Announcing My New Website and Blog

I am delighted to announce that I have created a new website and blog!

You can find my new website at the same old address: BonnieGintis.com

My blog is now an integrated part of the new website. This will be the last blog entry on this blog platform. This blog will remain posted here as an archive of what I wrote from 2009 - 2022. Please continue to read my updates at the new site.

There's just one sign up for the blog and the general emailing list. I have attempted to carryover the names of people who were previously subscribed, but technology can be unpredictable, so if you want to be sure you are notified of all my offerings, please go to the new site and sign up. There is a sign up form on the bottom of every page of the site. Don't worry, my new email list won't send you duplicates.

I hope you join me and become a part of my new online presence, and consider coming to a workshop and reconnecting in-person. Here's a link to my in-person schedule.

If you can't make it to a workshop, consider signing up for a One-to-One private session.

I appreciate that so many of you have connected with me through my blog since 2009 and followed my life journey. I hope we stay connected and that we have many more years of exploration and inspiration together.

Please visit my new site and sign up at https://bonniegintis.com/home

Audiobooks, PET Scans, Podcasts, and Trust in Nature

I have been exploring the poem, "Adrift" by Mark Nepo lately. I began hearing it in my head when my friend Robert's wife, Nell died a few weeks ago. And then as I pondered the "duet of wonder and grief" in my own life, I continued to contemplate the poem, line by line. I juxtapose the paradox of that which, "no one can take away and all that we’ve lost" and then loop back to the line about, "how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief." Here is the whole poem:

Adrift
by Mark Nepo

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

My life is filled with paradox, things that seem like opposites, but both are true.

I received some great news this week:
My publisher has given me the legal rights to publish my own audiobook! They don't want to produce it, so they've reverted the rights to me. My plan is to do an updated 2nd edition. It will be expanded, with a few new chapters, and each chapter will have guided meditations and dives. Some of it will be based on the book groups and courses I've done over the past 3 years. It will most likely take me a good year to complete it. It feels great to have a project that needs to be completed.

And now, for the other news:
As some of you know, I had a PET scan on February 20th. It's been a wild ride as I sort through what it might mean and explore my options.

The scan was not terrible, and it wasn't great either. Although its ultimate meaning is not completely clear, I have clearly progressed to the next level of "relationship" with this cancer that's visiting my bones. The good news is that it's not in any organs; it's just in my bones. Breast cancer that only spreads to bone is easier to treat than the type that spreads to other organs, but "easy" is a relative term.

It has spread further through my skeleton. It's in about 10 vertebrae, scattered throughout all the regions of my spine, as well as many ribs, multiple spots in my pelvis, arms, shoulders, hip, and bony skull. I am free of it in my organs (no spots in my brain, liver, etc) - yay!

Most of the spots are small and I can't feel most of them. As my oncologist describes it, what lights up on the scan could be a small cluster of just a few cancer cells that are metabolically active. Each spot doesn't necessarily represent a solid tumor. These glowing spots are in the earliest stages of deciding whether or not to turn into something significant.

The ones I can feel are quite painful, but the worst feeling of all is the vulnerability of sensing the fragility and vulnerability of my bones. There's nothing to take or do to make that feeling go away. I just have to be attentive, listen, be careful, and of course, breathe.

The odd, interesting, and paradoxical thing about my condition is that many tumors that showed up in the past year have disappeared, so I'm making them and resolving them. But right now, I'm moving one step forward and one and a half steps back. I'm searching for ways I might change the tempo of how my body meets this process.

I have been gathering information and doing a lot of wild and obscure testing. (testing genes, enzymes, and other circulating tumor factors) to see if there's a mainstream "targeted" treatment that I resonate with.

After 13 years, there aren't many alternative and complementary treatments that I haven't tried, but I am searching anyway for something new that feels right. I'm considering a few things. I am still opposed to any approach that involves human or animal sacrifices ;)

I've gotten suggestions and recommendations from many friends and loved ones that involve using devices to influence my condition (like Rife machines or the Qest 4 System). I appreciate everyone's concern, and I need to let you all know that I don't resonate with these approaches. I find it hard to trust that a machine (or the people who programmed the machine) knows what my body needs. I am more interested in searching for ways to be in direct relationship with my body and its wacky antics. As an Osteopath, I trust that I can generate, or other people to whom I'm connected might be able to generate these same resonant frequencies.

