May 21, 2025 • 28 mins
📝 Episode Summary:In this powerful and intimate episode, the Stress Therapist, Cheri Flake, shares the deeply personal story of her husband's journey through a life-threatening cancer diagnosis and how his established meditation practice became a cornerstone of his remarkable healing. Blending humor, raw honesty, and guided insight, Cheri urges listeners to adopt a consistent meditation practice before crisis hits. This episode underscores the vital role of stillness, the importance of preparation, and the transformative power of simply showing up—before life forces you to.🧠Three Learning Points:
- Meditation as Preventative Medicine:
Regular meditation practice builds resilience and emotional strength, preparing you for life’s inevitable crises before they arrive. - The Ego’s Resistance to Stillness:
The internal voice (ego) often resists meditation, but that resistance can be overcome with small, consistent steps. - Healing Amplified by Stillness:
A personal story about the host’s husband’s battle with cancer highlights how a strong meditation practice contributed to extraordinary healing.
🌀 MENTIONS & SHOUT-OUTS:
🎸 Sonic Yogi – Provides the dreamy soundscape for the closing meditation. Check him out on Spotify!
This episode is lovingly dedicated to Andrew, whose strength, stillness, and healing journey continue to inspire. Your courage reminds us why we start the practice before we need it. Thank you for allowing us to share your powerful story. 💛And to all the listeners who show up, sit down, and breathe—you’re doing the work. Keep going. We see you.🎧 Includes a Guided Meditation!
A breath-based meditation led by Cheri with music from Sonic Yogi. Perfect for beginners (and anyone who can breathe).The Host for this podcast:
Cheri Augustine Flake, LCSW
The Stress Therapist and Authorđź’• Love the show?Please rate and review us!đź’¸ Send some love bucks:
Paypal: cheri@thestresstherapist.com
Venmo: @cheri-flake
Thank you!🌊 Stay in Touch with Cheri & the Stress Therapy Community!Twitter: @stresstherapy
Instagram: @thestresstherapist
Website
YouTube🌿 Join Cheri Flake on her next retreat!
Register for a meditation and yoga retreat in the gorgeous Georgia Mountains or by the peaceful seaside on Jekyll Island. Walk away with a solid, joyful daily meditation practice and some serious inner calm.📚 Want Cheri to be your therapist?If you live in Georgia, go here to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.📖 Buy Cheri’s book:
Honey Do To Honey DONE!
A Simple System For A Productive And Happy Household With Absolutely No More Nagging!A word from your host, Cheri Flake, LCSW:
Feeling good after our Stress Therapy session? Awesome. Check out the show notes to connect with me, The Stress Therapist, on social media or visit www.iLoveTherapy.com to learn more about meditation classes & retreats.
Produced and edited by Owen Flake | Audio production, editing, and creative direction
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, beautiful people, how are you. It's so good to
be with you today. I want to talk a little
bit about I don't know, I'm gonna get kind of serious.
I know, I have a tendency to be joking all
the time and be laughing, like cotting up or whatever.
But I'm I'm a solo I'm a solo deal here, man.
All I have is myself to entertain, really, so you
(00:22):
have to excuse me for that. But but today I
want to talk a little bit about the serious part
of meditation and why I want you to be doing it.
Are you doing it? Hey, beautiful people, It's time for
(00:50):
some stress Therapy, a podcast about how to meditate and
get better at stress for people living in the real world.
Finally a place to park by twenty five plus years
of experience of working as a psychotherapist in the mental
health field, and now your host me, this stress therapist,
Erry Flake. Are you doing it? Are you really doing it?
(01:23):
I mean probably not. I mean our doctors are recommending it,
you know, like you can't throw a stick on the
internet without hitting the word meditation. Everybody's raving about it.
Who do you know, seriously, who do you know that
does it every single day. Can you name five people?
I mean, I'm in this business and I don't know
if I can name five people. I mean, that's pretty bad.
(01:46):
Do you know what I'm saying. I know a ton
of yogis that don't do it. And the interesting thing is,
and I really want to get into this with you guys,
is what's really cool about meditation is it's just a
little part of such a big, beautiful like manual on
how to live your life rightly and well and happily.
