Compassion Can Help Us Heal - Story From A Cancer Survivor

Welcome to another episode of the loving compassion podcast with Giselle.

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Today,

We're gonna be chatting about the power of compassion during an illness.

If you or someone you know is currently dealing with an illness,

Stay tuned to learn about how compassion can assist you through this difficult time.

My guest is a biracial African Canadian registered psychotherapist,

Who specializes in grief,

Trauma,

Spirituality,

Is ordained as a Buddhist chaplain,

Is also a yoga teacher,

As well as a mother of a 25 year old daughter,

As well as a stage three breast cancer survivor.

Please join me in welcoming my friend,

Kosu Butro.

Thank you so much for being on our show.

I mean,

We've known each other for a little while because of our MSW friendship.

I know that you yourself have practiced Buddhism as well as became a clergy.

I was wondering if you could share what you learned from this practice is about the power of compassion and love.

Well,

I mean,

I've never worked as a community clergy.

I've worked in spiritual care and healthcare for about 20 years or so.

So I did do training in Buddhism.

Buddhist practice was a big piece of my own spiritual formation.

I started,

I was introduced to Buddhist practice,

Really in grade 12 in a world religions class.

And I was really captivated by this sort of a systematic way of learning how to live out this idea of loving your neighbor as yourself,

Which is so central to Christian theology.

I've been raised in a liberal Christian environment,

But that how to now I'd say,

The idea of how to actually live out compassion to embody that I turned to Buddhist practice to give me some of those tools.

So I feel like over the years,

I'm going to be 58 soon,

Another month or so.

Congrats.

Yeah,

So that was a few decades ago.

And I think that my understanding of compassion and what it means and what it looks like in my life and my understanding of compassion has evolved,

Morphed and changed and continues to change.

Can you share a little bit about how it's different,

How it has changed?

Yeah,

So it's interesting.

You asked for me to give you a little bit of a bio and you sort of come up with a checklist of all of these different identities.

And in many ways,

We all have intersectional identities that impact each other.

So my experience being mixed race,

Black Canadian,

Is a key part of my experience in the world.

And even I know today we're focusing on my journey with breast cancer within healthcare as a patient.

As I'm looking at what's happening right now with COVID and how it's impacting different communities in different ways,

I'm reminded once again that we can't look at any one identity without recognizing the impact of others as well.

And that shapes our experience.

So I think my understanding of compassion now is strongly influenced by social justice,

By ideas of fierce compassion.

We talk about sometimes in Buddhism,

That there is a sense of showing up and finding my voice,

Finding a voice to not only be a supportive presence,

Which is very innate in the work that I do is in spiritual care and as a psychotherapist,

But also to stand with,

To show compassion for the pain and challenges we face with inequity and racism.

And I know you come from the child welfare sector.

And so I was in foster homes for a period of time in my teens.

And I feel that there is a voice that doesn't often get heard and that there's a place for me to step into that by stepping into that part of my identity,

Which is an invisible identity that I can walk with others in their journey.

Thank you very much for sharing that and for sharing the fact that compassion isn't weak or fluffy.

I think people tend to have that misconception about it,

Where there is a real fierce component to compassion around boundaries and around the social justice piece,

In terms of our shared responsibility to fight for those who have not had a seat at the table because of our common humanity and our shared experience.

And I think that's what we're lacking right now.

We're so focused on ourselves that we don't see,

We don't notice the suffering of our brothers and sisters.

Right?

Yeah.

And I think an acknowledgement that that's going to look different for each of us.

And so how we manifest our understanding of compassion,

Which I do think has to come out of self-compassion.

Self-compassion I see about as a process of learning to really see and accept ourselves fully as we are,

Which is hard work and requires quite a bit of humility and to be kind to ourselves,

To really be able to look at all of the parts of ourselves,

Even the ones that we sometimes don't want to be seen on Facebook or don't want to be known as in the world as,

You know,

Our angry parts or our jealous parts or our scared parts.

And yet self-compassion is making space for all of that.

And when we can make space for that within ourselves,

Then we can make space for that in others.

We have a better understanding,

We're less likely to become reactive and the quality of our relationships with others,

Including others that are challenging for us because they hold very different worldview,

Different world experience,

Can be,

We can make space for those conversations,

Those relationships a little bit more easily.

