Trusting in impermanence
by Françoise Gallet, coach & facilitator
February 2025
Tumours, explains my surgeon, tend to feel like a solid lump in your breast. On a cellular level, however, they look a bit more like stars, creating ‘arms’ that spread out from the centre. She’s drawing this in pen and paper on the desk in front of me but, in my mind, an image of The Mind Slayer from the popular TV show ‘Stranger Things’ is morphing on the page.
Of course, that isn’t what she is drawing. What’s carrying more weight though is the fear around where any of those arms — or tentacles — might have gone. Into the lymph nodes? Backwards into my chest and lungs? That thing that I felt when I smeared on some sunscreen two months ago, is now taking on nauseatingly sinister properties.
Instinctively, I’m filled with revulsion and resistance. I want it instantly removed — as if it has landed in my breast like some alien spore. A brief image of myself like an indomitable Sigourney Weaver — reaching into my breast and pulling the tumour out as I battle its tentacles — flashes through my mind.
Peace in the paradox of
of fight and surrender
Of course, as a fantasy of instant, triumphant resolution, it had no grounding in the physiological complexity of cancer and our human bodies. For, in the same appointment, I also learnt that the hormones that have blessed me with motherhood, strong bones, and have driven many other life-affirming biological functions had grown this tumour.
The fantastical drama in my head had met the greater reality of my mortality. It was all so seemingly contradictory and scary. Learning that my body — this site of life — had also made a tumour that would end my life (if I didn’t treat it) — is a confounding paradox to grapple with.
This is the natural order of things for all the living — even those who never get a cancer diagnosis. Over time our bodies age. We’re all mortal. We all share the reality of living and dying.
Of course, illness, loss, and setbacks aren’t what we dream or hope for. But we also all tend forget the truth of impermanence. We layer life instead with expectation, efforts to sidestep our vulnerability, or attempts to control the unpredictable.
A cancer diagnosis gave my mortality a potential form and implications. For my family and adolescent children this was frightening and heartbreaking. In turn, their vulnerability and fear were my greatest fear and heartache.
But when we let go of our expectations around how we think things ought to be, there’s a beautifully flawed life available to us. There’s no healing without disease, no joy without sorrow, no strength without vulnerability, no life without death. To live fully — to heal — this cancer diagnosis was asking me to befriend the truth of this paradox. To do that, I had to say ‘yes’ to fear.
Saying ‘yes’ to fear
Fear isn’t an easy feeling to allow.
But mindfully accepting what’s here for us, moment by moment, allows us to use the energy of emotion in fruitful ways.
Sometimes it is wise to flee, or fight, or freeze. We might need to harness the energy of fear to act, take risks, or make changes we might not ordinarily have dared before — to get unstuck, to heal. Sometimes we also need to see that our greatest fears aren’t grounded or founded.
But all of this is hard to do, when our energy is bound up in resisting the feeling of fear and pretending (consciously or unconsciously) that we’re invulnerable and unafraid.
Letting go
in an unpredictable world
I wasn’t only scared. I was also incredibly motivated to undertake the treatment that would give me the best chance of ‘sticking around’ for my kids. Unfortunately, the thing about cancer treatment is that it all comes with its own set of potential side-effects, costs, and anxieties. Facts, figures and words you’ve never heard of before, rapidly multiply their way into your life. It’s all a lot to wrap you head around.
So, just as I was expecting to take an active step towards physical healing, a collision of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and events resulted in the first step of my treatment journey — the surgery — being cancelled.
Intently focussed on ridding myself of the tumour, it was such an unexpected change of plan that it completely derailed any illusion of control or predictability.
Unsurprisingly this served only to exponentially increase the feeling of fear. But my surgeon was unequivocal. She wouldn’t operate.
Instead, I now faced a waiting period of further tests and the daunting reality of living — for a time I hadn’t banked on — with what my mind had made into a dangerously ‘tentacled’ tumour.
Awareness opens the door
to compassion
In that first appointment, something like revulsion and horror rose up towards it. I wanted to be rid of it. Awaiting the results of the tests — in the weeks post the cancelled surgery — I now instead had ample opportunity to offer the tumour attention.