(02:09):
And you know, it kind of comes in the form
of the yoga sutras, which you may have heard of,
but it's this raja yoga where we learned the eight
limbs of yoga, and the yoga asanas are just one
of them, and meditation actually takes up four of them. Yeah. Four.
So I'm just saying, you know, we've westernized yoga or whatever,
(02:32):
and I love yoga. I'm going all the time, So
I'm not putting down yoga, but I'm just saying that
the asinas were created just so we could sit longer
for the meditation parts. What. Yeah, pretty much, you know,
So it's something to think about. I want to talk
about the serious part about why it's really important that
(02:52):
we're meditating, Okay, And the thing that I would like
to drive home is, you know, on one of the
past episodes, I talked about how I was kind of
forced into the practice and a lot of people are
something happens. You know. There's a great book by Alan
Deutschman called Change or Die. And if you want to
go on Goodreads and follow me there. I do read
a lot of books a lot now. Are half of
(03:16):
them psychological thrillers, maybe, but some of them are self
help and some of them are definitely spiritually based. So
you will get something there. And if you like psychological thrillers,
please throw me your recommendations for sure. I think those
are a blast. Anyway, there's a great book by Alan
Deutschman called Change or Die where he looked at people
that were given this I think they all had heart attacks. Yeah,
(03:39):
I read it a long, long, long time ago, but
I believe this is something like this. So they had
heart attacks and their doctors told them like, you either
have to change or it's over. Man, Like you're going
to have another heart attack and it's going to be
your time for transition into the next life or whatever.
You think and it was remarkable because I can't remember
the percentage, but it was in the eighties or nineties.
(04:01):
And I'm not exaggerating. It was in the eighties or
nineties percentage of people that did not change, right, Like,
I mean what? Like, I mean what? But here's the thing.
When you're forced into it, I think it's a little
harder to take up the practice. Right now, some people
they're gonna say, you cannot eat red meat anymore, it's
(04:21):
over for you. You know. They might be able to make
that change or small changes, you know, and it's a
big difference to change everything all at once, right, But
if you can kind of ease into it, I think
when we have that luxury life is kind of grand
because easing into it is kind of the key. Remember
I talked about the little by little mentality. You really
(04:42):
want to take on a new behavior, little by little.
And the reason why I want you to do this
before someone forces you to or tells you you're gonna
die if you don't, okay, is because you need this practice,
this practice of stillness, of silence, of slowing down, of
no technology. I mean, listen, my husband collects all the
(05:05):
phones at nine o'clock at night, and mine is one
of them. Okay, he takes yeah, he takes mine. Because
I don't think any of us have a handle on
this situation. What's going on with technology right now. I mean,
I don't. I think we're gonna be blown away in
twenty years. How it's ruining everything. No one's bored, no
one's mind is idle, and everyone's talking about meditation, but
(05:27):
we can't name anybody who's doing it, you know what
I'm saying. I mean, like I might be your only friend.
None of my friends do it, I mean except for
the ones that I make them do it with me occasionally.
Like I mean, it's time now. The doctors that are
recommending it aren't doing it. Okay. That is ridiculous, Okay.
And it's effortless. It's so much less effort than other things.
(05:48):
And we're going to get into exactly why that is.
Exactly why that is because your ego is tricking you.
Your ego is tricking you into telling you all the
reasons that you can't do it, and it's not true.
And just because you think a thought doesn't mean it's
that's true. And just because you think of thought does
it mean that it's important. Okay, my brain thinks that
wordle is important. People, I've convinced my brain that wordle
(06:09):
is important simply by going there, you know, multiple times,
you know, a day or week. Okay, that's why people
drink the kool aid. Man. If you think something enough,
you believe it. It doesn't matter if it's true or not.
So what do you want to believe? What are you thinking?
What are you saying to yourself over and over again
that meditation is hard. I got news for you. It
(06:31):
ain't hard. Showing up might be, but not for long. Okay.
And here's the thing. You need this practice before you
need it, because it could be too late for that.
And I mean, I'm gonna go ahead and talk about
my husband here for a second, because he's not here. Okay,
(06:52):
so Lex, keep this on a download. My husband, he's
super cool, very handsome, super smart, great guy. Okay. About
four years ago he was diagnosed with cancer. And it
was I mean, at the beginning, we just did not
know the severity of the situation, and we agreed as
a couple to not google it, which is rare, I'm told. Okay,
(07:19):
we did not want to hear everyone else's horror stories, okay,
And if there's a percentage where it's going to go awry,
we would like to be on the other side of
that percentage, right, And sometimes that's just a decision. Anyway,
he was diagnosed with salarary gown cancer. I can't even
remember the name of it, probably because I didn't google it.