Yeah.

And what you said is so spot on and I've been thinking about how compassionate work is equity work from my perspective.

And I'm interested in yours in the sense that I think one of the challenges in us having kind of those lean in conversations is that especially with people who are non-racialized,

There's a lot of shame that comes up in terms of some of the privilege and some of the issues,

And then the wall of resistance goes up.

And I think through the practice of self-compassion,

I think people can hold themselves with nurturance,

Why they're leaning in while they're engaging in the dialogue,

While they deal with the shame of the ancestors.

And in terms of everything that has been done to marginalize people,

Racialized people,

Indigenous people,

People are so defensive that they can't get past the emotions in order to be able to kind of lean in and listen.

Yeah,

I've had quite a profound experience of that over the last number of months during COVID.

I made an intentional decision to deepen my relationship with my birth mother.

So I was adopted as a baby.

And I had met my birth mother about 20 years or so,

But it was very,

Very challenging to establish that relationship.

She's deeply wounded from her own experience.

My conception came out of an encounter that was not pleasant for her,

And that she really didn't want to have to remember.

And so we had maintained a very distant relationship.

And then I think part of this reflection through the last year,

Through the pandemic,

Has been really,

For me,

And probably for many of us,

It's reevaluating our relationships and thinking,

You know,

What really is meaningful?

What's long standing?

What are the relationships that are really going to matter at the end of the day?

You know,

Where can I really invest my energy in a way that will help me grow and be able to contribute back?

And so my birth mother is 78 years old,

And I made a decision that I would start to use the Zoom technology that we're all so much more comfortable with now,

As is she,

To start having a weekly conversation,

And that we would take this time to get to know each other.

And it has been a really fruitful process.

Far,

Far more connecting and bonding than I imagined at the beginning.

I didn't want to have a lot of expectations,

But I knew it would be something that would be helpful for both of us,

Or could be.

And I've discovered that taking this time,

Having this regular consistent commitment to taking this time together has really helped us to start to build a genuine connection and start to reach out toward each other.

And this is,

You know,

Late,

I'm in midlife,

She's in her senior years,

And here this form of family relationship is building.

But there is an element,

I think,

In terms of,

If I frame that within this idea of compassion,

There's an intentionality behind it,

To show up,

You know,

Continue even when it's hard to recognize the value in the connection,

And to be willing to have a little discomfort to allow something genuine to build.

I applaud your willingness to actually do the work to want to understand the story.

A lot of us have our pains for childhood,

And one of the things that I found,

I was able to forgive my parents later in life and understand that their behavior was based on kind of their own beliefs and their own experiences,

And they were doing the best they can,

And I'm sure I'm going to make lots of mistakes with my kids,

And that I'm doing the best I can too.

But that forgiveness is so important because it's for ourselves,

Right?

What kind of relationship have you developed with forgiveness around this very challenging relationship that you have?

Yeah,

I don't think about forgiveness a lot,

To tell you the truth.

I think that,

And I think because it's such a challenging concept,

And maybe working in the spiritual care community,

I find that it can be sort of overlaid with this righteous moral stance.

But I think it's like compassion.

You know,

We can have compassion practices that feel very rote,

That really kind of lack the robust depth,

Complexity that I think that any kind of deeper practice is going to call out.

So in a case with my relationship with my birth mother,

I entered into it with the understanding that,

Not that I was doing it to achieve a specific outcome,

But that there was value in the relationship in itself,

That having a meaningful connection with someone who is part of my ancestry,

That painful or not,

We share a narrative together,

Beyond whatever DNA is in place.

You know,

From a scientific stance,

The significance of DNA,

There's,

You know,

There's all sorts of interesting thoughts on that,

On the level of commonality that might breed,

But I do believe that relationship is built,

Part of that is a shared story,

And a willingness to build trust and to show up.

So I think it was,

I'd say it was an act of self-compassion for me,

I recognize the importance of this relationship and making resolution,

Of a sense of this is part of who I am,

And to be able to turn towards it,

Rather than denying that history and denying this part of my ancestry.

And I knew that the relationship would matter to her,

That it was not something that she would take lightly either.

