My peyote healing

Cancer, Healing, Spirituality21 Comments

We sit in a teepee.

It’s moist and chilly. I had to drive down the mountain from the coast at 4 a.m. this morning so I could meet the elders as they broke for their morning fast.

At 5 a.m., they opened the teepee flap and Native Americans emerged. They all wore jeans and t-shirts (mostly). I felt my preconceptions crack.

I’m at my aunt’s house sipping badly flavored vanilla coffee before dawn and I’ve just been diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer a few days before, and I’m watching a bunch of Indians groggily exit a two-story-tall teepee on the edge of her property. Sur. Real.

It’s only been a week since my doctor called with those words you never want to hear: It’s cancer.

No, really, stop, I’m only 43. This isn’t supposed to happen for another 30 years. I’m right in the middle of shit. I have two kids in grade school. You can’t be serious.

And now, the sun has just woken and I’m entering a tent overfull with men, women, and kids who’ve all been awake all night – healing, connecting, and doing something I can’t put my finger on. Frankly, I’m too aware of myself to see what’s really going on. I’m a foreign intruder with my old aunt, mom, and uncle in tow, all entering someone else’s sacred circle because we own their land. How can it get worse? Which means in my heart, I’m feeling it’s still all about me, although soon it will be all about them and I will just have to catch up to that.

My aunt bought her house on what she discovered was Native American land – traditional land for celebrating and connecting. Years ago, some tribespeople approached her and asked if they could still celebrate on her land. Of course, yes (embarrassed that I own your land). So every month or two, a big teepee and picnic tables and Porta Potties appear, and an all-night ritual commences to connect us to the stars.

My aunt was blessed, right?

She called the tribe when she learned I was diagnosed. They said yes we’ll take your niece. Come before dawn.

 

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How to know what your doctor really thinks of you

Intuition, Self-Love & Self-Trust, Spirituality4 Comments

I was with my radiation oncologist a few months ago as he examined me.

“Oh,” he says as he flips through some papers. “You’re fine. You’re not like some other people.”

I thought to myself, “Egads, what other people, and what’s wrong with them?!”

And it occurred to me, too, that you don’t really want an oncologist who’s dismissive of you.

Or do you?

I call what happened with Dr. L an “intuitive slip.” I can tell when someone is letting information pass through them. It’s an offhand remark, a casual observation they didn’t know they even spoke aloud. One of my other doctors does it too, and she also doesn’t know she does it. Nor will I ever tell her. (She’d be horrified.)

But this is one of the biggest reasons why I chose them both: they’re in touch with their guidance. It doesn’t matter if they’re traditional medicine or alternative: each follows his or her hunches. I want people like that on my team.

The muse is strong around you, Padawan

Manifesting, Self-Love & Self-Trust, Spirituality4 Comments

As I’m lying on the massage table, the woman who treats my lymphedema each week leans down and whispers to me, “The muse is strong around you right now.”

I immediately think “the Force” and then remind myself I’m not a Jedi.

It’s the writing muse, she tells me. And Susan is pretty good at this. She maneuvers the lymph out of my arm every Thursday, and she slips in whatever else I need to know as I’m lying face down in the hospital room on the papery sticky table.

Sometimes she sings to me while she works. Sometimes she does myofascial release, which basically means she grabs two parts of my skin and stretches it as far as it will go.

I think about why I’m going to see her every week, and part of me knows that, while yeah, I’m keeping my lymph moving and my arm from swelling, I also just want to see what else might happen.

Sometimes she gets an intuitive message for me. Sometimes I get a message for her. We swap hits and guesses. We talk politics, and about family. And then maybe she’ll touch part of me gently and ask if this is the part that’s holding fear.

“Yes,” I gulp. And then we both think about what it would be like if that part of me had no more fear.

Susan is not in your normal demographic. She wears her hair long, straight, and gray, cusses like a sailor, slips around the massage table in her granny pants and tennis shoes, is one of about ten children, and is easily twenty years my senior. She is perfect and right in every way.