But we told our doctors, listen, we don't know anything
(07:40):
about this any anything that we need to know. You
need to tell us because we're not gonna know right like,
we're not. We're only gonna know what you tell us.
And he had to undergo a massive, massive surgical procedure.
He had many surgeries afterwards, you know that they couldn't
(08:01):
take care of in the first one. But the first one,
one of the doctors told me after the surgery, thanked
God that it was the most extensive surgery that a
human can endure. That's what he told me. My husband had.
He had the roof of his mouth completely removed and
a few teeth. Then while they were like harvesting parts
(08:28):
of his body, bones, lymph nodes, nerves, flesh, and bone.
But while they were doing that and creating a roof
of his mouth, he had skull surgery. So the skull
surgeon came in and took the cancer off of the
nerves in his skull, and then they implanted this new mouth.
(08:48):
It was like a million. It was like the six
billion dollar man, six million, six billion. It would probably
be six billion now, like Frankenstein type of you know
what I'm saying. They took his mouth out, they did more,
then they put a mouth in. Okay, it was like
fourteen hours or something. It was. It was incredible. And
you can imagine just when you have a toothache, how
(09:08):
painful it is. I mean, my man was in some serious,
serious pain. And he was supposed to be in the
ICU for a couple of weeks or at least a week.
He was only there for a couple days. He was
supposed to be in the hospital for at least a month,
and he was only there for I think ten days.
(09:29):
And it was supposed to be this massive recovery, and
it was. It was. It was unbelievably serious and long,
but he had the ability to heal so quickly. There
were interns following him around to watch his healing. Now,
I had like the medicine Buddha, and I had the
(09:49):
shawls on, and I had, you know, the incense and
all the things in the room. And I mean, the
hospital is a terrible place to heal. It's like the
nastiest place in the world. You have to like clean
your space all the time. And I was at incense
and the lighting is off, and there's all these people.
It's so noisy, and everybody there is sick. It's terrible.
You know, it's terrible place to heal. So he tried
(10:11):
to make it a little more, you know, that way.
But he was healing so quickly, and it was attributed
to his meditation practice that he already had prior to
being diagnosed with cancer. And now he won't even utter
the C word, which is cancer. That's it's like it's dirty. Okay,
(10:33):
never mind, he won't even utter that word because he
doesn't even want that word resonating or vibrating in his face. Okay,
we're taking it one step further here, at people, you
need this before you need it. Because when my husband
was in the throes of more pain than probably any
of us can imagine or will ever endure, he wanted
(10:56):
me to sit with him and meditate with him. He
did not want morphine. He did not want oxies. He
wanted to sit still and quiet and allow the Holy Spirit, Jesus, God, Buddha, Allah, Susie, Patsy,
(11:17):
whatever you call it, to aid him in his healing.
And I can tell you I don't think it would
have gone the way that it did had he not
had a solid meditation practice already in place. And I
know that this is really serious. But what we got
(11:37):
from that experience, now I get it. I'm not the
one with the cancer. I didn't have the cancer. I
was the caregiver who It was a lot. I'm not
medical school was never an option for me. There were
a lot of wound care. But I'm not the one
who had cancer. But I can safely say for him
and us that what we got out of that as
(11:59):
a couple was unattainable any other way. And what he
has personally gained from that experience that is so horrific
and terrible and awful and on whatever, it's magical, and
it would have been a completely different story. I think
(12:21):
if we had not had access to being still enough
to allow the stillness, the magic, the holiness, and the
divine in each of us to bubble up while you
are healing now. My man is completely he's awesome. He
just got scans back. They're perfect and wonderful, and he
(12:42):
is perfect and whole, and so were you. Maybe right now,
but before the hits the fan, Okay, why don't you
just sit and enjoy the breeze of the fan for
a little bit, allow yourself this practice. You don't have
(13:02):
to be a binge meditator. You don't have to try
to learn this after everything's horrible. You can reap the
benefits before that. And they just never stop. They just
keep coming and keep coming and keep coming. I've been
meditating since two thousand. It just keeps coming and coming
(13:26):
and coming. I wouldn't give it up for anything. It's
the most important thing. So this means that we're going
to meditate together now. Okay, we're going to talk about
the props and the location, and you know where we
meditate and what we do. For now, I want you
to just start thinking about a place that you can
go to where you can already feel healed, whether you're
(13:50):
sick now right now or not, where you feel whole
and wonderful and alter if you will, that you put
something on there that means something to you, a feather,
a picture of your grandma. I always have a candle
that my grandma gave me. I don't know whatever it is,
and you could load it up and you could start
off really small. But when you go to that place,
it's like greeting an old friend. And so when you
(14:12):
go to meditate, it feels welcoming and it feels like
you're strong, and it feels like you can do it.