And that was one of my criteria that I came out of post COVID,

While we're still in COVID,

Was that relationships are,

That matter are relationships where there's an investment.

There's an investment and a willingness to withstand the inevitable ups and downs and struggles.

And that's where I wanted to put my energy in terms of building a stronger community,

Stronger relationships.

For those who may be kind of wanting to engage in that dialogue and may be struggling,

What sort of processes or tools have helped you be able to navigate this journey with your mom?

Like,

What have you found helpful?

Well,

I think that it's definitely a process.

And I think that in terms of building any relationship,

Certainly years just aging and making peace within myself around my own limitations,

My own mistakes along the way and recognizing just how it is a struggle.

You know,

As the Buddhist adage goes,

You know,

There is suffering in life.

It's sort of endemic in how our cultural and our need for survival is going to manifest in different types of suffering.

And so as I made peace with my own suffering and accepted my own limitations,

It made it much easier for me to be open to having a relationship with her without the judgments,

You know,

Inevitable feelings of feeling abandoned and rejected.

In the earlier years when I first met her,

I have a daughter who's 25.

And when I first met her,

My daughter was only a few years old.

And at that point,

I was still looking to have my needs to be mothered met.

There is still a very strong frozen need.

And my birth mother,

Because of her own woundedness and her own fears,

Was not able to really connect with either my daughter and I in what felt like a very warm heart to heart way.

And so I would often feel really hurt by that because I had this need.

And that's not to say that that need ever goes away.

I think,

Though,

That there are a number of ways that we can feed our need for intimacy and feed our need to be seen and feel valued.

And that's where self-compassion is a very powerful practice to be able to really hold our vulnerable places and then look at how can we meet those needs.

And so the quality of other relationships in my life and sense of meaning and the work that I do and connection,

All of those things helped me to develop a more grounded place to then be able to connect with my mother more as an adult,

I would say,

And less from a place of a child wanting a parent to take the lead.

And so we can now meet,

I can meet her more eye to eye,

Adult to adult.

Wow,

Thank you for sharing that.

It was very clear how the connection between self-compassion and compassion for others were able to better understand their behavior and kind of hold the space for them.

But like you said,

Sometimes when we have our own unmet needs,

It's hard to do that for other people.

Yeah,

And you mentioned practices.

There are many different types of ways of cultivating self-compassion.

There are formal practices,

Different types of meditations,

Different types of active practices such as writing gratitude journals,

Things like that.

I think that any of these practices that we develop need to come out of a natural extension of who we are and how we engage with the world.

So I always encourage people to create your own patchwork of things that work for you.

There's no one formula.

And in fact,

As soon as we start to get into a formulaic approach,

For instance,

Loving kindness meditations,

After a while you're reciting,

May you be happy,

May you be free,

May you be free from suffering.

It can lose its meaning unless we find words and find ways of doing a kind of loving kindness practice that really resonates and feels authentic to us.

So I feel very fortunate that I surround myself with some really wonderful teachers who basically challenge me to be as authentically myself as possible.

And that's the ground from which everything else arises,

Is going more and more deeply into that sense of who am I and how can I bring that into the world in a way that feels authentic and contributing in some way.

Thank you.

I was wondering if you can share a little bit about your cancer journey.

Sometimes an illness for someone can be sort of a bit of a wake-up call in terms of them understanding kind of their own needs,

What you learned from that journey and that maybe you had wished you had known before you kind of embarked on it and what your experiences were.

Yeah,

You know,

It's interesting in that the idea of what I wish I had known in some ways I think it's like embarking on any journey of the unknowns.

What comes to mind is parenthood,

You know,

When you first,

You have your first child and you have no idea of how much your life is going to change.

And so much of that depends on the child that you have and where you're living and,

You know,

Your relationship and other factors.

So my experience with breast cancer,

Which was now 15 years ago,

Was in some ways it came at an interesting time in my life.

I was already very involved in Buddhist practice and so had these ideas and concepts around working with impermanence and in Buddhist practice we talk about,

You know,

Living as if death is peering over your left shoulder.

So,

You know,

This sort of this,

Again,

Strong kind of lip service to this recognition of,

You know,

All things will end,

Including my life.

