healing Archives - Page 2 of 4

Connecting and the JoyBoots Community

May 14, 2020November 11, 2019 by Kelly Inselmann

From the moment you are born, you need others to survive and thrive. Community lifts you up when you are feeling low. And emotional isolation at a crucial time can be devastating, making a difficult situation feel even more traumatic. We all need community. Even those of us who are introverts by nature or who have an independent spirit.

Community sustained me when I went through cancer the first time. My baby daughter was 2 months old and I was still on a learning curve as a first time mom, sleep deprived, terrified, and furious that my life with my daughter was being hijacked by an urgent need for unwelcome treatments.

Friends brought food and offered a listening ear. Some could connect in spite of my pain and share their own challenges and there were no obstacles to our maintaining friendships. Maria Elena, a yoga friend I met while teaching a program volunteered to help me with my daughter and became our full-time nanny, life saver, and a person very dear to our family and my heart.

As many of you know, I’ve been revisiting the cancer experience personally, this time as a caregiver to my husband. As he continues treatment for colon cancer, I’m aware of how essential community is to me and how hard it can be to ask for help and accept limitations.

One way I’ve felt sustained by community is connecting with the members of my Wednesday Wellness Warriors yoga class, co-sponsored by Capital of Texas Team Survivor. After a temporary re-location over the summer, we have recently returned to South Austin, in the lovely FlowYoga studio in the Westgate Center.

I’m energized by the enthusiasm and commitment of this group and the way they show up for themselves and each other. I love how large the class is and how many different cancer experiences and stages are represented by this group of smart, caring, capable women, each open to healing in her own way.

I love my connections with the Joybooter community, a fierce and fascinating group of women. Knowing the backstories of so many inspiring women gave me the idea to begin a new series to share some of their wisdom and experience with the larger group.

Stay tuned…

Let’s All Take a Deep Breath

May 14, 2020September 13, 2019 by Kelly Inselmann

“I feel that since my diagnosis of cancer, I’ve had an accelerated learning curve about myself and the rest of the universe.

I miss my ‘old self’ but I know that I am living life to it’s fullest and enjoying every breath.

Breath. It really is everything.”

Nancy Kirby, Austin, TX

Stopping to take a breath, focusing on long, deep breathing can support you as you move forward with your healing. You likely already know that deep breathing is the foundation of most meditation practices, but it benefits your mind and body in many ways you may not have considered.

By breathing deeply, you allow your diaphragm to relax, your rib cage to expand and create more space for the lungs to fill with life. This increases oxygen in your blood, eventually helping your heart rate to slow down, creating feelings of calmness, peace and relaxation.

Deep breathing also detoxifies your body and releases toxins. Roughly 70% of toxins in our bodies are released through our breath. Carbon dioxide, as an example, is a natural waste product of your body’s metabolic process.

So what other benefits can you experience from practicing deep breathing?

Strengthening the lymphatic system
Calming the nervous system
Lowering and stabilizing blood pressure
Reducing feelings of anxiety and stress

Now that you know how deep breathing can benefit your mind and body, let’s practice.

Sit in a comfortable position, lie flat on the floor, your bed or yoga mat- somewhere you’re comfortable.
Relax your shoulders and your back. Really tune into every part of your body to make sure you’re not feeling tension anywhere.
Breathe in through your nose until your lungs feel full. Experience the air moving through your nostrils into your abdomen, making your stomach expand.
Exhale slowly until your lungs feel deflated.
Repeat this process several times.

If you’d like to practice with me, click here.

The Art of Saying No

May 22, 2019 by Kelly Inselmann

So you want to say no, but you don’t know how?

If you are unsure whether you should make others comfortable at your own expense, read last week’s post here http://www.kellyinselmann.com/monday-morning-videos/can-boundaries-improve-your-relationships/?fbclid=IwAR2H7X9QkWEv137hzdRV6AmBgPTQuIDU-ABZBLb5ozbGeFzydbukQ-4AC7Y

Many people don’t get early training in saying no or asserting yourself. That’s ok-but there’s no time like the present to start!

In the service of your health and emotional wellbeing, you must be willing to take the time and space you need to heal.

And that means being willing to choose to prioritize your peace of mind and energy and to reclaim your time. Giving yourself this permission can be the hardest part for some people.

Does this mean never help or be there for another person? Of course not!

