if it’s “hocus pocus” to take for cancer, I’m pretty sure most of us Americans could use some support regulating our blood sugar, so my guess is that it can’t hurt.

Pair berberine with some of these simple blood sugar regulation hacks and you’ll start to notice positive changes in mood, inflammation, and sleep in no time:

1. Take a 10-15 minute walk after meals: Movement helps your muscles absorb glucose. Even a gentle stroll makes a difference. Sometimes I do a 5 or 10 minute Peloton workout to get my heart rate up if dinner was carb heavy.

2. Eat protein and fat before carbs: Having veggies, protein, or healthy fats first slows glucose absorption and prevents spikes.

3. Add vinegar to your meals: A tablespoon of apple cider vinegar (in water or as dressing) before eating can blunt glucose response. You can also make a digestive mixer by adding lemon juice and/or ginger with the apple cider vinegar and some water to ease it going down and further support digestion.

4. Don’t eat carbs naked: Pair carbs with fiber, protein, or fat. Toast with butter and eggs beats toast alone.

5. Stand up and move every hour: Sitting for long stretches tanks insulin sensitivity. Set a timer. Stretch. Walk to the bathroom. Just move.

***Standard disclaimer: Obviously I'm not a doctor. This isn't medical advice. This is my personal health journey and the research that informed my choices. Cancer is a highly individual situation. Everyone’s cancer and treatment plans are different. Don't take supplements based on what some stranger on the internet writes about their own health choices. Talk to your oncologist, your pharmacist, someone who actually knows your medical history.

Scientific links:

• Glucose-lowering effect of berberine on type 2 diabetes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36467075/

• Berberine reduces colorectal adenoma recurrence: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40795846/

• AMPK pathway and berberine mechanisms (Frontiers): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2019.01461/full

• Umbrella meta-analysis of berberine on glycemic and inflammatory markers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149291823004290

• Berberine safety and drug interactions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berberine

• The Warburg Effect: How Does it Benefit Cancer Cells?

  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4783224/

• Cancer and Glucose Metabolism: A Review on Warburg Mechanisms

  https://jbiomedsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12929-025-01167-1

I felt my body contract. It didn’t want to fight. It didn’t want war.

It wanted acknowledgement and listening.

I breathed deeply, I softened, I reversed out of that aggression.

Fight and fire are not the way to heal. Instead, I sat in meditation. I channeled peaceful warrior energy.

From a neurolinguistic and psychoneuroimmunology perspective, war language is not neutral.

It activates the amygdala (the brain’s threat-detection center), immediately shifting the body into fight-or-flight mode.

I believe this is a major reason why so many people have a rough time in chemo.

The body cannot heal if we believe we are at war.

Language shapes perception, and perception drives physiology.

War language has downstream effects that drastically alter chemo response:

• Elevated cortisol suppresses immune function and tissue repair
• Chronic sympathetic tone reduces digestion and nutrient absorption
• Reduced vagal tone impairs anti-inflammatory signaling
• Increased inflammatory cytokines correlate with fatigue, pain, nausea, neuropathy
• Sleep suffers when the brain believes it’s under attack

Chemo already stresses mitochondria, bone marrow, the liver, and nervous system. Layering constant threat messaging on top just keeps those punches rolling.

If you subscribe to the “battle,” you’ll punch, and chemo will punch right back.

When our language opens to acceptance, receptivity, support, repair, + regulation, different neural networks run the show:

• Prefrontal cortex stays online
• Parasympathetic activity increases
• Vagal signaling improves gut + immune coordination
• Pain perception decreases
• Medication tolerance improves
• Recovery resources are conserved instead of burned

I am not at war with my body. I’m not “fighting” cancer. I’m loving this teacher, grateful for the messenger, speaking kindly to my body all day every day.

My body is not trying to hurt me. I am not in a battle with her. She’s inviting me into deeper self-knowledge, and as I learn, we heal together.

My body + I are on the same team, speaking the same language.

It’s not woo, it’s neuroscience. (published scientific references below.)