She’s perfect because she really doesn’t care if other people get her or not. This is why she’s a soul sister. I don’t need other people to get me either, or at least, not as much as I used to need it.

I’m thinking about just how awesome it is to be freed from What People Think.

We live in boxes – boxes that shape the walls of our houses, and boxes that shape the walls of our minds. The most evil boxes are the ones that shape the walls of our expectations.

Made up words, or snow floating on water

Manifesting, Spirituality1 Comment

Another sleepless night in 2016 had me up researching the actual 50 words Inuits (Eskimos) use for “snow.”

Such as:

natquik – drifting snow

muruaneq – soft deep snow

And my favorite, qanisqineq – snow floating on water.

I began thinking about new words that have crept in my vocabulary over the last few years, taking up their positions on my head so I can describe a new emotion or way of being that I didn’t have words for before.

There’s “pre-act” (v.) and “pre-action” (n.) as well as “pre-spond” (v.) and “pre-sponse” (n.).

These embody the idea that we can have either a reaction and pre-action at any given time.

A reaction is when you respond to what has already occurred. A pre-action is when you pre-spond to what is yet to occur. In other words, you feel an emotion toward something that has yet to occur.

We manifestors spend a lot of time in pre-action and pre-sponse, since that is what cues us in that we’re in creation mode instead of reaction mode. Pre-acting means we’re actively describing the parameters of what we intend to have happen next to the Universe. These words are embedded in every Flowdreamer’s vocabulary.

Here’s another word; “head scraping.”

I may have coined this unsexy little jobber, but it’s my mother, Venus, who usually actually does the head-scraping. (Nope, it’s not a head rub. She does it with her mind.)

IDGAF

Change & Transitions, Entrepreneurs, Passion & Purpose, Self-Love & Self-Trust9 Comments

I know I’m pretty much useless when, instead of getting work done, I’m folding clothes.

It’s 11 a.m. and my workday should be in full swing. But I work from home, and so instead I’m folding laundry and checking my emails every five minutes looking for something exciting. Nothing exciting comes in.

I spot the stack of old financial papers that need shredding. I’ve let them languish by the shredder for months. Yes, months. I know something is really awry because now pulverizing that stack through the shredder is looking really good and I spend the next hour doing it.

Hello, Rebellion. How are you today?

“I don’t want to! You can’t make me. I don’t care if I should. No.”

My name is No . . . my sign is No.

A Types, overachievers, controllers, and those of us who generally Get Shit Done know this feeling and it scares the heck out of us. It’s called IDGAF. (You can work that acronym out.)

IDGAF is your inner rebel, telling you she needs a break. Give her one. What’s so hard about that?

Oh, I know what’s hard: you’re going to lose control of your life for five or ten minutes, or maybe even half a day. Or if you really slack, maybe even . . . a week. And if you’re really, really screwed – a month. And of course the ultimate freak: forever.  You’ll be in IDGAF forever.

Because what if you never find your way out of IDGAF? What if you stop earning your income? What if your marriage that you’ve been propping up suddenly bores you? What if you stop to relax for one bald second and discover that you’re running on fumes and those fumes felt so real that you lived off them for ages?

Toilet woman

Change & Transitions, Love & Partnerships, Self-Love & Self-Trust5 Comments

In the stall next to me, a woman is on her cell phone.

She’s booking an appointment. I can’t tell with whom. Is it nails? Her therapist? Her oncologist? Her voice echoes over the empty bathroom stalls.

I snap the paper toilet seat cover down and sit. This is really uncomfortable. I’m going to make pee noises. The woman in the stall next to me is chatting away.

I hesitate, then I get mad. She’s the one breaking the rules, I think, not me. I am going to pee as loud as I want.

When I get up to flush, I’m frozen again. I’m thinking how awkward it must be for the person on the other end of her phone to hear all the noises of a public bathroom. I’m actually thinking about the feelings of the person the woman beside me is not thinking about at all. This is ridiculous.