And yet the reality when the diagnosis arose,

I remember thinking,

Looking at all the many books that I have on my bookshelf and thinking,

The answer isn't in any of those books.

Feeling at a bit of a loss because I had such an intellectualized idea of spirituality and living that I felt ill prepared in the world.

So that was definitely a big wake-up call for me.

I would say that,

You know,

15 years later I am a much more embodied person.

I really feel that I have a better understanding of the,

You know,

The nervous system and how working with the body,

The body-mind is a much more full way of being alive.

And so,

You know,

Once I got beyond the initial fears and scares of if I was going to live at all,

Which I think is common for anybody when they first get the diagnosis,

I then started to think about,

You know,

Quality of life.

So now that I've got a recognition that at any time my life may end,

The reality of how precarious that can be,

The focus on the quality and what was important,

What I really felt that I wanted to contribute and to be in this world.

So I find with myself and also having worked in hospitals for many years,

Relationships always come out near the top of that list of priorities.

My own daughter at the time was only around seven years old.

Oh,

My God.

Maybe a bit older.

She's 25 now.

It's 15 years.

So,

Yeah,

About 10 years old.

And it was just unthinkable to imagine leaving her at that point.

And there's still so much guidance and support and presence that I wanted to offer in her life.

I think that sort of the sense of priorities and,

Yeah,

Any kind of disease diagnosis gets you real really fast.

Yeah.

It's all the superfluous things suddenly fall away and seem really silly.

It's funny.

I was just thinking about how that's very similar to COVID in that here we are in another situation again where people have had to really realize,

Okay,

What's our priority?

But globally,

What are our global priorities?

And I think that's one of the things that has come out is that real awareness.

I do think yet again we're kind of in that state of greater awareness.

Yes.

And that recognition of vulnerability.

The vulnerability was always there.

But we talk sometimes that we're a death-denying culture,

That we're invested in this image of ourselves as omnipotent and appearing very competent and strong.

There's a lot invested in that.

And yet as the work of Brené Brown has so beautifully illustrated,

The real power of connection,

Real courage lies in acknowledging and embracing our vulnerability.

So COVID or a cancer diagnosis or a loss in your life,

A significant loss completely pulls back the veil of the illusion of self-reliance and of kind of a false sense of strength.

The strength that I found through my cancer journey definitely was the incredible relationships I made as I joined support groups with other women who had similar diagnosis and similar stage.

And that kind of naked vulnerability and honesty and support we brought each other was incredibly powerful.

And I've been involved in groups throughout my life through my psychotherapy journey.

I've done a lot of group work.

I still do group work.

And I encourage people to do group work for that reason,

For that experience of really being seen,

Which is a powerful healer in itself.

There's a loneliness,

The idea that I am suddenly I'm alone.

I'm no longer part of what I perceived was the norm,

The normal.

I'm now an outsider,

Whatever the tragedy is that has suddenly changed your identity.

And to have that shaken up,

It allows us to dig to the core and find a more essential identity and realize what's present in every person.

So that's the gift of illness,

I think.

It's sort of a super highway in terms of spiritual growth.

Wow.

I was pondering what you said,

Which I think is so powerful,

Which I don't think people realize what a lonely journey it is or can be.

And when I think about mental illness,

People feel very lonely.

So when something happens to you,

It can be very lonely.

And so I totally see the power in bringing people together who are sharing those same experiences that may not be part of the perceived larger norm.

Right?

Yes.

Very powerful.

Yes.

I think about that with death,

Too,

As I looked at the possibility of my death coming much sooner than I anticipated.

And I have to say,

I had stage 3 cancer.

So it wasn't a stage 4 palliative,

But it was significant enough that it was a diagnosis,

That there was a possibility that it could lead to a less favorable outcome than I had.

I did at different times,

I think as most people do,

I did not encounter any kind of serious illness diagnosis.

And all of us at some point as we age and encounter the reality of our own mortality,

I did reflect on death.

And the reality that no matter how many loved ones you have around you on the journey,

That's a portal that you go through alone.

And that's where it all depends on what your spiritual beliefs are.

But at that moment of stepping through the portal to whatever happens after this life,

Just as when you come through that portal and you arrive in this world,

It's one place you have to step in alone.