Segerstrom & Miller (2004), Psychological Stress and the Human Immune System — a meta-analysis of over 300 empirical studies demonstrating that psychological stress alters immune parameters in humans, showing how stress responses can suppress immune function and dysregulate immune activity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361287/

Balakin, A. A., et al. (2025). Regulation of stress-induced immunosuppression: Neuroendocrine and immune mechanisms. Biology, 14(1), 76.

https://doi.org/10.3390/biology14010076

It took a cancer diagnosis for me to learn how to just ‘be.’

Every day since my diagnosis, I’ve said ‘thank you’ to the mass in my left breast.

‘Thank you?’ You might wonder. ‘Why in the world would someone be grateful to a cancer diagnosis?’

Hear me out.

I don't believe anger, blame, and fight language will heal me. Yes, I’ve gone there before, but then I moved on. I let them pass through. I didn’t stay and harbor those emotions. That will create dis-ease in itself.

I choose not to play victim. I don’t believe in “random” or “bad luck.” I don’t believe this is happening “to” me. I am not “fighting” cancer. I believe it’s happening with me and for me. My body created a symptom as a message that something was out of balance in my internal ecosystem.

I believe that in a crisis (and in every day life), mindset and attitude are everything. The body follows wherever the mind goes, like an untrained puppy chasing every squirrel. This is a definitive event in my life that’s shown me how years of cultivating a practice of mental strength, nervous system resilience, and centeredness has paid off. I can’t imagine the places an untrained mind will go in a cancer diagnosis.

Cancer and crisis are an unexpected language which, as it turns out, I speak fluently. They’ve opened closet doors to skeletons I never knew were there, and meeting them with curiosity and an open heart has changed everything. Old stories, belief systems, habits and patterns have surfaced, asking me to examine what still fits and what I’ve simply outgrown but never shed.

It’s in this way that I hold cancer to be the greatest teacher of my life. It’s impossible to deny that there are lessons we will just never learn until death comes knocking at our doorstep 50 years earlier than we expected.

And when I look at cancer as a teacher, as the intelligence and wisdom of my body sending me a message, I marvel at it in amazement, and I think, “Wow, what a ride this is.”

I see it as an opportunity to question everything, because it’s pretty much a no-brainer that everything I thought I knew (i.e. myself, life, and everything about my life) isn’t at all as it has seemed.

And so I hold this experience close to my heart. (Quite literally, as the tumor is over my left breast.) And I say thank you, cancer.

Thank you for…

Waking me up

Bringing me a sense of awareness and aliveness

Lifting the veils of everyday illusions I once walked past so easily

Illuminating where I was living out of balance

Clarifying what matters and what really doesn’t

Slowing me down. Wow, like really. THANK YOU for slowing me down!

Teaching me how to live

Calling me forward into a greater version of myself

Teaching me discipline and devotion

Showing me my capacity

Strengthening my discernment and helping me sift through noise

Teaching me how to really truly research

Pushing me to advocate for myself

Strengthening my intuition and confirming my trust in myself over and over again

Challenging my dogmatic beliefs

Reshaping my relationship with myself

Teaching me how to treat and talk to my body in the most loving, supportive way

Showing me that my body has been trying to protect me all along, even when everyone else calls it a “betrayal” or “disease”

Teaching me to stop apologizing for taking up space, for needing things, for asking for what I want

Reminding me I am the only one living this particular experience

Making me realize how much of my identity was stuck in being “the strong, independent” woman

Showing me I can change my mind about who I thought I was, who I am, and who I thought I was going to be

Softening the walls I’ve built around my heart

Reconnecting me with the little girl inside me who wants to be loved, held, and cared for

Showing me my own strength, grace, and poise

Reflecting the inner work I’ve done over the past fifteen years

Showing me that my pursuit of healthy, organic living was in no way ‘defeated’

Revealing the inner homemaker I love being

Opening my heart

Expanding my capacity of love for myself and those around me

Letting me feel true compassion

Showing me that love isn’t conditional

Proving I’m worthy of love

Teaching me about vulnerability and truth

Teaching me that vulnerability takes strength and being open about struggle actually takes more courage than pretending to be fine.

(And showing me the people who aren’t ready to hear what’s real, and the people who only want to hear what’s real.)