And when you show up, you feel good. You feel
so good. And remember that's the number one thing. You
gotta feel good. Okay, So let's get into our comfortable
space and let's meditate together right now. Even if you
(14:34):
can hear a saw in the background while the guy
cuts my tile in my backyard next to my beautiful
pink treehouse, because the saw, listen, what's cool about the
saw is, oh, we should do the saw meditation. I
even think of that. We could do this saw meditation.
But anyway, what's cool about the saw is that it
(14:54):
reminds us what's happening right now. Okay? Is it annoying?
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Is it la?
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Do we have to get around it? Do we have
to wait for it to stop? No, that's just labels
that our ego puts on it, so we'll stop meditating.
Because it's whole agendas to get you to stop meditating.
Your ego doesn't want you to meditate. Where's your ego
when you're meditating nowhere, right, And so it's constantly try
to get you to stop. And that's one way I
had a client who was like, can't meditate. There's this
(15:22):
construction next to my house. I'm like, just see it
as a way in, you know, and after a while
you'll be able. You won't even hear it, It won't
even bother you, right, I would imagine that I've vowsed
by myself right now, I probably wouldn't hear it. But
because I'm recording and everything and thinking about you and
your listening experience, I would like it to be, you know,
as good as possible, because we're about to play the
(15:43):
sonic Yogi, which is lovely, right, And if we had
to choose a sound, we would choose sonic Yogi over
the saw, right. But but that's just what's happening right now.
It's a reminder of what's happening right now. And I
don't mean now like today's Friday or Monday or whatever
(16:03):
or you know it's the afternoon or later on I
have to go to the bus stop to pick up
my kid, or I mean, like, I don't even know
how I'm gonna end this sentence right now, like now,
like here's another now and now, like now, this is
what you got, This is it, This is all you have.
So how are you gonna be in it? If you're
(16:25):
gonna lug something into this moment? Be choosy, man, Be choosy.
Pick something good, Pick something that heals you. Pick a
preventative practice, Pick silence, pick stillness, Pick now. Find a
(16:59):
comfortable space, a comfortable sitting position for you.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Alert.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Put your hands on your knees with your palms down
or up. You can even use a Gian mudra the
okay sign on your knees, and from your feet to
your shins, to your knees to your thighs and your bottom,
(17:30):
and your entire spine and belly and heart, center and
arms and hands and fingers and neck and face. Acknowledge
your beautiful body so you can forget about it, just
for a little while, breathing in and breathing out. I
(17:52):
learned this meditation from a beautiful monk. She is just
lovely and venerable, says, Imagine in your mind's eye that
you're holding on to a log, and you're holding it
(18:14):
in place. Maybe you're standing in the woods and you're
sawing it back and forth, back and forth. You would
not move your eyes with the saw. Rather, you would
(18:37):
keep laser focus on the log, from breastplate to spine,
from shoulder to shoulder. Imagine that your beautiful heart center
is the log, and that your breath that comes and.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Goes yes.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Is the song. Back and forth, back and forth, back
and forth. I'm going to leave you with this imagery,
(19:25):
allowing your breath to come through your heart center and
maybe down to your belly, and then exiting the same
way while you lays your focus, all of your attention
on your lovely heart center, and I'll be back to
(19:48):
guide you out back and forth, back and forth, back
(24:22):
and forth.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Slowly, come back.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Out of the woods.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Into the room you're in.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Imagining around you with your eyes closed, allow the imagery
to fall away and bring yourself back to this moment
in this time, Allow yourself to just sit in quiet.