I also trust the path that I'm on and I accept that at some point I will let go of influencing my life path. I like to think that I know the difference between "control" and "influence." It's important for me to contemplate that everything is fine just the way it is. That doesn't mean I have to like it, or give up caring for myself. Acceptance doesn't mean acquiescence. It means I am committed to listening deeply and experiencing things as they are, and not desperately grasping for a fantasy of some special cure when I get to the point where there are no more options. I'm open to stumbling upon things that are helpful, but I don't believe that I can conjure a cure and control my body with my will.

I am preparing for when the time comes that I can't be in a balanced relationship with this process anymore. Well, that's another story that I'm not ready to talk about publicly. I am not there yet.

This cancer moves "at the pace of a glacier" (that's a direct quote from my oncologist) and I have years to be creative in my relationship to it. Ah, life in the uncertainty realm is a great adventure!
When people ask how I'm doing, I answer, "good enough." I have my dark moments. I'm sad and disappointed. I lean in to how I feel emotionally and then it passes and I want to "finish" something, like this blog, or an email, or a podcast episode, an updated website, or my audiobook. I feel "coherent" and I have an excited "potency" around teaching, writing, and crafting my new audiobook.

Other than that, life is great. I'm excited about teaching at Omega and Kripalu this year. You can go to my old-fashioned website for those dates: https://www.bonniegintis.com/wordpress/teaching/ I hope to have a new, more modern and functional website and webstore to see classes and my audiobook, and more by June of this year.

Steve and I are working non-stop on our podcast: https://osteopathyunplugged.com/
It's deeply satisfying and a LOT more work than I imagined. Because of the podcast, I am confident that I can produce an audiobook. We have the audio recording equipment and I know how to edit and package an audio product. For all you Continuum folks, an episode on The Three Anatomies will be coming in April. Stay tuned.

Many of you have asked, at some point, what you can do to help. Just knowing that you're there listening to my story is helpful. You could also buy my book, come to a workshop, or subscribe to our podcast.

If you don't want to sign up for the paid version, you can follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify or Google Podcasts for free and get notified when there's a new episode. The first 6 episodes are free for everyone forever. We will intermittently add a few other free full episodes. After the free foundational episodes, we give you a portion of each episode so that you can decide whether you want to subscribe or not. You can sign up for as little as $5 and cancel before the end of the month if you don't want to be charged every month. It's a great way to support our efforts.

Thanks for being in my life.

Until then, I'm sending oceans and skies full of love,
be well, listen deeply, and stay curious (that's how we end every podcast episode),
Bonnie

Where Does Healing Unfold?

“Cure is the prerogative of the organism.” These are the words of G. D. Hulett, Osteopath and nephew of Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of Osteopathy. Hulett lived, practiced, and taught in Kirksville, Missouri and wrote these words in 1904.

When I first read this quote in the late 1990s, I was both inspired and relieved. I didn’t have to be a miracle worker. I was never comfortable with the idea that any one person could be so powerful as to cause the cure or healing of another person. I was never drawn to the idea that someone else had the ability to change the course of my body's functioning, and I didn't want that power or responsibility over others. Upon reading this quote, I felt confident and reassured that my responsibility as an Osteopath and physician was to diagnose and treat my patients, and to educate them in order to create the conditions that their bodies needed to further their own healing process.

I don't mean to minimize what it takes to offer a good Osteopathic treatment. It takes years of dedication, training, study, and practice to hone one's perceptual and manual skills, and to learn to hold the space for others. It is an ongoing, lifelong endeavor to be a good Osteopath. But no matter how gifted the Osteopath is, the response to that treatment unfolds in the patient's body. Jim Jealous, DO used to say that the fulcrum of a treatment is in the patient, not in the Osteopath. To reword Hulett's quote, "healing only occurs when the patient responds to the treatment." 

