Awakening After Cancer
- Surviving Breast Cancer
- 6 hours ago
- 11 min read
By Jessi Lord COMMUNITY | BREAST CANCER STORIES
How cancer ended my lifelong habit of leaving myself
There are myriad ways to experience an awakening. I don’t believe we have just one during our lifetime, but many moments when the life we’ve built can no longer contain the truth of who we are becoming. This is because we are living not only as bodies moving through the material world, but as souls continually remembering who we have always been.
Some awakenings arrive as quiet, almost imperceptible whispers of recognition. Others come as seismic shifts shaking us awake in a way that alters the course of our life forever. But both provide energetic rememberings of who we have always been. What followed my breast cancer diagnosis was not just survival - it was an unraveling, a reckoning, and ultimately, an awakening.
What I couldn’t have known was that breast cancer would uncover a life that had been waiting beneath the one I thought I was living. I thought breast cancer would ask everything of my body. I had no idea it would ask everything of my soul. I hadn’t yet realized that my body surviving a full year of treatment would only be the beginning of my healing and that I would spend the next year learning how to inhabit it again.
I had faced my greatest fear while in active cancer treatment. I came to understand how I would get through the physicality of it because of the advice from a wise retired oncologist, who was a dear friend of my late mother’s. He was my first phone call after I received the pathology report from the diagnostic biopsy. I asked him to help me understand the biology of the cancer I had and my options for treatment. The report said that I had triple-negative breast cancer. Unlike many other breast cancers, mine wouldn’t respond to hormone therapy or other targeted treatments like surgery right out the gate. There were no alternative paths to weigh, no decisions between different medications. From the very beginning, the plan was six months of weekly chemotherapy and immunotherapy infusions, followed by surgery, and finally radiation.
Most of us have seen the physical transformations that can happen during chemotherapy whether in the movies or in real life as so many of us know someone diagnosed with breast cancer. The hair loss, becoming nauseous and weak and frail, sitting for hours at a time in an infusion room. Yet, how would I be able to do it? After a career of treating thousands of cancer patients, the retired oncologist informed me with absolute certainty: “There is no better survivor than a young mother. This is not a fight,” he said, “this is about curing your cancer. Remember… this is not a sprint, this is a marathon.” Deafening silence and a tidal wave of awareness of what he was saying hit me straight in the heart. There it was - all the motivation that I needed accompanied by the undeniable necessity to dig deep for the endurance I would need for the year ahead. Because he was right. There is no stronger force of energy than the strength and determination of a young mother. I had a daughter to live for; I embodied that archetype.
When treatment was all over and with each passing week, I found myself spending less time at the cancer center, surrounded by one of the most supportive communities that I have ever been a part of, and more time alone with myself. And as the noise of treatment quieted, something within me grew louder and impossible to ignore. I was feeling confused, lost, circling and spinning in my efforts to make it back home to myself after what I had just been through.
I felt small whispers of a loss, of a grief; tears would flow uncontrollably, sometimes out of nowhere like on a drive to a dentist appointment. These small shifts of release in my nervous system gradually grew in intensity and scale and the need to express what I was feeling became louder.
I had read deeply about trauma and had come to understand the ideas presented in The Body Keeps the Score, and how trauma is stored in the body. Throughout my life, I adapted to trauma by becoming exquisitely attuned to everyone else’s needs while growing increasingly disconnected from my own. Hypervigilance became my normal. My nervous system never truly believed it was safe, so I ran, exercised, numbed with substances, withheld joy, and silenced my own voice for fear that expressing it would cost me connection with, honestly, anyone. I certainly had no idea what I needed to regulate my nervous system and definitely had no idea how to express my wants and needs with words. During a somatics-based alcohol recovery program during COVID, I raised my hand in genuine confusion. “Wait,” I said. “What do you mean when you say regulation means feeling safe in your body?” The Zoom room grew quiet as I heard myself say the words that surprised me most: “I didn’t know that.”