That was frightening for me.

That was a really,

In that moment,

As I was looking at it,

At the time I was in my 15 years ago.

So,

Yeah,

40,

Early 40s.

So,

Still pretty young to be thinking about that.

So,

You know,

One of the things I'm involved with now is I'm very interested in psychedelic integrated therapies.

And there's been a lot of work with the use of technology around end of life to work exactly with those kinds of thoughts,

To experience a kind of ego death.

So,

You talk about,

You know,

That again,

That dropping away of everything that we think we are.

And,

You know,

Connecting with the essence.

And so that a lot of research has shown that that is sort of a kind of experience of recognizing that what is left and when all the extraneous is peeled away is something that's essential.

And it seems for many people that alleviates the fear,

That fear of that journey to the unknown through death.

Thank you for sharing that.

That was really powerful.

I have heard a lot about psychedelics and how that's an up and coming intervention.

I did want to talk a little bit about spirituality.

I myself,

I'm a believer that we don't necessarily die,

That death is a transition in terms of our soul.

Our soul kind of goes on,

But we leave this physical body.

Just wondering what your thoughts are on that kind of the spiritual piece around kind of like the difference between the soul and the body,

Considering the journey that you went through in terms of really kind of getting in your body and understanding its limitation.

Well,

That's hard for me to answer because I've spent so many years working as a psychospecial therapist that I have become very attuned to recognizing what I don't know,

More of what I don't know than what I do know.

I don't have any definitive sense of what we mean when we talk about,

For instance,

The idea of soul.

I mean,

It's interesting.

I have been looking at a work of an African American psychologist who has actually done a thesis on soulfulness.

And she's a contemplative,

I have to look up what her name is.

So in mindfulness,

In the world of mindfulness,

We talk a lot about awareness,

Which tends to be sort of locating,

Looking at the mind,

What's happening in the mind.

And then we have increasingly looked at heartfulness,

Which are the compassion practices and loving kindness and metta.

The soulfulness piece is really interesting because she did a thesis looking at the soulfulness,

Which comes out of somewhat of the African American tradition.

But I think we could define it as a sort of a deep sense of essence,

A deep,

Deep sense of sort of the ground from which we draw on.

And it's often manifest in creativity,

In the arts,

In music,

In spontaneous expression,

In beauty of nature.

I have been working recently with a therapeutic modality called Internal Family Systems,

Which is with Dick Schwartz,

Where he also talks about S-Self,

Capital S-Self,

Which is really aligned with this essential essence that we all carry that is whole and unbreakable and unwounded.

And so all these other parts,

All of our experiences,

All of the habits we have and identities and the behaviors,

Good or bad,

That they are all parts of us finding ways to function in the world.

But underneath that,

There is this essential,

I'll call it an energy,

For lack of a better description.

I tend to think of it energetically.

And what I really love about that modality is that it appeals to all of the faith traditions.

I have been training students who are primarily Christian,

And I myself am very involved in the Buddhist community,

And both of those communities have embraced IFS as therapeutic modalities that work well with spiritual values.

And it also can be understood from a very secular,

From a non-spiritual place.

And I think so when we talk about spirituality or soul or these kinds of conversations,

I think that when we find universal concepts that appeal across the board and are relevant to all people,

Regardless of culture,

Regardless of where you were born,

Regardless of the social,

Political,

Economic environment that helps to shape our human institutions,

That this essential truth feels applicable in all circumstances.

To me,

Then we have touched something that is essential.

That is true.

For me,

It's my kind of evidence-based litmus test.

This is going to be as relevant to a woman in Rwanda who is recovering after the genocide and healing with her family as it is to an American military person who is trying to come to terms with their identity after having spent time at the Gulf War.

If that concept of soul or self is equally applicable,

Then it feels to me that that's starting to capture what we mean when we talk about soul.

Thank you for that.

That was beautifully said.

I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about the journey after you were cleared from cancer.

There isn't a lot of information about what happens after.

Do you return to your regular life or does it look very different?

I think that any experience we go through has phased different kinds of periods or has a developmental phase.

I do think that post-treatment can actually be a very challenging time.

You are no longer in active treatment.

You don't have all the supports in place.