I encounter so many people these days who just want to go to a practitioner and have them “fix” or heal them. Many people want to lie down on the table and have someone make their bodily troubles disappear. It just doesn’t work that way. The best that someone else can do for us is to help create the conditions for our own body to do what it needs to do to remodel, adapt, or learn to compensate for what has changed due to age, illness, or injury. 

I have devoted my life to the exploration of healing. I’ve had plenty of my own healing experiences to test my philosophy and approach personally, and then I practiced for 25 years as an Osteopath and had the opportunity to see how it all unfolded for other people.

My conclusion is absolutely clear; no one heals another. We can help each other find the conditions, causes, and situations that prevent our health from fully expressing itself, but then it’s our own body, our organismic being, that has to respond to the input. 

I have been studying Osteopathy since 1981, and I am always searching for ways to deepen my understanding and educate people about how to duplicate and support the treatment experience. So many of the problems I encountered in my Osteopathic practice could have been easily remedied by my patients themselves if they could have re-learned to interweave their bodies’ natural tendency to breathe, move, and rest into their busy lives. Development of our kinesthetic sense—the sensation and awareness we have of our own movement—is the key to this process. In my experience, Continuum is the only approach I’ve found that elicits something powerfully healing and reverent that parallels Osteopathic treatment, and it empowers each participant to access the ability to heal themselves.

If you want to explore with me in person, please consider coming to my workshop, Embodiment Through The Senses, October 30 - Nov 4 at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in western Massachusetts. Here is a link: https://kripalu.org/presenters-programs/embodiment-through-senses-transformative-self-care-retreat

If you would like to explore this and other Osteopathic concepts, please listen to the new podcast I'm doing with Steve. Here is a link to our homepage where you'll find all the details: https://osteopathyunplugged.com/

Introducing Osteopathy Unplugged...and a quick Health Update

After 25 years of being together, Steve and I decided to have a podcast. We've named it "Osteopathy Unplugged" because the type of Osteopathy we practice doesn't require electricity.

Over the years, we've explored all sorts of philosophical issues over what we call our "morning hot brown liquids" (coffee, tea, hot chocolate, etc.) and we realized that rather than write it all down in a book, that we would be modern and pass on our ponderings via the 21st century oral tradition of podcasting. The younger Osteopaths we work with are excited about listening to a podcast, rather than reading a book. It seems as if everyone loves listening to podcasts these days.

We hope you listen and we welcome your feedback. We are in the early stages of expressing the art, the craft, and the tech of podcasting, and we hope to learn from our listeners.

Here is a link to our homepage where you'll find all the details: https://osteopathyunplugged.com/

The foundational episodes (about 8 episodes) will be free of charge, and will be available on our website, Patreon, Apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Four episodes are already available.
After the foundational episodes, the complete collection will only be offered at Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/OsteopathyUnplugged
If you’d like to support us, you can sign up on Patreon.

We want to share our Osteopathic world view with anyone who is interested in Osteopathy. This includes: Osteopaths, Osteopathic Physicians, students, other healthcare practitioners, Continuum practitioners, patients, and anyone curious enough to listen and willing to dive deeply into the complexities of healing. Help spread the word.

be well, listen deeply, and stay curious.


HEALTH UPDATE - "SCANNING FOR FUN & PROFIT"

I can joke about the PET scan that I had last week, because it looks pretty good. It wasn't exactly fun, but I did hang my sign that reads, "The Tunnel of Love" on the outside of the scanner before they fed me into the tube. We all had a good laugh. And they did profit, as they billed Medicare nearly $10,000 for the procedure.

Great news! 95% of it is improved from the last one. The questionable area is probably due to reaction from the radiation therapy I had in January, and it is not a big deal. I do still have a small breast tumor and it didn't grow larger, but it is a bit more metabolically active. No one knows exactly what this means. I have grown and gotten rid of 9, yes NINE previous breast tumors, so I don't worry about this one.

All of this information supports decreasing the dose of my treatment with palbociclib (Ibrance). I begin my next treatment cycle in a week and I’m hoping it will be easier, as well as just as effective at the lower dose.