(25:09):
I think Paramahansa Yogananda says, jumping up right after meditation
is like kicking over the pail after milking the cow.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Just sit here for a few moments, noticing your mind
may be settled, noticing any urges to get up and
do something, Noticing how you feel now as opposed to
(25:48):
earlier before we began. Just be.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Take a long, slow, deep breath in your nose. Let
it all go out of your mouth. Take a nice, long, cleansing,
awakening breath in your nose, Let it all go out
(26:51):
of your mouth. One last big breath in your nose.
Let it all go out of your mouth, and when
you're ready, you can open your beautiful eyes. Thank you
(27:25):
so much for being here, showing up, for listening to
my story, and definitely for meditating with me. I loved
it and I love you, so take care home peace, Amen,
(27:45):
have a lovely, lovely day. Hi, y'all feeling after that
stress therapy session? Good awesome. Check out the show notes
to connect with me distress therapist on social media at
the stress therapyst on Instagram and at stress Therapy on Twitter.
You can always go to I loovethapy dot com to
(28:06):
find out about meditation and yoga retreats and other offerings
that I have there. If you live in Georgia and
you're ready to be one of my clients. Go to
my website to find out how you can sign up
for a free face to face consultation with me. At
the very least, jump by my mailer so you don't
stress or miss one thing Until next time, have a lovely,
lovely day.
Hey, beautiful people, how are you. It's so good to
be with you today. I want to talk a little
bit about I don't know, I'm gonna get kind of serious.
I know, I have a tendency to be joking all
the time and be laughing, like cotting up or whatever.
But I'm I'm a solo I'm a solo deal here, man.
All I have is myself to entertain, really, so you
(00:22):
have to excuse me for that. But but today I
want to talk a little bit about the serious part
of meditation and why I want you to be doing it.
Are you doing it? Hey, beautiful people, It's time for
(00:50):
some stress Therapy, a podcast about how to meditate and
get better at stress for people living in the real world.
Finally a place to park by twenty five plus years
of experience of working as a psychotherapist in the mental
health field, and now your host me, this stress therapist,
Erry Flake. Are you doing it? Are you really doing it?
(01:23):
I mean probably not. I mean our doctors are recommending it,
you know, like you can't throw a stick on the
internet without hitting the word meditation. Everybody's raving about it.
Who do you know, seriously, who do you know that
does it every single day. Can you name five people?
I mean, I'm in this business and I don't know
if I can name five people. I mean, that's pretty bad.
(01:46):
Do you know what I'm saying. I know a ton
of yogis that don't do it. And the interesting thing is,
and I really want to get into this with you guys,
is what's really cool about meditation is it's just a
little part of such a big, beautiful like manual on
how to live your life rightly and well and happily.
(02:09):
And you know, it kind of comes in the form
of the yoga sutras, which you may have heard of,
but it's this raja yoga where we learned the eight
limbs of yoga, and the yoga asanas are just one
of them, and meditation actually takes up four of them. Yeah. Four.
So I'm just saying, you know, we've westernized yoga or whatever,
(02:32):
and I love yoga. I'm going all the time, So
I'm not putting down yoga, but I'm just saying that
the asinas were created just so we could sit longer
for the meditation parts. What. Yeah, pretty much, you know,
So it's something to think about. I want to talk
about the serious part about why it's really important that
(02:52):
we're meditating, Okay, And the thing that I would like
to drive home is, you know, on one of the
past episodes, I talked about how I was kind of
forced into the practice and a lot of people are
something happens. You know. There's a great book by Alan
Deutschman called Change or Die. And if you want to
go on Goodreads and follow me there. I do read
a lot of books a lot now. Are half of
(03:16):
them psychological thrillers, maybe, but some of them are self
help and some of them are definitely spiritually based. So
you will get something there. And if you like psychological thrillers,
please throw me your recommendations for sure. I think those
are a blast. Anyway, there's a great book by Alan
Deutschman called Change or Die where he looked at people
that were given this I think they all had heart attacks. Yeah,
(03:39):
I read it a long, long, long time ago, but
I believe this is something like this. So they had
heart attacks and their doctors told them like, you either
have to change or it's over. Man, Like you're going
to have another heart attack and it's going to be
your time for transition into the next life or whatever.
