Healing

What does it mean to heal? I‘ve been pondering this question on holiday as I begin to come back to my body. To relax and let it find its level. It’s new normal. I’ve been writing this post for two weeks on and off. Lost for words. Or just a bit… lost.

I have been in Ibiza with my family for nearly two weeks now. It feels like it‘s been a month and it is a good place to allow a slow unravelling of all the senses. To silently ask where does it hurt.

I came here in search of a compromise between a family holiday and my own need for healing. Our first week was spent at a posh agriturismo place with a beautiful pool, air conditioned gym overlooking the greenery, a small yoga deck and outdoor cinema. Our accommodation was little garden studio bungalows in traditional Ibizan style with laid back terraces and rustic outdoor beds. It’s possibly the first holiday our kids have actually had with a pool and luxury. I’ve never allowed myself it as it seems like such a waste of money. Usually we drive through France Holland Germany camping on mountain sides and in pine forests with the odd chateau along the way. Now in our second week in Ibiza we have downgraded to a small three bedroom casita near Benniras beach at Ibiza Yoga, one of the few unspoilt corners of the island and somewhere I came on retreat two or three times in my early thirties. Our small Ibizan finca is so simple with cool terracotta tiles throughout, a rustic kitchen and terraces with chickens, kittens and ageing chihuahuas all wandering around trying to steal food when your back is turned. Out the back there is a magnificent sprawling fig tree that I have been inventing new recipes for each day. Last night a fig and halloumi salad, figs with greek yoghurt, planning a fig and iced coffee smoothie later. I gleefully go hunting each morning for freshly ripe ones drowing in the scent of the tree and kicking the ones that have fallen into the garden below for the chickens.

I‘ve taken part in meditation, yoga or sound healing most days. My older son and my daughter are quite open to participating. The younger boy and my husband not so much. They are similar, avoiding the hippies and enjoying their own company and hobbies. I kind of admire their resolute commitment to non-joining. Things have changed a bit in the twenty years since I was last here. I’ve changed a bit too. Less to prove to myself and others. And amazing to return with three grown children. When I came here before I had no idea that I could even have children, or that we’d struggle to have them or that it would all work out. No idea how much cancer would shape my life.

On Monday I found my way to a sound healer for a one to one session, Mirabel, whose studio lies tucked away in a colourful shack painted blue and aquamarine in the verdant green of the mountains hidden down a dusty track. Mirabel has been living in the Himalayas for a decade living with the Nepali people who make her singing bowls. I am guessing it is not her real name. I had assumed she was Spanish by her accent and thick curly dark hair but she tells me she was originally from Israel. Now a citizen of the world. She arrived in Ibiza during Covid and never left. We have a wild 90 minute session where she plays her full moon bowls directly on my creaky cancer-eaten hips and I feel energetic sparks firing up my spine. Energy escapes through my right leg which kicks up voluntarily as if possessesed. As if something is trying to leave my body. It now happens every time I do a healing session whether hands off, hands on or with the gong or the bowls. My whole body bucks and as I slip into a different level of consciousness I feel my head being pulled upwards as if pulled by an invisible string. And yet I remain sceptical. Of myself! Mirabel has an arsenal of rainmakers, tiny xylophones, little bells and drums littered around her studio as well as two full sets of bowls. The effect is simple and powerful but disorientating and when I remove my eye mask after the session I am surprised it is still daytime. I feel like I have been on a shamanic journey which could have lasted days. There is an energy about this island that is unique and I fnd myself wishing I hadn‘t left it twenty years.

As a stressed out TV director in my early thirties I remember struggling to unwind as I worried about whatever film I was making and feeling self-conscious around the other yogis at the retreat. I like being this age and caring less. There are young volunteers from the UK at the Ibiza yoga who set off two years ago, went via Goa, arrived in Ibiza and stayed. They face the prospect of coming back to the UK in time for the dark drizzle of winter. I can’t imagine being that age again and I envy their freedom. I dreamt of doing something like that but was far too driven and ambitious to stop once I had my claws in the industry.

I’ve been doing two hours of morning yoga a day plus the odd evening session. I am pretty pleased when my body lets me do even some of the yoga I was doing in my early thirties. With cancer damage in my spine, my hips and my shoulder blade I feel it a little but not too much considering. Shoulder stands and full bridges and back beds are too strong for my spine and aren’t allowed. I am ten times more mobile here than at home and, although I have been giving in to the odd sangria on the beach, my inflammation due to the hormone treatment is under control. It was becoming crippling before I left, to the point where I thought I should maybe hang on to my late father in law’s wheelchair. But that is not any sort of plan really is it? Here in the heat, swimming in the sea and stretching each day, the pain is largely gone. The longer you stay here the more the magic of the island reveals itself. The constant orchestra of cicadas silenced only by sunset. August is a bit too busy. I’ve talked to the first hotel about coming back in February with a group to do a retreat for ladies with cancer. It would be very special.

