Blog With Love 4 Breast Cancer Awareness

As many of you know, October is breast cancer awareness month. As a breast cancer survivor of seven years, I don’t really have to be reminded. I will never forget the experience of having had breast cancer and how it impacted my life.

            Dr. Susan Love’s Army of Women is an organization that is working hard to find the cause of and cure for breast cancer. You can join to help even if you have never had this disease. Log onto www.healthofwomenstudy.org to become part of this groundbreaking effort to gather information that will help make breast cancer a disease of the past.

            In the meantime, Army of Women bloggers have been asked to blog this month about “collateral damage—costs of the cure.” I think everyone is aware of the challenging journey that many women (and men) make when they are diagnosed, as they struggle through surgery, chemo, radiation, and other treatments.

            Collateral damage means more than losing your hair, feeling nauseous, or facing your own mortality. I have seen several friends in addition to myself suffer the consequences of breast and other cancers, and I am more convinced than ever that we must find a cure soon. One of the saddest things I witnessed was when a friend who had breast cancer was forced to miss her son’s graduation from high school. She had worked so hard for her child’s entire life to experience the joy of that day. But instead, she spent her son’s graduation in the hospital dealing with complications from her treatment. 

            So many moms have experienced the physical pains and losses that come with breast cancer. But there are other collateral effects: Missing your child’s band concert, not being there to help your kids do homework, feeling too sick to attend their important sporting and musical events. The year that I had breast cancer my middle son was applying to colleges. Though I tried to give the process my full attention it was difficult to concentrate on my son’s bright future when I wasn’t even sure if I would have any future at all.

            To put it plainly, there are side effects…and then there are side effects. Feeling too sick to hug your toddler, feeling too tired to take your kids to the park, feeling too scared to laugh and smile at Christmas dinner (I was diagnosed a few weeks before the holiday) are things that doctors don’t tell you about and certainly no pill will fix. Cancer can steal away our health; it can also steal away our peace of mind and our ability to enjoy our lives and our families…if we let it. Cancer can also result in depression, anxiety, and fear. For many women, living with the fear of recurrence is a daily struggle.

             Please join the effort to eradicate this disease by going to www.armyofwomen.org and signing on to a study. Remember, it’s not necessary to have or even to have had breast cancer to participate in many of these research initiatives. Sometimes you can help just by answering a few questions on an online questionnaire, or by spreading the word to others. Thank you!

Thanks to the Butterflies...and Eloise

A very sweet young lady I know created this drawing for me when I was looking for ideas for the book cover of my memoir, Yin, Yang, Yogini: A Woman’s Quest for Balance, Strength and Inner Peace (now available for pre-order!) The final book cover, designed by the publishing company, is a bit different, but the artists did incorporate the butterflies. Hands are very difficult to draw (I am told!) but Eloise did an excellent job. In fact, I’m sure that if she so desires, she will one day have a lovely career as an artist.

            The point of this blog is to say thank you to Eloise (and to her mother, my dear friend Amy) and also to say thank you to all those who helped to make my dream of creating and publishing my memoir about my yoga and breast cancer journey come true. For the fact of the matter is, even though I was the one to sit down at my computer and write the book, it never would have happened without the input of many, many people. Nothing happens in this world, I believe, without a chain of angels (human or otherwise) that help us on our path.

            I remember the very first time I entered the yoga studio at the foot of my hill. Somehow, the universe had planted a yoga center there just at the time in my life when I deeply needed to change my path for emotional as well as physical reasons. From the moment I entered Nesheemah (which means breath), my life forever changed for the better. I entered a parallel universe of which I had hitherto been completely unaware, a universe of kind and gentle souls, of teachers, friends, and others too many to name here. That day set into motion a series of events and serendipitous meetings, opening my heart to compassion, forgiveness and trust. So many have been part of my journey…I would like to personally thank each and every one…but some I don’t even know by name. Sometimes I think of the waiter who refilled my coffee cup when I was feeling down, or a woman I crossed paths with in a grocery store who let me go first in line; the people who brighten our days are sometimes unknown to us, even though we may feel and benefit from the light they share.

            Today, I’ll simply start with Eloise, who spent some hours after school creating the beautiful drawing above for me. And I’d also like to thank the butterflies…who reveal to us every day that we are capable of change, that we capable of overcoming struggle, that we are born to be free and beautiful.

The Power of Wow

One of my favorite yoga teachers (prominently featured in my upcoming memoir; details soon!) used to have a favorite mantra she’d repeat every time something amazing happened in her life (which was quite often). Here it is: “Wow.” She’d say this numerous times a day—whenever she ran into someone she knew in an unlikely place, whenever she looked up at the sky, whenever she woke up in the morning to a beautiful sunrise. Her enthusiasm for life was (and still is) contagious. For her, every moment seemed to hold a potential “Wow.”

At first, I thought this exuberance was a little over the top. But then, I too, began to notice that I was saying Wow a lot. It began to seem amazing to me that cats purr or that somehow the universe managed to hook me up in college with a best friend I would have for life. It seemed extraordinary that an opossum liked to hang out in my pear tree at night, and that I lived within walking distance from a fantastic Thai restaurant. It seemed unbelievable that goats are so adorable, or that butterflies and birds have such vibrant colors.

 I started to no longer take much of anything for granted, and to look at all the ordinary things in life in terms of their potential “wow-ness.” Of course, it’s easy to feel “The Wow” when you’re gazing at a sunset or looking into the eyes of a newborn baby. But in time, if you get into the Wow of things, you’ll find yourself totally wowed by a head of organic cauliflower or by a good car mechanic.

As a yogi (and as an admirer of author Eckhart Tolle) I often extol the “Power of Now,” and the beauty of living in the now. But I think my yoga teacher takes it an important step further.

If you can live in the now and in the Wow at the same time, I believe you may find true happiness. And all I can say to that, of course, is Hallelujah! I mean... Wow.

On the Porch

That’s porch. Not Porsche.

            I like porches (well, I like Porsches, too). These days everything is about the deck (and I do have one, out back. I don’t have a front porch any more). But when I was a kid, everything happened on the porch, in the front of the house, where all could see.

Porches make memories (well, maybe decks do, too, but they seem to be more along the lines of “Wow, we grilled some awesome portabellas last night” or “Did you see the size of those zinnias?”)
             Porch memories (at least for me) are more personal. The front porch is where I colored in my coloring books and played with my wooden blocks and paper dolls for hours. The front porch is where my best friend got into an argument with my cousin (he threw her crayons overboard into the forsythia bush). It’s where my high school boyfriend and I broke up. And it’s where my father took me when I was small and especially naughty. He often also carried me there in the evening—on his shoulders—to say goodnight to the moon.

            The front porch was where my mom and dad sat after dinner to watch the cars go by, and where my mom sat for years after my dad died, watching the cars go by alone. The front porch was where we hung out when it was just too hot inside the house, and it was where the glider was (upon which, as I recall, my lovely sister and her boyfriend often cuddled).

           We waved to neighbors passing by from the porch and often got into conversations about the weather or the state of old Miss so-and-so’s health. Today, we may not know our neighbors, and if we do, we’re all out on our back decks so we don’t have as many chances to chat. The porch was a great place to spy from and it was also an excellent elevation from which to have a lemonade-spitting contest (when mom wasn’t looking, of course).

            I guess I could go on and on about porches but you get my drift. Decks are nice, but I love porches, and always will.