Reminding me that being real and authentic are always more honest than toxic positivity

Teaching me how connections deepen from being seen in vulnerable states

Forcing me to learn the difference between being busy and being full

Revealing who shows up and who doesn’t, and in what ways and in what level of authenticity

Rewiring my beliefs

Helping me understand that this journey is not linear, and that’s exactly as it should be, even though I often get frustrated with it

Showing me that uncertainty doesn’t have to mean hopelessness

Helping me release the need to understand everything before I can accept it

Helping me understand that forgiveness (for myself, for my situation) doesn’t require understanding

Showing me the ball of yarn my mind tangles itself into whenever I try to make some kind of meaning when “the plan” takes a turn

Showing me that my timeline is not everyone else’s timeline, and that comparison is a thief even here

Showing me how much energy I spent trying to earn approval, when in reality, I don’t actually need or want it

Helping me distinguish between what I actually value and what the noise of the world values

Teaching me to receive

Closing the chapter where I believed I had to do everything alone

Teaching me how to ask for and receive help, a lesson I’m still learning

Offering an opportunity for my family to grow closer

Bringing my community together in meaningful ways

Reminding me that boundaries are absolutely necessary when other people think they know what’s best for me

Allowing me to feel everything

Allowing me to experience the full range of human emotions: anger, frustration, grief, fear, resentment, denial, amusement, joy, love, acceptance, confusion, hope

Giving me the experience of duality: I can be afraid and brave, angry and grateful, devastated and hopeful all at the same time and not have to pick one or the other

Cracking the door to emotions and feelings that have long been ignored

Showing me I’m allowed to grieve the life I planned while building the one I have, and opening up to the one I will walk into

Revealing what presence means

Teaching me that mortality is a conversation and concept we need to normalize more so we can all understand that “ordinary” moments are so special

Revealing that every “mundane” moment of washing dishes, folding laundry, morning sunlight, contains an entire universe of wonder when you’re fully in it

Teaching me that comfort and growth rarely coexist, and both have their seasons

Helping me let go.

Helping me deconstruct the mental scaffolding of old stories that my ego was so tightly holding onto for protection

Making me face my fears

Reshaping my daily routines and habits to better, lifelong ones that will stay

And the most surprising one to me:

For excavating a long-buried truth inside my heart that after many years of denying and defying, I do in fact, want a family.

I have learned so much about myself over the last 6 months. And I feel like I’m just getting started.

1Etymologically speaking, the word “crisis” comes from the Greek krisis, (κρίσις) meaning “a separating, decision, or judgment,” derived from krinein (“to separate, decide”). The word first appeared in English (15th century) in a medical context, referring to the critical stage of an illness. By the 17th century, it gained its broader sense of a “decisive or vitally important stage in anything,” evolving to often imply disaster, though its core meaning remains about choice and change.

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GFL was primarily started to be an educational space around Kambo, but also an all-encompassing place for my mind and heart to make any sense of what’s going on in the world, with a flare of an auto-biographical tone. I’ve transferred over a list from the introduction post to GFL of what I imagine it will be moving forward.

• Earth-Based Wisdom & Medicine

• Stories and field notes from the jungle

• Healing the soul through the body

• Humility, initiation, and the slow path of mastery

• Slow-living as a lifelong pursuit of unlearning

• Living between worlds: humanity and ai, spirit and science

• Returning home after 15 years nomadic: what different lands have taught me

• Learning to lead from the heart

• Death, grief, beauty, and the wild inner terrain

• What frogs, forests, and ancestors teach us

• Honest reflections on being a woman, a witness, a weaver

• Building intentional spaces

• Gathering as resistance to loneliness

• Food as medicine, intuition as truth

• The future of sacred, creative, communal life

• Storytelling as healing

• Love letters to the Earth, prayers for the collective

So while this space, Green Fire Letters, was originally meant to be where I explore and express my love, admiration, and knowledge of Kambo, the jungle, the Earth and the lessons I’ve learned along the way, it shifted on July 16, when I received a surprising and unexpected breast cancer diagnosis, which took over my world, and is now teaching me in very new ways.

I invite you to join me on this exploration into the wild unknown of healing a Stage 3 cancer diagnosis from a perspective of curiosity, critical thinking, and intuition.

#chemotherapy #stage3breastcancer