It was one thing to know I was entering a whole new chapter of healing trauma in my life. It was another thing to actually walk through it. I couldn’t wait for perfect clarity on how to begin this new chapter, so I reached for a familiar coping technique. I immediately went back to work at the tail end of treatment thinking that this is the normal thing to do. Check! I took everyone’s encouragement as confirmation that I was doing exactly what I should be doing. Check again! Boy, was I proud of myself for diving right back in! My first day of my new job was my last day of radiation! Go me! But in hindsight, I confused everyone else’s encouragement with my own readiness. It actually was not something I was ready for. I was beginning to recognize a deeply conditioned pattern within myself: I had made another major life decision based on what I believed I should do rather than what I actually needed.
At this point, the bouts of uncontrollable crying were happening nearly daily. Usually I could get back to myself with breath, sound, grounding on the grass, and other somatic techniques I had learned. It wasn’t quite evident to me yet that there was something deep inside me loosening its grip on me. But I was able to verbalize that I hadn’t felt depression like this since I was a young teenager - some of the darkest and most emotionally traumatic times of my life. I could only describe it by saying: “I don’t know how to find my way back home to myself.” Every coordinate I had once used to navigate my life no longer pointed me home. I was struggling. My dysregulated nervous system escalated from being overwhelmed to an all-consuming chronic state. I could not settle. It felt as if every internal compass I had trusted suddenly stopped working.
I kept searching for language, an analogy that might come close to explaining what I was experiencing. The comparison that came to mind surprised me. I almost dismissed it before I allowed myself to say it out loud. “I feel real compassion for veterans,” I heard myself saying. The words hung in the air while I found myself wondering if survivorship carried its own version of that impossible transition. “They go off to war,” I wailed to others. “They see life-changing devastation and experience incredible trauma and upon their return to civil life, they are told: ‘Thank you for your service!’ with the expectation to just navigate seamlessly back into society. Can you even imagine!?” I heard myself yelling. But, they couldn’t understand the shared psychological challenge of returning to ordinary life after an extraordinary experience that I was trying to describe. Despite having just escaped death, I was told something similar: “You must be so happy to get back to normal!” But every time I heard that, I could not believe it, not even for a second. What those around me didn’t understand (aside from my ‘breasties’ on a WhatsApp thread that we used to bare ALL the brutal details of navigating our cancer journeys) was that there is no going back to “normal.” There would be no normal. It simply did not exist.
After I saw, endured, and felt all the physicality of being a cancer patient, what I was experiencing now was the emotional backlash, the PTSD of surviving breast cancer - the lonely, confusing work of finding my way home after an experience that had forever changed my internal landscape. I felt alone with those closest around me. I was having dark thoughts of what the point of life was. The trauma of the medical experience I had just survived was catching up with me; slowly sneaking up on me, quietly behind my back. I’d turn around to see what was there and it would freeze… and upon turning back around it would quietly leapfrog closer to me, anxiously reaching and grabbing for my energy to pull into its darkness. I called my doctor for pharmacological intervention.
For a while, I could keep its relentless grip at bay. I could feel it rising, but I could still meet the world with composure. Until one day I couldn’t.
It happened in my kitchen with my boyfriend standing just a few feet away. What unfolded is difficult to describe in ordinary language. The closest words I have are Eckhart Tolle’s. It felt like my pain body took over, as though something long buried had finally demanded to be felt. I entered a dissociative, panic-filled state unlike anything I had ever experienced. A wave of panic consumed me. My breathing became ragged. I was confused. My boyfriend later told me my eyes looked different - dark, almost vacant. I remember pleading with him to let whatever was happening run its course. I believed my body was doing something it had been trying to do for decades: release what it had carried for far too long.
I remember very little of what I said that day. Only the overwhelming certainty that I could no longer outrun what had been living inside me.
Whether it was trauma releasing through my body, a nervous system overwhelmed by everything it had endured, or both, I knew one thing with absolute clarity: this wasn’t only about cancer anymore.
16 months after my original diagnosis, I took a necessary retreat to step away from the demands of daily life. I spent my time focused on meditation, yoga, and a workshop on the art of future-making. The structure of the retreat allowed my nervous system to relax and helped me find the grounding and clarity I needed to see what must change in my life.