I flush. It’s really loud.

As I’m washing my hands I realize that I have just seen what happens when you break a social norm. It’s not embarrassing the woman next to me to talk to a stranger while using the bathroom. But it’s embarrassing me. Because I go around thinking that everyone feels like me: I would never call someone from inside a public toilet stall. Ever. I think that everyone else thinks like me, too.

Until someone snaps that idea in half.

Guilty and gentle

Change & Transitions, Spirituality35 Comments

What I should be doing and what I am doing right now are totally different. Right now I’m sitting in an airport hotel in Los Angeles, alone in a huge suite, surfing Amazon for ceramic travel mugs, when I know what I should be doing is hobnobbing downstairs with some of the bigwigs I came here to learn from and hobnob with.

In fact, I’m going to walk outside my room right now, hang off the balcony and snap a pic, and show you just what I’m missing in fancy-hotel-bigwig land.

There, I did it. I’m sticking it at the top of this post.

And now I’m sitting down again and getting into the core of this lack thinking I’m in.

I’ve only realized what a state I’ve gotten myself in because it’s dawned on me that I’m still sitting on the couch in my high platform shoes and conference outfit (you know the look) and it’s been an hour since I came back to my suite. Apparently, some part of me thinks I’m still going back out to Hobnob and Make Great Deals and Connections. And this part of me is also screaming how I suck because I’m such a bad networker that I’d rather be in my room alone searching for travel mugs.

Isn’t this a familiar feeling? “What I should do” vs. “What I am doing.” And the well of guilt and insecurity that lies in between. The well of lack thinking that tells me ”¦ ”Oh Summer, if you’d just put on your big girl pants you wouldn’t miss this opportunity.”

I know we all have this going on inside us. The “what I should do” and “what I am doing” dialog, and how much we suck because we aren’t doing what we should do. We have a big long list of what we should be doing.

And this is when I hear myself in my own ears: “Be gentle with yourself, Summer.”

Be gentle with yourself.

My hate mail

Passion & Purpose, Self-Love & Self-Trust42 Comments

I get hate mail all the time. I’ve gotten it for years. It started at least a decade ago or more, when I created Hay House Radio, and people would send me, the Network Producer, hate mail about the particular shows I aired and how I should run them better or even kick certain hosts off the station. (Yes, Wayne Dyer got hate mail, Louise Hay got hate mail….it’s pretty universal). It taught me a lot about people.

So for no particular reason, I found myself trolling my old book reviews this morning, and getting a laugh out of the particularly hostile ones. Book reviews can be a form of hate mail.

Here’s a condensed excerpt of a book review I stumbled on that’s so bitter, I even forwarded to my mom (she gets a laugh).

“Apart from coming across as abrasively full of herself ”¦ in fact it is apparent that Ms Summer has lived a very nice life and apparently has no concept of how bad life can get, how little control ordinary people may have over certain things. It seems to me that Ms Summer is the lucky owner of a newly minted soul, a first lifer (you get them), still reflecting the in glory of wholeness. How nice. Enjoy it while you can.

If I were you Summer, I would have a serious chat with my ‘guides’, your higher self or wherever you are getting your guidance from, because the info you are getting is flawed. Also, read a bit perhaps. Find out what’s out there before making sweeping statements about life, the universe and everything. A considerate person would hedge her bets, show some humility (none here!!!) and show some understanding for the common human experience, which is in fact not all colored roses bubbles and bliss.”

If I were this woman, I’d have thought, “No big deal. I don’t like this book. Move on.”

But this person got deeply triggered, and this is where things can actually get dangerous. She wants me to get triggered with her. She wants me to feel how she feels.

And if I’m not careful, this means that not only could I get really upset or sad, but even worse . . . I could begin to subconsciously hold this other person’s opinion of me inside myself.

If I believe her, and feel hurt by her, then I’m accepting her opinion inside me of who I actually am.

And if I did that, I’d be letting this stranger have power over me, from inside me. Then I’d start to fail to me be, and become a little more like her.