You think and it was remarkable because I can't remember
the percentage, but it was in the eighties or nineties.
(04:01):
And I'm not exaggerating. It was in the eighties or
nineties percentage of people that did not change, right, Like,
I mean what? Like, I mean what? But here's the thing.
When you're forced into it, I think it's a little
harder to take up the practice. Right now, some people
they're gonna say, you cannot eat red meat anymore, it's
(04:21):
over for you. You know. They might be able to make
that change or small changes, you know, and it's a
big difference to change everything all at once, right, But
if you can kind of ease into it, I think
when we have that luxury life is kind of grand
because easing into it is kind of the key. Remember
I talked about the little by little mentality. You really
(04:42):
want to take on a new behavior, little by little.
And the reason why I want you to do this
before someone forces you to or tells you you're gonna
die if you don't, okay, is because you need this practice,
this practice of stillness, of silence, of slowing down, of
no technology. I mean, listen, my husband collects all the
(05:05):
phones at nine o'clock at night, and mine is one
of them. Okay, he takes yeah, he takes mine. Because
I don't think any of us have a handle on
this situation. What's going on with technology right now. I mean,
I don't. I think we're gonna be blown away in
twenty years. How it's ruining everything. No one's bored, no
one's mind is idle, and everyone's talking about meditation, but
(05:27):
we can't name anybody who's doing it, you know what
I'm saying. I mean, like I might be your only friend.
None of my friends do it, I mean except for
the ones that I make them do it with me occasionally.
Like I mean, it's time now. The doctors that are
recommending it aren't doing it. Okay. That is ridiculous, Okay.
And it's effortless. It's so much less effort than other things.
(05:48):
And we're going to get into exactly why that is.
Exactly why that is because your ego is tricking you.
Your ego is tricking you into telling you all the
reasons that you can't do it, and it's not true.
And just because you think a thought doesn't mean it's
that's true. And just because you think of thought does
it mean that it's important. Okay, my brain thinks that
wordle is important. People, I've convinced my brain that wordle
(06:09):
is important simply by going there, you know, multiple times,
you know, a day or week. Okay, that's why people
drink the kool aid. Man. If you think something enough,
you believe it. It doesn't matter if it's true or not.
So what do you want to believe? What are you thinking?
What are you saying to yourself over and over again
that meditation is hard. I got news for you. It
(06:31):
ain't hard. Showing up might be, but not for long. Okay.
And here's the thing. You need this practice before you
need it, because it could be too late for that.
And I mean, I'm gonna go ahead and talk about
my husband here for a second, because he's not here. Okay,
(06:52):
so Lex, keep this on a download. My husband, he's
super cool, very handsome, super smart, great guy. Okay. About
four years ago he was diagnosed with cancer. And it
was I mean, at the beginning, we just did not
know the severity of the situation, and we agreed as
a couple to not google it, which is rare, I'm told. Okay,
(07:19):
we did not want to hear everyone else's horror stories, okay,
And if there's a percentage where it's going to go awry,
we would like to be on the other side of
that percentage, right, And sometimes that's just a decision. Anyway,
he was diagnosed with salarary gown cancer. I can't even
remember the name of it, probably because I didn't google it.
But we told our doctors, listen, we don't know anything
(07:40):
about this any anything that we need to know. You
need to tell us because we're not gonna know right like,
we're not. We're only gonna know what you tell us.
And he had to undergo a massive, massive surgical procedure.
He had many surgeries afterwards, you know that they couldn't
(08:01):
take care of in the first one. But the first one,
one of the doctors told me after the surgery, thanked
God that it was the most extensive surgery that a
human can endure. That's what he told me. My husband had.
He had the roof of his mouth completely removed and
a few teeth. Then while they were like harvesting parts
(08:28):
of his body, bones, lymph nodes, nerves, flesh, and bone.
But while they were doing that and creating a roof
of his mouth, he had skull surgery. So the skull
surgeon came in and took the cancer off of the
nerves in his skull, and then they implanted this new mouth.
(08:48):
It was like a million. It was like the six
billion dollar man, six million, six billion. It would probably
be six billion now, like Frankenstein type of you know
what I'm saying. They took his mouth out, they did more,
then they put a mouth in. Okay, it was like
fourteen hours or something. It was. It was incredible. And
you can imagine just when you have a toothache, how
(09:08):
painful it is. I mean, my man was in some serious,
serious pain. And he was supposed to be in the
ICU for a couple of weeks or at least a week.