Fortunately, if we’re mindful in how we pay attention, attention itself can be healing — even when… perhaps especially when what we are paying attention to is scary, or threatening, or distressing. For awareness opens the door to compassion — the warm-hearted concern that unfolds when we witness suffering.
Compassion, when we offer it to others, is a recognition of what they’re up against. Self-compassion is this same response, directed inwards. It’s made possible when we take a moment to attune to our own experience of distress. In the full recognition of the pain of the experience, the heart naturally softens and opens.
Loving-kindness
as an antidote to fear
Like mindful attention and acceptance, offering ourselves and others compassion, takes some practise. But with practice we learn how to keep our hearts open and tender, even in the face of fear. Indeed, from this soft heart, loving kindness — considered the antidote to fear — can bloom.
In the Buddhist tradition, loving-kindness is seen as a condition of unconditional friendliness. It’s cultivated through the practice of Metta — a mindfulness-based concentration practice in which you mentally wish goodwill, happiness and welfare for all (even those you dislike).
The practice is taught in many secular mindfulness and compassion programmes — including those we run and teach at thrivelife. With surgery cancelled, the treatment journey in question, and an exponentially mushrooming feeling of fear, I now had some pretty rigorous ‘test’ conditions.
The powerful medicine of love
American writer and teacher, Jack Kornfield, has a beautiful adaptation of Metta specifically for those who are grieving, facing cancer, and illness, injury, or any kind of loss or setback.
In this adaptation, Kornfield focuses more pointedly on the offering of loving-kindness to self, with the invitation to contemplate a “sacred” question: “How do we touch our wounds and our brokenness?” It is here, Kornfield suggests, that we “learn the great lesson of love” and so he leads the Metta practice with the invitation to gently touch the parts of our bodies in pain, or ill.
It’s an invitation that, bound up in fear, I would never have — with body, mind and heart — indulged if the surgery hadn’t been put on hold. After all, fighting is such a common — and logical — theme in the public lexicon of cancer discourse. If a cancerous tumour cannot be, or is not removed sooner (or treated), then rarely is there a later for the human body. It seems obvious that we should be encouraged to fight it — to resist.
But as an avid gardener, I think plants offer us a profound reminder of natural order of healing. Renewal — or healing — is not a battle. If we offer the conditions of profound encouragement (just the right light and nourishment), there’s a natural tendency towards renewal and healing, and a release of the toxic.
In this fearful waiting period, unable to rid my body of the tumour, allowing my heart to release that which was frightened and broken became my practice.
Touching the tumour tenderly
Touching the tumour tenderly was a profound surprise. Instead of revulsion, I discovered a part of body and mind that was overwhelmed by doubt — a sense of deep insecurity and ‘disorder’.
Faced with one’s mortality, I reckon insecurity is something of a default setting for most. But this emotional pattern, a deep absence of trust and sense of powerlessness, had also been a persistent psychic challenge through several years of perimenopause.
Cancer begins when the orderly and ordinary process of cell division breaks down, and abnormal or damaged cells begin to multiply and grow when they shouldn’t.
I’m not reducing the physical manifestation of cancer to a psychological sense of the ‘absence of order’. But I can share that it was profoundly healing to embrace this confused and ‘broken’ part of myself — to meet these ‘wounds’ with love.
Saying ‘yes’ to impermanence
A sense of renewal emerged spontaneously too through Metta. Practising it informally as I moved through hospitals and examination rooms — and in response to the care I received from friends and family — I encountered something impossible to name, and much greater than my frightened and small sense of self.
For it’s humbling and inspiring to contemplate your mortality and find yourself instead in the story of so many countless others. At each step in the cancer journey, where I benefitted from the advances in medical science, loving-kindness kept me deeply aware of all those who came before.
Like those whose struggle facilitated my chances of healing — the early candidates of radiation in the 70s. It was deeply sobering to contemplate that the failures in their treatments helped doctors, researchers, and engineers, hone the specifics of an appropriate radiation dose today.
There were also those who trialled medicines or opted for new procedures — and their healing and flourishing yielded treatments that offered promise to my future.