Learn About Life By Acquainting Yourself With Death

You can learn a lot about life by acquainting yourself with death.

Pause now, and notice if you are triggered by my opening sentence. If you aren’t, that’s very encouraging. If you are upset by this sentiment, let’s explore what that’s about. Did you assume this means I have bad news about my health? Relax. I don’t. Are you squirming in your seat with the uncertainty towards which this opening points? Here is something I am certain about; I am going to die someday, and so are you. Now that we’ve established that, can we please accept this fact of life and learn to appreciate the preciousness of what we have now while we are here together?

Many people who teach about death as a way to more deeply appreciate living, say some version of this opening remark. Lately I have been reading, listening, watching, or being in a Zoom box with several of these kindred spirits: Frank Ostaseski, Francis Weller, Marilyn Schlitz, Stephen Jenkinson, Kim Rosen, and others who share their insights into living and dying.

Some of my friends and loved ones have asked me if I’m being morbid or prematurely preparing for dying. Their asking me this question shows me how important this exploration is in our death-phobic culture. Dying is not something that happens in a faraway time we call “later.” It is a process and it begins the moment we are born. Dying doesn’t spread like an infection; it’s not contagious; it’s part of living. Talking about death won’t make you more susceptible to it. Life and death are a two-for-one package deal. Why not befriend mortality?

Accepting that someday I will die allows me to more fully appreciate being alive. Acceptance is not the same as liking, agreeing with something, giving up, surrendering, or letting go. Acceptance is one of my greatest motivators to show up and be as fully present and engaged as I can be. When I forget that my life won’t last forever, I get lazy, I procrastinate, and I take things for granted.

I acknowledge the limits of my body, as well as the possibilities and potential that present themselves even in the midst of living with cancer. It’s one of life’s paradoxical qualities, where two things seem opposite, but both can be true. If I stop trying to fight with what is, I can relax and listen more intently. I can more clearly hear the messages from my body that guide me to make choices about how I care for myself. Acceptance allows me to creatively compensate and adapt. Accepting the limits of my life sparks my longing to fully embrace being here and making the most of it all now.

I had a PET scan on March 1st that showed how well my body is responding to my new treatment. Most areas of cancer activity have decreased in metabolic activity. A few spots are unchanged. There’s nothing new or worse. That’s the best scan I have had in years! Living with metastatic cancer is like a rollercoaster ride. I’ve had 12 years of ups and downs, but it’s always there, whispering in my ear, “Wake up, live now!”

The Ocean, Not The Boat

This is the longest I've gone between blog posts. What a year! We all have stories from the past year about how we were distracted from our usual priorities. Our lives have all been touched by something: Covid, cancer, Zoom calls, or some other ordeal. I hope to get back to writing more regularly in the coming months and I hope sharing my experience enriches all of our lives. We are in this life together!

I had my follow-up PET scan yesterday, and it looks like I definitely have a trend of new cancer growth in my bones.

For those of you who don't know about PET scans, here is a brief explanation of the value of the information they provide:

PET scans create an eerie picture, a strange mix of light and dark patches that construct an impressionistic image of the body and show which clusters of cells are behaving like cancer. The increased metabolic activity of cancer cells glow brightly in contrast to the dark, relatively less active healthy tissues.  A CAT scan is included as part of the PET scan and can be likened to a 3-dimensional x-ray. It shows detail in bones really well. Together, these 2 scans show me where there are new concerns.

I have cancer growing in some lymph nodes and multiple bones: ribs, sternum, sacrum, hip, and several vertebrae (C4, C6, L2). The scan shows a mix of previous spots lighting up more brightly and a few new spots. Mysteriously, there are some old areas that look better than before, and I'm thrilled to know no organs are involved. No one knows what these conflicting results mean, but the fact that I have new areas, some described by the radiologist as "worsening areas of severe bony destruction" tell me that it's time to change my course. 