He was only there for a couple days. He was
supposed to be in the hospital for at least a month,
and he was only there for I think ten days.
(09:29):
And it was supposed to be this massive recovery, and
it was. It was. It was unbelievably serious and long,
but he had the ability to heal so quickly. There
were interns following him around to watch his healing. Now,
I had like the medicine Buddha, and I had the
(09:49):
shawls on, and I had, you know, the incense and
all the things in the room. And I mean, the
hospital is a terrible place to heal. It's like the
nastiest place in the world. You have to like clean
your space all the time. And I was at incense
and the lighting is off, and there's all these people.
It's so noisy, and everybody there is sick. It's terrible.
You know, it's terrible place to heal. So he tried
(10:11):
to make it a little more, you know, that way.
But he was healing so quickly, and it was attributed
to his meditation practice that he already had prior to
being diagnosed with cancer. And now he won't even utter
the C word, which is cancer. That's it's like it's dirty. Okay,
(10:33):
never mind, he won't even utter that word because he
doesn't even want that word resonating or vibrating in his face. Okay,
we're taking it one step further here, at people, you
need this before you need it. Because when my husband
was in the throes of more pain than probably any
of us can imagine or will ever endure, he wanted
(10:56):
me to sit with him and meditate with him. He
did not want morphine. He did not want oxies. He
wanted to sit still and quiet and allow the Holy Spirit, Jesus, God, Buddha, Allah, Susie, Patsy,
(11:17):
whatever you call it, to aid him in his healing.
And I can tell you I don't think it would
have gone the way that it did had he not
had a solid meditation practice already in place. And I
know that this is really serious. But what we got
(11:37):
from that experience, now I get it. I'm not the
one with the cancer. I didn't have the cancer. I
was the caregiver who It was a lot. I'm not
medical school was never an option for me. There were
a lot of wound care. But I'm not the one
who had cancer. But I can safely say for him
and us that what we got out of that as
(11:59):
a couple was unattainable any other way. And what he
has personally gained from that experience that is so horrific
and terrible and awful and on whatever, it's magical, and
it would have been a completely different story. I think
(12:21):
if we had not had access to being still enough
to allow the stillness, the magic, the holiness, and the
divine in each of us to bubble up while you
are healing now. My man is completely he's awesome. He
just got scans back. They're perfect and wonderful, and he
(12:42):
is perfect and whole, and so were you. Maybe right now,
but before the hits the fan, Okay, why don't you
just sit and enjoy the breeze of the fan for
a little bit, allow yourself this practice. You don't have
(13:02):
to be a binge meditator. You don't have to try
to learn this after everything's horrible. You can reap the
benefits before that. And they just never stop. They just
keep coming and keep coming and keep coming. I've been
meditating since two thousand. It just keeps coming and coming
(13:26):
and coming. I wouldn't give it up for anything. It's
the most important thing. So this means that we're going
to meditate together now. Okay, we're going to talk about
the props and the location, and you know where we
meditate and what we do. For now, I want you
to just start thinking about a place that you can
go to where you can already feel healed, whether you're
(13:50):
sick now right now or not, where you feel whole
and wonderful and alter if you will, that you put
something on there that means something to you, a feather,
a picture of your grandma. I always have a candle
that my grandma gave me. I don't know whatever it is,
and you could load it up and you could start
off really small. But when you go to that place,
it's like greeting an old friend. And so when you
(14:12):
go to meditate, it feels welcoming and it feels like
you're strong, and it feels like you can do it.
And when you show up, you feel good. You feel
so good. And remember that's the number one thing. You
gotta feel good. Okay, So let's get into our comfortable
space and let's meditate together right now. Even if you
(14:34):
can hear a saw in the background while the guy
cuts my tile in my backyard next to my beautiful
pink treehouse, because the saw, listen, what's cool about the
saw is, oh, we should do the saw meditation. I
even think of that. We could do this saw meditation.
But anyway, what's cool about the saw is that it
(14:54):
reminds us what's happening right now. Okay? Is it annoying?
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Is it la?