Even as I contemplated my mortality, I discovered there’s very little ‘me’ to be frightened for when you’re bound up in the great circle of living and dying, and its ceaseless change. At the same time, it’s also heartbreakingly beautiful to be able to encounter the potential loss of a singular life and to see how tethered to one, in the filaments of connection with others, is a boundless love.
As I slowly took on this reckoning, my frightened heart ballooned with a sense of trust in the unpredictability of it all. Embracing impermanence — the reality that each moment of living is also a moment of dying — brings with it a much larger grace and freedom.
I’m so grateful that cancer prompted me to say ‘yes’ to this.
*For insight and input into how you can work with Metta or draw on compassion and mindfulness-based practices, check the Insight and Practice tabs above.
Insight is the place where we prompt you with questions to catalyse your own ah-ha moments. You can try these activities before musing on the information we share in our blog. Or after.
Working with fear
Fear isn’t an easy feeling to allow. Or to learn from. But mindful awareness, compassion and some strengths-based contemplative journalling can help.
Offering fear mindful awareness
The practice of mindfulness meditation can be profoundly helpful in navigating fear. But, as this emotion can be an incredibly strong and powerful force over us, it’s important to work in this territory gently and slowly, sometimes even with the support of a mindfulness-based facilitator or mental health practitioner.
Thankfully though, like all emotions, fear comes in waves — it arises, it intensifies and peaks, it passes away — as a part of a nuanced and kaleidoscopic experience.
For instance, even as I was taking in the news of my cancer diagnosis, and feeling significant fear, I was also deeply aware of the kindness in the doctor’s voice and the firm, unfaltering bodily support of the chair.
It’s when we know our emotions as passing states, that we gain some relief and greater clarity and perspective.
Of course, at times some emotions may dominate our experience — even for a span of time. When they pass, it also doesn’t mean they won’t return. Though to offer any soothing to distress, we need to first mindfully recognize it.
This begins by meeting it with a non-judgmental mindful awareness — at the essence of which is a willingness or be with your experience as it unfolds.
This can look like a few things:
- Using mindful awareness, you can gently name the emotion of fear as it arises. Something like: “I’m noticing fear.” Or just labelling the emotion: “Fear”.
- Mindfully sensing into where the emotion is manifesting viscerally — the sensation of fear in the body and its location — while letting go of the story around the sensations.
- Paying close attention to how the feeling and sensations shift and change and how long it lasts.
- If the physical sensations of fear are too difficult to offer attention, try shifting your attention to any bodily sensations that are neutral or pleasant — some sense of warmth, coolness, softness, weight… Perhaps a tingling? Rest your attention there for a few moments.
- Mindfully noticing the thoughts, images and pictures in the mind, without getting completely entangled in the story around the fear, or overly identifying with it. Rather, noticing them simply as aspects of your current experience — as if they are clouds moving through the open sky.
- Sometimes journalling around the behaviours and emotional patterns that fear drives can be helpful too.
Giving your frightened self
a compassion break
Awareness opens the door to compassion — the warm-hearted concern that unfolds when we witness suffering. Compassion, when we offer it to others, is a recognition of what they’re up against. Self-compassion is this same response, directed inwards, and made possible when we take a moment to attune to our own experience of distress.
Mindful Self Compassion teacher and researcher, Kristin Neff, has a wonderful practice for moments of distress — the Mindful Self-Compassion Break.
It entails offering yourself some gesture of kindness or soothing — perhaps gently placing and resting a warm hand on the heart — as you mentally speak words and phrases of compassion to yourself.
The idea is that you make these phrases authentically your own, and offer them using an inner voice tone of friendliness — how you might console a good friend.
Having learnt the practice from Neff, my phrases mirror hers to some extent and always begin along these lines:
This is a moment of suffering…
This is difficult/hard right now…
Suffering is a part of life, and we all go through setbacks and struggles…
May I remember to treat myself with kindness and compassion….
Identify your strengths
Fear can markedly narrow your perspective — focussing all your efforts and energy on the problematic aspects of life and often our weaknesses — in pursuit of some kind of fix.
To flourish, we need to look closely at our strengths — what you have at your disposal to meet your fears and challenges.