You are no longer maybe identified as somebody who is in cancer treatment,

Which is an identity in itself.

It can become central for a period of time.

Then it is who am I?

Who am I now?

I think that in my case,

I definitely felt for the first five years,

And that's partly because of the way the research is done.

There is a lot of data around the first five years after cancer treatment,

And then data up to about ten years,

And then very,

Very little beyond ten years.

So there is this marker.

It might be a bit of an illusion,

Depending on the nature of your cancer,

But five years seems to be viewed as a kind of litmus test.

If you have been in a cancer treatment for three to five years,

Then that's a good indicator.

In reality,

I think every year that you survive is an indicator,

A positive.

But five years seems to be a magic number that many cancer survivors hold on to.

So I do remember that the first five or so years,

And I think that there is something around that sense of I'm still involved somehow proactively.

I have some control in this.

I'm still involved in this.

So I think that there is something around that sense of I'm still involved somehow proactively.

I have some control in this.

Once that stopped,

And I would say even earlier,

After five years or so,

When I seriously started to think I could start making longer-term plans again,

Then I think for me,

I started to take over the treatment.

So I think some of that hopefully has happened much sooner.

You look at what you've done,

You look at what you've done,

You look at what you've done,

And you look at what you've done much sooner.

You look at what you're eating,

You look at your exercise,

Your overall health,

Your social,

Emotional,

All those things.

But then the focus on if no one else is treating me now,

So I kind of need to take over this.

So what's going to be my regime that I need to do to try to manage my health?

I would say that at this point,

15 years plus,

The cancer is no longer living as close to me as it was.

I probably have just as much of a likelihood as getting a completely different cancer or one of the myriad other diseases we get when we're aging at this point as our recurrence from the original cancer.

So yeah,

There's the efficacy piece.

What can I do?

What kind of power and agency do I have in managing or trying to prevent a recurrent?

And I had a colleague at one point who was quite health-conscious,

And I remember her asking me,

She said,

You know,

What do you think is the reason that you survived and other people don't?

I've known people who unfortunately have gotten cancer,

Very similar diagnosis,

And have had very different experience with it.

And I say in all honesty,

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't believe that I'm better.

I don't believe that I've got any kind of magic recipe or that there's something special about me.

I think there are many,

You know,

Very beautiful,

Talented,

Kind people that haven't been given this gift that I have.

But the one piece I would say that I think that intuitively and scientifically we know that is worth really taking on as part of our self-treatment is around stress.

It was just very conclusive evidence that there's all sorts of detrimental effects and wear and tear on the body.

And to me,

Addressing stress means addressing quality of life,

You know,

Returning to I don't know if I've got a year or I have 10 years or I have more,

But how do I want to be living my life?

What do I really care about?

What's important?

And I think that is addressing the core of stress rather than,

You know,

I do yoga and I eat well and I go for walks in nature.

Those are all great.

But there's something deeper,

More fundamental.

If you're like really angry,

You're going out in nature,

You're getting 10 minutes maybe reprieve.

But in the larger scheme of things,

Better to deal with the anger,

Better to deal with the deeper emotional pain that's constricting your body and form some space and some joy.

Thank you for sharing that.

I had a conversation with somebody.

She's a personal coach as well as a nutritionist.

And she was talking about how the emotions are so important in terms of when you're engaging in an activity.

So,

For example,

If you are really resentful while eating that salad,

You might as well have the cheeseburger.

That's not going to be positive for your body.

Yeah.

So I was contemplating that as you were talking.

I was also thinking about a book I read,

You know,

Viktor Frankl,

Who talked about the experiences of surviving the Holocaust.

Absolutely.

And one of the things that I remember reading in that book was the fact that those individuals who saw themselves past the experience,

Who are able to see beyond their experience,

Were the ones who are more likely to survive.

I was wondering how you thought the impact of thoughts on individuals' ability to be able to overcome such a challenging time.

Yes.

And I remember,

Too,

He spoke about he had a picture of his wife,

And he used to meditate on that and think about how he was going to join her and they would be together.

And that was a really key piece of hope that he hung on to.

Yeah.

So the whole idea of hope and what gives us hope,

I think it's a very,

Very powerful force.