But I will wager most of you are already well trained and adept in the art of putting others first.

Allow me to share a few of the phrases that make it easier for for me to protect my energy:

I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I’m going to have to hang up now. Talk to you later. Then hang up!
I really want to hear more about this, but I’m going to have to call you back (take a nap, get on to my next activity). Then move along.
I wish I could sign up, but I’m still healing/resting/receiving treatment.
I wish I could, but I can’t.
I’m not in a position to volunteer right now.
No thank you.
“No.” It can be a complete sentence!
I’d love to, but let me think about it. I’m still healing.
Do not raise your hand or sign your name if it’s not going to bring you JOY (or save an actual life).
Try to avoid giving long explanations that will tempt others to keep asking.

It’ s crucial to get used to the idea that you may not receive as much (or any!) praise and thanks for saying no. Some people may even push back with annoyance or hurt.

But as you stop overcommitting, you are making space for joy, delight, and healing. You are preparing for the moment that you can say YES and mean it.

It is your right and responsibility to keep setting limits on activities that drain your energy.

They may not thank you for saying no, but that’s OK!

First Things First

March 11, 2019 by Kelly Inselmann

First things first.

After you have cancer, you begin to re-think your priorities in life.

Which relationships are most important? How do you want to spend your free time? What has been left undone?

What must you say “no” to in order to say “yes” to what really matters?

You may have some physical limitations: fatigue, pain, insomnia, other side effects. You may be dealing with “chemobrain” or struggling with anxiety or depression. Making adjustments so that you can get through each day.

After cancer, I became adept at looking through my weekly calendar and crossing out non-essential activities in order to have more unscheduled down time.

Because: first things first. I need time to just “be” and not feel constantly rushed.

What will enable you to live and enjoy the best life you can? It’s a good question for everyone to ask themselves, cancer or not.

Recently, Michelle came to our weekly yoga class and shared that she was feeling well enough to get a part time job. She was very excited for the new opportunity. But, she announced, she’d taken the job on one condition. She told her boss up front that every Wednesday she had to have a little extra time for her lunch hour so she could go to yoga class. Because she’s determined to prioritize her health and emotional well being and the weekly yoga helps her do so.

First things first.

Where can you set limits in your life this week to protect your energy and free up valuable moments of your life?

What would you really like to say “yes!” to?

What is Sanctuary?

March 5, 2019March 4, 2019 by Kelly Inselmann

I think of a safe place, where I am welcome exactly as I am. No need for performance. I can set down my burdens and extend my legs and catch my breath.

I notice what’s happening around me because for just a moment, I can let down my guard. No need to scan for danger.

I think of entering an ancient space, with cool walls and floor and with a cozy place to lie down. I think of a community sanctioned spot, a chapel, a temple, a park, or a safe house, a friend who is always home and has something cooking.

I know the people in the sanctuary are holding a space for me and devoted to a higher consciousness than we what I live in during much of life. I know the space is one that was created for safety and for aligning with a Higher purpose that includes compassion for the human experience and reverence for the sacredness in each of us.

I have the image of grandmothers taking me in, washing my brow and comforting me, caring for my wounds. Protecting me. A place to go when no one else understands. Here, they hold space for me to love myself again. Here, I surrender the need to know what the future holds and the notion that I must be in control.

Instead, I rest in a space of openness- to learn, rest, heal, care, and be.

Can I get a Witness?

April 9, 2024February 18, 2019 by Kelly Inselmann

When I was in the middle of chemo, I looked in the mirror with great curiosity. Sometimes shocked. Sometimes incredulous.

“This is me?”

No hair, no eyebrows, deep pain and fatigue. But also beauty, depth, surviving against the odds, making it through each day even when there was fear or suffering.

I hadn’t spent much time in front of the mirror before, barely wearing makeup, and not interested in the latest fashions. But now I did.

And I could see my soul.

I had no outer defenses. Sometimes I would cry at how changed I was on the outside. Deep lines had appeared out of nowhere and there were dark circles under my eyes.

But I also felt great empathy and love for this Self I was looking at. How amazing her life experience was and how hard she was trying.

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You go through cancer alone.

Even if you have supportive community around you, which I did, there are still many moments that you feel profound aloneness. Everyone else’s life is going on around you. But you are going through uncertainty, procedures, tests, waiting for results, blood draws, infusions, surgery, radiation, medications, hiding your fear and fatigue so you can still participate in parts of your life.