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Do we have to get around it? Do we have
to wait for it to stop? No, that's just labels
that our ego puts on it, so we'll stop meditating.
Because it's whole agendas to get you to stop meditating.
Your ego doesn't want you to meditate. Where's your ego
when you're meditating nowhere, right, And so it's constantly try
to get you to stop. And that's one way I
had a client who was like, can't meditate. There's this
(15:22):
construction next to my house. I'm like, just see it
as a way in, you know, and after a while
you'll be able. You won't even hear it, It won't
even bother you, right, I would imagine that I've vowsed
by myself right now, I probably wouldn't hear it. But
because I'm recording and everything and thinking about you and
your listening experience, I would like it to be, you know,
as good as possible, because we're about to play the
(15:43):
sonic Yogi, which is lovely, right, And if we had
to choose a sound, we would choose sonic Yogi over
the saw, right. But but that's just what's happening right now.
It's a reminder of what's happening right now. And I
don't mean now like today's Friday or Monday or whatever
(16:03):
or you know it's the afternoon or later on I
have to go to the bus stop to pick up
my kid, or I mean, like, I don't even know
how I'm gonna end this sentence right now, like now,
like here's another now and now, like now, this is
what you got, This is it, This is all you have.
So how are you gonna be in it? If you're
(16:25):
gonna lug something into this moment? Be choosy, man, Be choosy.
Pick something good, Pick something that heals you. Pick a
preventative practice, Pick silence, pick stillness, Pick now. Find a
(16:59):
comfortable space, a comfortable sitting position for you.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Alert.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Put your hands on your knees with your palms down
or up. You can even use a Gian mudra the
okay sign on your knees, and from your feet to
your shins, to your knees to your thighs and your bottom,
(17:30):
and your entire spine and belly and heart, center and
arms and hands and fingers and neck and face. Acknowledge
your beautiful body so you can forget about it, just
for a little while, breathing in and breathing out. I
(17:52):
learned this meditation from a beautiful monk. She is just
lovely and venerable, says, Imagine in your mind's eye that
you're holding on to a log, and you're holding it
(18:14):
in place. Maybe you're standing in the woods and you're
sawing it back and forth, back and forth. You would
not move your eyes with the saw. Rather, you would
(18:37):
keep laser focus on the log, from breastplate to spine,
from shoulder to shoulder. Imagine that your beautiful heart center
is the log, and that your breath that comes and.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Goes yes.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Is the song. Back and forth, back and forth, back
and forth. I'm going to leave you with this imagery,
(19:25):
allowing your breath to come through your heart center and
maybe down to your belly, and then exiting the same
way while you lays your focus, all of your attention
on your lovely heart center, and I'll be back to
(19:48):
guide you out back and forth, back and forth, back
(24:22):
and forth.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Slowly, come back.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Out of the woods.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Into the room you're in.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Imagining around you with your eyes closed, allow the imagery
to fall away and bring yourself back to this moment
in this time, Allow yourself to just sit in quiet.
(25:09):
I think Paramahansa Yogananda says, jumping up right after meditation
is like kicking over the pail after milking the cow.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Just sit here for a few moments, noticing your mind
may be settled, noticing any urges to get up and
do something, Noticing how you feel now as opposed to
(25:48):
earlier before we began. Just be.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Take a long, slow, deep breath in your nose. Let
it all go out of your mouth. Take a nice, long, cleansing,
awakening breath in your nose, Let it all go out
(26:51):
of your mouth. One last big breath in your nose.
Let it all go out of your mouth, and when
you're ready, you can open your beautiful eyes. Thank you
(27:25):
so much for being here, showing up, for listening to
my story, and definitely for meditating with me. I loved
it and I love you, so take care home peace, Amen,
(27:45):
have a lovely, lovely day. Hi, y'all feeling after that
stress therapy session? Good awesome. Check out the show notes
to connect with me distress therapist on social media at
the stress therapyst on Instagram and at stress Therapy on Twitter.
You can always go to I loovethapy dot com to
(28:06):
find out about meditation and yoga retreats and other offerings
that I have there. If you live in Georgia and
you're ready to be one of my clients. Go to
my website to find out how you can sign up
for a free face to face consultation with me. At
the very least, jump by my mailer so you don't
stress or miss one thing Until next time, have a lovely,
lovely day.
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