As I began to gain this clarity, I felt the familiar pull of fear and the ego trying to keep me anchored in old, unhealthy patterns. That hook to remain in old unhealthy patterns is what the ego is very good at doing. When it senses that you are remembering who you have always been and are initiating any kind of move towards the seat of your soul, it bears down. Your ego will tell you to remain hidden from the world and will guide you to relapse into the toxic patterns of your suffering. This is because the ego’s greatest fear is your soul waking up. It takes immense courage to witness your ego’s thoughts without being consumed by them any longer. It’s not for the faint of heart to question the story you’ve been telling yourself.
For most of my life, I allowed those false narratives to run my operating system even though for the past ten years I had been attending a Tibetan Buddhist sangha in my local community. I would dutifully go twice a week to hear dharma talks, meditate with the deities, learn about the true nature of my original mind, and practice remembering who I have always been. Despite that active spiritual practice, my ego would still interpret the motives of others as mean or harmful, my nervous system responding to their actions as if the emotional abuse I experienced as a child was occurring again. But the door to clarity was cracking open. I could hear my soul guiding me to step into this other way of being that I had dedicated my practice to. It was time I stepped into this frequency that I had always known in my wisdom mind. A place where I could open my heart, see the pure perception and recognize that truth reflected back to me. I could finally tell myself the story my heart and my soul had always known was true.
I had learned to advocate for my physical needs while I was in medical treatment for cancer. I went into that journey being the best advocate that I could be for myself. It was very clear very early on that I would have to both advocate for myself and surrender to the experience and knowledge of my team of oncologists. But now I was coming face to face with the mental wounds from the cancer journey - and now the healing wasn’t about fixing what was broken. And healing wasn’t about becoming someone new. It was about becoming someone I had never been allowed to be.
If I finally faced the emotional journey that cancer had uncovered, I knew it would lead me to the very roots of my trauma. It was there that I could finally apply the salve to old wounds - to lovingly tend to the little girl who had spent so much of her life believing she had to earn love by abandoning herself. In caring for her, I began learning what it meant to care for myself, to become whole. And with pure clarity, I now understood that it was only from that place of wholeness that I could truly be in right relationship with others.
Once I understood that my greatest responsibility was no longer just advocating for my body, but for the little girl who had always lived within it, everything began to change. I wanted to show her that I was here now - that she would never again have to navigate the world alone. That together, we would build a life spacious enough for joy. And that, little by little, she could learn to let it in.
This summer, she and I are traveling across the world together. We will sit among women devoted to healing, walk barefoot along the shoreline, and spend long days beside the ocean where she has always felt most alive. For the first time in my life, I am not trying to become someone else. I am simply becoming the safe place she has been waiting for all along.
I am coming to terms with the hard truth that tending to my own needs affects others who were used to my self-abandonment. It will take courage to assert what I need, but I know it is the only way to refill my own cups and to maintain healthy relationships.
I’ve realized that life after cancer is forcing me to stop surviving in the ways I did long before my diagnosis. Cancer stripped away my old coping strategies and exposed the ways I had learned to abandon myself. Now, as a 48-year-old survivor who navigated chemotherapy, immunotherapy, surgery, followed by radiation, and the menopause that came alongside, I am committed to structuring my life in a way that truly works for me.
I used to think surviving cancer meant getting my life back. I know now that there was no life to go back to. For years I believed I was searching for myself. It turns out that she had been waiting patiently for me to come back and get her. Oh Mary, I finally get it, this is what I will do with my one precious life! Somewhere along the way, I had mistaken survival for direction. I wasn’t lost because I lacked a map. I was lost because I had spent so many years navigating by everyone else’s compass instead of my own. And perhaps that was the awakening all along - that cancer had ended my lifelong habit of leaving myself.
Read More:
On the Podcast: Breast Cancer Conversations
Episode 306. Can Breathwork & Ayurveda Support Healing After Breast Cancer?