After treatment, when the “emergency” is over for everyone else, you move forward with side effects, both physical and emotional.

And if you are in ongoing treatment? My understanding is that your aloneness can become a companion.

You feel most alone when you feel marginalized. When you are trying to hide your anger, feelings of loss at “what was,” and fear of death, so as not to make others feel uncomfortable.

In my online Winter Sanctuary Series session, I shared that when trauma occurs, you feel fragmented.

Fragmentation happens when feelings get pushed aside in favor of survival. Parts of your experience are forgotten, the changes in your body create unfamiliar and unwelcome sensations. Your identity shifts as well as your sense of who you are.

As uncomfortable as it is, fragmentation is a normal response to a traumatic, life threatening experience.

The problem is that you don’t always re-integrate.

And Integration = Healing

What does “integrated” feel like?

Settled. You have access to your emotions (i.e.you don’t feel numb). You are more in charge of how you act and react. You can talk about your experience in a coherent way.

What creates a feeling of integration?

Feeling truly seen, heard and witnessed by a caring other person is one way. Personal reflection through meditation is another. Both of these invite “the witness.” When you include others, they are your witness. When you are meditating and/or being the observer of your own experience, you are your own witness.

A feeling of compassion, either from another human or from yourself, are key ingredients of Integration.

This may be controversial, but I would submit that you cannot truly recover emotionally and feel whole and integrated UNLESS you are seen and heard and feel cared about and understood.

You can survive, yes. But we are social creatures and to really thrive, you need people and places to be yourself and connect more deeply.

Who is this new person you are becoming? How will you integrate the different parts of yourself? Where can you open and be witnessed in your pain and joy, change and growth?

Water the Root

January 6, 2019 by Kelly Inselmann

Do one thing completely, all is done;

Try to do all, you lose the one.

To get your fill of flowers and fruit,

Water the Root.

Kabir, Poet

The Wretched and the Glorious

March 25, 2024August 26, 2018 by Kelly Inselmann

LIFE IS BOTH WRETCHED AND GLORIOUS
BY Pema Chödrön

“Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected.

“But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction.

“On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there.

“The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple.

“Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.”

– Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

Kindness

March 25, 2024August 7, 2018 by Kelly Inselmann

Kindness

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and

purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you every where

like a shadow or a friend.

From Different Ways to Pray, 1980.

Wounded Amazon

March 25, 2024July 2, 2018 by Kelly Inselmann

Hundreds of blood red spikes poke out of the white marble head and chest of a statue of a woman. This replica of a Roman statue, a “wounded amazon,” sits in a public art space on the street in NYC.

The placement of the spikes is no accident. They are arranged precisely where women who have had breast cancer surgery are cut and feel residual sensation, discomfort, and pain.

Even as I sit in the cool library and type these words, I can feel sensation a few inches to the right of my left shoulder blade, old discomfort from the left breast mastectomy I had 10 years ago.

The sculpture of the woman is enormous. The pain I see in her eyes is haunting. And so familiar, from looking into the faces of women I work with and from looking in the mirror at myself.

People are walking around the statue, many without a second look. Some glance her way, recognizing something unusual, but it’s hot outside and they are busy. Couples hold hands and laugh. The taxi driver has pulled his van over and parked right in front of her, waiting impatiently for the group he is collecting to come outside.

Her pain is enormous and she is in plain sight, yet the world swirls and moves forward without her. Her agony is her own.

This piece of art was created by artist Prune Nourry, age 33, who recently underwent treatment for breast cancer. It is called The Amazon and is modeled after the life sized marble statue of a wounded amazon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nourry referred to it as a “catharsis sculpture.” She decided to extend the timeline of the project recognizing that “healing is a long process.”

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The definition of catharsis is “the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions.”

Identifying and then expressing the thoughts, emotions and sensations you feel are also the first steps in emotional recovery from the trauma of having cancer.

So why is it so hard to acknowledge the impact that cancer has had on you?

There’s pain, both physical and emotional that you are trying to avoid by pretending it doesn’t exist. And then there’s shame at having pain, at not bouncing back more quickly, at needing time to recover, instead of being an invincible warrior.

But even the Amazon warrior, as this piece demonstrates, can be wounded. And even she needs to be seen, understood, and given time to heal.