Based on American Professor Ryan Niemic’s work on character strengths, this adapted exercise (from Emory University’s Cognitive Based Compassion Training(CBCT)) can be done as a reflective journalling exercise.
Though if you find it tricky to contemplate your unique strengths, skills and talents, you can ask a few people who know you well to share their thoughts. What do they think you are particularly good at? Watch Simon Sinek, the self-described unshakeable optimist, offer some great prompts for this conversation here.
If you’d like to give journalling a try, perhaps consider these guidelines:
Any self-reflection is best done by:
- Setting aside some quiet time.
- Being curious about what you discover, as best as you’re able.
- Being gentle with yourself, rather than harshly critical.
- Allowing insight to emerge in its own time, rather than striving for answers and solutions.
Now, take a few moments to think of a time — or specific situation — in your life when things were going well, or you were being the ‘best’ version of you. Jot this down in some detail.
Read through what you have written, and then take a look at the list below. Using this list identify any strengths that came to fore in that situation, or during that time in your life.
Perhaps as you read through what you have written, jot down any other strengths, not highlighted.
- Appreciation of beauty and excellence
- Wisdom
- Creativity
- Curiosity
- Courage
- Prudence
- Perseverance
- Zest for life
- Fairness
- Forgiveness
- Honesty
- Humility
- Humour
- Humanity
- Hope
- Gratitude
- Kindness
- Love
- Leadership
- Cooperative
- Self-regulation
- Spirituality
Bring some mindful awareness to this moment. What does it feel like to notice these strengths?
Lastly you may wish to make a few further notes: How might a greater awareness of your strengths be helpful?
Practising Loving-Kindness or Metta
Metta — or Loving-Kindness practice — is a practice centred on the recitation of benevolent phrases. With practise, it invites the practitioner into a more loving and connected state of mind.
It can be practised formally on a mediation cushion/chair or informally as you walk down the street, pay for your groceries, or stand in a queue at the bank.
Typically, the recitation begins by directing the benevolence and goodwill to oneself, then those you feel fondly towards, then those to whom you feel neutral.
Lastly, if the loving-kindness that you are generating gathers any ‘gravity’, you can direct the phrases to those you find difficult — someone who you feel has wronged you, for instance.
Draw on imagination
To evoke or ignite the feeling of loving-kindness, you can draw strongly on your imagination by bringing to mind images of loved ones, friends, or even pets.
There’s likely very few of us who can claim simple and uncomplicated relationships — even with friends and family. As we bring these relationships to mind, the memories around them can fuel thinking and even rumination.
So it can be helpful to focus on a singular moment in time that you shared with this person, or being — a moment where you felt a sense of connection, friendliness, or kindness. Hold this moment in mind for a few moments — without getting caught up in the story of your relationship.
Why practice Metta
Metta is the work of developing an unconditional friendliness — feelings of love and ease as boundless as the oceans — towards all sentient beings, including ourselves.
This makes it a practice with big challenges and profound fruit.
For instance, at first it might feel overly sentimental, corny, or mushy. In some cultures, directing well wishes to oneself can spark a sense of uncomfortable conceit. Sometimes, when practising Metta, what’s more noticeable is the absence of connection, ease, or friendliness. We might notice aversion, resentment, jealousy, or loneliness instead. Indeed, trying to generate loving-kindness for someone very difficult can be a painful experience.
So, just like you don’t go to the gym and lift the heaviest of weights in your very first training session, the invitation is to practice Metta incrementally, beginning gently and slowly.
In the beginning, centre your practice on the phrases that prompt the most noticeable sense of ease and friendliness — that might be wishing benevolence to loved ones, yourself, or someone neutral. It’s different for each person. Then slowly try that which is a little more challenging.
Allow the phrases to be resting place — or focus point — for the mind. In time, the deeper intentions of the phrases, will gather their own gravity and momentum.
The results can change how we see ourselves, how we see others and in turn how we see the world.
In this particular practice, we offer a guided Metta practice directed to oneself.
Widsom from Jack Kornfield:
“At the root of suffering is a frightened heart, afraid to trust the river of change, to let go in this changing world. This unopened heart grasps and needs and struggles to control what is unpredictable — we can never know what will happen. With wisdom we allow this not knowing to become a form of trust.”