Although my inner hippy is very happy here, part of me resists the high end wellness industry that has sprung out of the sixties hippy movement and reached its zenith in Ibiza. This is late capitalism writ large. Work yourself so hard for the Man that you are willing to part with whatever cash you have left to recover your soul. We visited one of these temples of modern life the other night for dinner and a sound healing session run by Mirabel. Slap bang in the middle of the island is Atzaro, an agriturismo where Ottolenhgi has a ‘residency’ (like a DJ for food). The word isn’t really a fitting description. Super luxury temple maybe. I’d considered it as a short stay at 800 bucks a night and then decided that I probably wasn‘t the sort of person who felt comfortable blowing this much on a bed for the night and we definitely weren‘t that sort of family. (Although, to be clear, I’d be very happy if someone else thought I was and took me there!) These places are extraordinary beautiful temples of design, invented to counter modern life. You must be very tired indeed to want to lie on a large Balinese bed from the moment you get up, only to roll off into the length pool which resembles the water feature at the Taj Mahal and then be carried off to your treatment. The nerdy academic in me looked at the layout of the spa/temple complex and saw similarities with a chicken factory. You are processed in the fancy reception, pummelled, plucked clean and spat out the other end as organic hand reared premium human chicken breast. Hairless and featureless but corn fed and bit more orange than the other chickens.

Cynicism aside, I LOVED IT. As we arrived for our sound healing extravaganza the more down to earth side of the family took one look at the place and ran away to the local farmers for a 2 euro beer and a game of chess in field as ‘my side’ gasped at the beauty and went for a sound healing session in the grounds as the sun set. I could see that, like me, my luxury loving kids were imagining that life should always be like this. I reminded them that they might have to become successful lawyers or entrepreneurs to earn this right but that it comes at a price and they should remember to take me when I‘m old. Quietly my brain says to myself, ‘if you get old.’ But we don’t say that out loud to children.

Am I healing? I don’t know. The holiday has taken some of the shock away. It feels a bit like I’ve been running from a wild animal for six months and suddenly I’ve stopped to catch my breath but I think it might still be out there hunting me. It’ll take a while and a few more scans for that feeling to leave me I guess. Reassurance is not something they like to dish out freely at the hospital. They are too cautious and too used to seeing what comes next I guess. They will quietly whisper to you, ‘that is a fantastic outcome for your scan.’ Carefully crafted sentences.

Am I healed? For now. No evidence of disease but still stage 4. I just can’t get my head around it. It’s very hard to accept it has gone. And the doctors would say it hasn’t really. The cancer cells slosh around in the system waiting to reactivate. This is ‘incurable’. Gone but not gone. Gone for now. My body tells me I must say ‘gone’ and not wish it or expect it back. The way my consultant speaks you’d think the cancer is only being kept at bay by the pills and the shutting down of oestrogen. I accept the miracle and want to take a more empowered patient view of the extent that I can control that through diet, exercise and lifestyle. Either way it comes with a hefty dose of ‘what if’ anxiety and my next PET scan will be nail biting in mid September. Now I have connected with secondary cancer groups I appreciate that my situation is not the norm. It’s terribly hard to make friends and find out weekly that someone’s cancer has spread somewhere new. It’s such a horribly relentless, inventive, cruel disease. I have something like survivor guilt which is ridiculous but it makes it hard to know who to talk to about what I’ve been through. If you talk to people whose cancer is still very active you feel like they probably want you to just shut up and be grateful. And I probably should but I have to find a way to process and get my head round this.

I’ve been reading Audre Lorde’s ‘Your Silence Will Not Protect You’. She is such an iconic, powerful voice. Cut down too soon. I carry her book around for strength. The phrase keeps coming back to me. Watching fascist events unfold around the world, fighting my own inner battles, watching others fight theirs…this truth remains. Whilst silence is an option I feel strongly that my silence will not protect me and it won’t heal me either. And it helps no one else to just shut up and move on. As women, as people, we are somehow expected just to shrug off trauma, to accept the quiet mutilation and poisoning of our bodies in the name of ‘health’, to simply be grateful if the medicine works. Don’t complain. Focus on survival. It’s a price we accept to go on living. So should we quietly go back to ‘normal’? To how we were before? Be grateful, be quiet. Carry on?

I can’t. I want more. So excuse me if I keep talking it out. Shouting it. Looking for ways to find my frequency, my resonance, to seek a new level. A new normal. My life was pretty good before but not the way I treated myself. I can’t just go back but I don’t know what my new version of balance looks like. I overspend my energy constantly on some obsessive endeavour and just bringing up three kids. I’m afraid I’ll just slide right back into a boom and bust because staying the same is easier than change. Cancer comes for a reason. Mine is not genetic surprisingly but I feel the way I was living for years didn’t help. All the striving. Pushing myself hard for all the wrong reasons. All the stress and the lifestyle that goes with that. It had become so…ordinary… to treat my body casually badly. I need to live differently and that involves giving things up. Alcohol (especially free pink alcohol – a unicorn’s favourite drink), bad food, toxic situations and occasionally people. I have to make very conscious decisions to live well and say no to things now. Even though these choices are literally a matter of life or death it’s still harder than it sounds.