What does stir our energy,

If we're talking essentially about this energetic force that animates us,

Without a sense of channelling that towards something,

I think it's easy for it to become stagnant and to feel stuck and to not feel that,

Feel mobilized to keep moving forward.

So I think our hope and what we are looking towards for hope changes all the time,

And it's really important to evaluate that.

Like when I think back to 15 years,

I remember looking at my young daughter at the time and wanting to be there,

Wanting to see her graduate from high school,

Wanting to know that she was going to be a young adult who would be able to be self-sufficient and was on her way in life with some sense of confidence.

And also feeling there are things that I know that are left to do.

And on the one hand,

Knowing I might have to let go of some of those things,

But if I live,

I'm going to really take that on.

That's important.

That's what it's about.

That will be my guiding force.

As we get older,

As we move into midlife,

We go through a stage where we are taking care of our families and nurturing our immediate family and community.

And then as they get older,

Which is the position I'm in now,

And we're freed up,

We have the resources in place,

It really becomes about what can I give?

What can I contribute?

I think that that sense of wanting to feel that we have something to contribute.

I think about studies that they're doing now as people are getting older and this idea of retiring.

Now this idea of retirement age at any particular age is under question whether that even makes sense.

A lot of studies show that for many people,

It's best to work as long as you're able to work.

That's a hugely inspiring and meaningful activity for people.

We know that the frequency when people lose that sense of meaning in their life or ability to feel valued,

That often they age very quickly and don't care as well in terms of emotional and physical health.

Now that's not to say that it's only work that defines us,

Right?

You know,

The body-mind spirit takes many forms.

And I think that the more varied kind of experience we have,

Then the broader ways we can feel satisfied and feel a sense of getting some nurturance from what we're doing in life.

One of the things I really wanted to do was go back and do my Masters of Social Work and to re-engage with that social justice piece as a mature adult from a different perspective than a young person who's doing more street-level activism and protesting,

Wanting to do it from this place of sort of privilege of having some education and some awareness and a little bit more experience in the world with systems.

So how can I make use of everything I have now and still address the inequities we've talked about and support younger people coming up as well and mentor them?

And then my work in psychotherapy and working towards transformation and healing and looking at moving out of the box,

Some of the more sort of traditional modalities,

But working in a way that is more intuitive and body-centered,

Less concerned about sort of the evidence-based,

More traditional recognition,

But being able to be more flexible and look at alternative experiences like,

For instance,

Psychedelic integration with therapy.

Yeah,

For sure.

Thank you for mentioning systems.

You know,

You and I have worked in different systems and could see the benefit of how compassion could be integrated.

I'm wondering how compassion could have been integrated in terms of your journey with the medical system.

Yeah,

So I've worked in healthcare in hospitals for most of my career over the last 20 years.

And so I have the benefit of multiple perspectives.

So as an insider,

As a staff person,

Of course,

My journey as a patient.

And my journey with cancer,

It was the first time I'd ever been significantly ill and really had to make use of hospital resources.

So I remember going in for my first MRIs and just being taken aback at the sophistication of equipment that was available,

That was very quickly available to me,

Gratefulness of being in a country with national healthcare where I didn't have to worry about the cost attached.

And so I think that the journey is we're part of a system and yet we are all individuals within a system as well.

And so a lot of the experience is framed through the lens that we bring.

That doesn't mean that they're not structural issues.

One of the long-standing and ongoing issues,

I believe,

In cancer care is that people going through treatment have to go to a lot of appointments,

Whether it's going through the chemo or radiation,

As well as the regular ongoing appointments with your care providers.

And often they're long waits.

These are busy clinics and the way the scheduling works,

There are often very long waits.

I remember when I was doing my chemo treatments at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto and they would give you,

It's like a little pager,

So you could go offsite and then you would be paged when your time came up to have the infusion,

Which I thought was brilliant.

I'd go down the street to winners and go shopping.

So when I think about compassion,

I think that as a healthcare provider,

I know the stress that people working within the healthcare system face.

And I know that the ideology that brings people generally into those kinds of professions is one that's based on compassion and care.

And so the human touch that I experienced as I,

In the early days,

I went for biopsy and then ultrasound,

And technicians are not allowed to give you your results.

It has to come from the doctor.