I’d have given her that power over me. Follow that? That’s the Big Daddy concept here.

It’s not about whether or not you’re hurt by words, it’s the slow build-up of doubt they can create. It’s someone else telling you how to think and feel, and if you believe them even the teeniest bit, then you start living a little less like yourself, and a little more like them.

Her words remind me of other emails and reviews I’ve received, most of which tell me how in some way or another I’m fatally flawed, selfish, insensitive, or ignorant and then prescribe how I should fix myself.

Which leads me to remember another email I got a few years back in response to a newsletter just like this one, which, I’ve started to realize, did in fact affect me.

Here’s how that one went down:

The emperor wears no clothes

Jobs & Work, Self-Love & Self-Trust11 Comments

It’s cold – as in air-conditioning cold – in the hotel conference room. I’m gathered with a bunch of other women at a self-development conference, and we’ve been picking apart our lives (in between shivering or baking) all weekend.

Many of the women are coaches. In fact, I’d say 80% are, which is why this weekend has been so difficult for us.

You know the old saying: “The emperor has no clothes”? It refers to a fairy tale in which an emperor is hoodwinked into believing that two tailors have made him the most handsome outfit in the world. However, if you’re stupid or ignorant, he’s told, you can’t see the clothes. Of course, this is all bullshit and the tailors made nothing. The emperor walks naked down the street in a procession, yet all his townsfolk except one honest child are afraid to say what they really see.

Today we use this phrase to mean that we sometimes portray things about ourselves to others that are deeply untrue, because we’ve hoodwinked our own selves into believing them. It means we can be hypocrites, that we’re false under our own words.

I find that coaches often carry this energy in their own Flow. It’s embarrassing. Here we are, leading people into knowledge and guiding them toward their desires, while our own desires are unfulfilled and we fail to follow our own advice.

Think: the plumber whose own pipes are always broken. The accountant whose own accounts are a mess. You get the idea.

The question is: Does this mean we’re truly illegitimate? Hypocritical? Are we sipping our own Kool Aid? Are we wearing no clothes?

Will I live five more years or fifty?

Cancer, Change & Transitions, Health & Wellness9 Comments

You know that feeling when you haven’t talked to someone in a long time, and each time you try . . . you think about how awful you’ve been that you haven’t talked to them in so long?

And so your fingers stick on the keyboard, and the phone remains untouched in your purse or pocket. You just don’t know what to say. How do you begin?

That’s how I feel now.

I left you all somewhere in the middle of December, after my last chemo, bald and floppy and utterly wiped out. And then ”¦ silence. Nine months of it. Holy cow. Where have I been? Where did my life go? Where has yours gone?

Here a brief catching up: I’m in remission from Stage 2 breast cancer. I had six months of chemo, two months of daily radiation, three months of lymphedema therapy, and three surgeries in just about one year. Add on heapings of the alternative therapies and healings (herbs, qi gong, acupuncture, Reiki, rebounding, juicing, shamanic journeying, and emotional cleansing) and you can see how busy I’ve been.

Being sick and getting well can really take up your life.

Right now, it’s a gorgeous Sunday morning. My orange and pink roses are firing off blooms in front of my window, my family are all still asleep, and I feel like I’m just waking up.

I mean, really waking up.

Waking back into life.

I’ve leaned a hella lot about cancer this year. And I’ve learned even more about the way we think, feel, and anticipate (or brace for) life. My own personal life goals jumped tracks and landed in all new territory.

“Go with the Flow” has a much richer, deeper meaning.

The concept of manifesting is much more nuanced and interesting.

One thing I learned is that cancer, or any illness that can come back, plays with your head. Is it gone or isn’t it? Am I safe or am I still in danger? Will my body cooperate, or is it going to kill me?

I jokingly refer to this dynamic, and the uncertainty that’s always bubbling below the surface, as the 5-year and 50-year plan. (My husband hates it when I talk about this, because it’s ”¦ you know ”¦ talking about death.)