But in subtle and nuanced ways,

I felt that the technicians were trying to prepare me,

That what they saw was compelling enough that I could almost feel their desire to want to cushion what was going to come.

And so by the time I got the actual diagnosis,

I knew,

I already knew.

And I think that those very human encounters that happen,

After my treatment was finished,

I had a follow-up appointment with one of my doctors at Princess Margaret.

And again,

The clinic was busy,

The wait was long,

And my patience had reached its limit.

And so I went to the receptionist and said,

I'm not staying.

I'm no longer held hostage by the need to be here for a treatment,

And I'm done.

I'm out of here.

And that oncologist,

Who I remember by name,

Dr.

Natasha Lail,

At Princess Margaret,

I don't know if she's still there,

She sent me a handwritten note of apology.

And I have never forgotten that.

I haven't forgotten that on a personal level,

In terms of how touched I was,

But also as I continued in my own career in healthcare,

And as I've encountered patients and as well as staff struggling in their own moments of challenge,

I have never forgotten what a difference that made,

That she saw me.

I hear your frustration,

And I'm helpless with this,

But I want to acknowledge that I'm part of the system,

And I'm sorry that you are experiencing this.

It was very,

Very beautiful.

It's amazing.

Sometimes it's very small things,

Right?

It's small things that have a significant impact.

When my son was going through a journey where he was not terribly well,

I remember going to McMaster Children's Hospital.

I was beside myself,

And I was like,

You know,

I'm not leaving until my son sees a gastroenterologist,

And I kind of,

Like you yourself,

Said,

Enough.

I'm here.

Somebody's going to help me do something.

And I remember this one doctor who came and held my hand,

And he answered all my questions,

And he just sat with me,

As if I was the only person in the world.

And he's like,

What do you want to know?

And he went through everything,

And I always remembered that.

And I remember getting much later a review,

Like,

You know,

When they give you those questionnaires in terms of how is your care.

I wrote pages and pages about how that impacted him,

And it wasn't long that he sat with me,

But it was enough to see my suffering.

What you said is so important.

So what would you like to share with the audience that you're working on before we conclude our beautiful,

Beautiful conversation?

Yeah,

I,

Well,

I think our discussion around wanting to connect,

Sort of coming back to ancestral connections,

Yeah,

Is really impacting me these days.

So for me,

Part of that,

That history is having been involved with child welfare and this desire to look at supporting young adults as they are aging out of the system.

And this whole idea of developmental trauma,

My focus in on trauma in my psychotherapy practice,

And in particular,

I'm really drawn to working around this complex developmental trauma,

Because I'm excited by the fact that with our understanding now of somatically oriented kinds of therapies to reprocess embedded memories in the body,

That healing is possible.

And I would like to contribute to a healing,

Which is a kind of a liberation to people who,

Like myself,

Experienced significant trauma as young children early in life,

Who had no control at the time to be able to avoid that,

And yet can heal those wounds.

I do believe trauma can be healed and then have the possibility to experience rich,

Full,

Meaningful lives.

So that's a very big piece of my focus right now in my work.

I've been working for the last couple of years with Gabor Maté.

He has developed a training program based on his own approach to trauma-based therapy called Compassionate Inquiry.

And so I have been involved with that training,

And I'm going to continue on in that community and doing work,

Using that framework as I move forward.

So it's interesting,

My spiritual journey,

Which came out,

Like many people,

Came out in sort of a more structured traditional form,

Is now moving,

Increasingly has been on this trajectory.

It feels like it's a much more open and connected with the,

You know,

The vibrancy of being alive now in this body,

You know,

In this place,

And just really celebrating that.

And wanting for all of us to be able to be liberated,

To really be alive together.

I feel like that is my mission.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for sharing all of your experiences as well.

Yeah,

Thank you,

Thank you,

Thank you.

Thank you,

My friend.

It's lovely to be able to be here and be part of this wonderful thing you're creating,

This wonderful space,

This wonderful opportunity for community that is just so valuable and so close to my heart.

So I feel that this was a definitely heart to heart,

Soul to soul conversation.

And thank you to those who tuned in to listen to us.

If you would like transcripts of this conversation,

Please go on our website www.

Maitricentre.

Com.

See you soon.