I am not ready to let cancer take over in my bones, so I am going to switch to some new mainstream treatments and see if it can slow things down. Since I have so many friends who want the medical details, here  they are: I will change my estrogen blocker to an injectable form called fulvestrant (brand name Faslodex) and I will begin taking an oral treatment called palbociclib (Ibrance is the brand name). This treatment inhibits the formation of a protein (CDK4/6) and slows the growth of the type of breast cancer that I have. It's considered a "targeted therapy" and has far fewer side effects and collateral damage than conventional chemotherapy. I will have to monitor my white blood count, but I won't know about the side effects and the change in the quality of my life until I start taking it and see how it affects me. 

I'm also considering a mini round of radiation (less than 5 days), just for pain relief. It won't change the course of the disease, but it's quite effective for bone pain. I will do anything to avoid taking pain meds. I detest the way opiates make me feel and I can't take anti-inflammatories because of my polycystic kidneys. It would be a sad joke to survive cancer and end up in renal failure needing dialysis because of a handful of ibuprofens.

I will continue all my other "alternative and complementary" treatments and practices. I have seriously increased my devotion to both Continuum and meditation practices.

I've known literally, in my bones, that this has been happening for almost a year. I've explored so many ways of being in relationship to this process, hoping it would shift...and it hasn't. Although I certainly don't like what's happening, I accept it. This is just what human bodies do sometimes. It's not personal, even though it's happening to me. I will continue to take good care of myself, as Darlene Cohen used to say, "because I yearn to be cared for" and not because I think I can control the outcome. 

The illusion of control over certain health outcomes can become a toxic motivator. The alternative world is just as guilty as the mainstream world in offering simple pseudo-solutions.  Do the purveyors of this so-called healing advice ever wonder what happens to people in the time of their decline and on their deathbeds when they might have gotten the wrong idea that they failed? 

Too many people die thinking or feeling that they didn't try hard enough, take the right supplements, eat enough vegetables, do the right ceremony, go to the right kind of acupuncturist, expose themselves to some magical electromagnetic frequencies, avoid the wrong electromagnetic frequencies, or see the right shaman or therapist. I am done being tempted by that thinking. I've always thought that what you do is not as important as the consciousness with which you do it, but I don't think I completely believed it until now.

There is a view of life where choices seem to matter and cause and effect seem to be evident. I know I feel better if I eat a certain way, move my body, sleep enough, avoid too much alcohol and ice cream. If I break a bone, I want it "fixed" in a cast so that it can heal as well as it can. This gives us the wrong impression when it comes to the length and breadth of the span of the living human body. We cannot control the big picture. All living things die, and when it's time for that to unfold, I imagine (and hear from others who have spoken to me from their deathbeds) that it's a bit like being on a runaway train - you just have to surrender. Living in a body moving towards death has its own momentum. We can tinker with the surface variables, but we can't control the underlying process of unfolding. 

For you folks with a Continuum vocabulary, the cause and effect that seems evident in the Cultural/Personal Anatomy is less so in the Primordial/Biological Anatomy, and dissolves completely in the Cosmic Anatomy, where life and death are not separate. We develop a perceptual habit of seeing life and death as separate, but they are just different states that can be appreciated along a spectrum, or "continuum" of our existence.

For those of you who might be a bit uncomfortable or squeamish right now, let me quote Monty Python, "I am not dead yet!" I am not announcing my imminent death, but you Python fans might be thinking, "But no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition!" You are right. Since I can't predict when I'll die, I might as well begin preparation so that I can move as gracefully as possible through this phase of my life. The process that's moving through my body is moving at the speed of a glacier. I am, however, becoming acutely aware of the process in a new light.

A teacher of mine once asked, "When you're on a leaky boat way out in the ocean, are you going to identify with the boat or the ocean?" I feel like I'm patching up the leak in my boat because I love my boat and I love the people in my life. I also know it won't last, and that's ok. My spiritual practice is dedicated to my love of the ocean, not the boat.

The only thing that I know is of value is my own presence and awareness as my life unfolds. That can be refined and I can continue to live in deep inquiry regardless of what cancer is doing in my body. That is where I choose to put my attention. We don't always get to have what we prefer, but we can choose how we meet what's happening.

In case you missed it, in 2017, I wrote an article, "The Continuum of Uncertainty."  It is based on conversations I had with Emilie Conrad, the founder of Continuum, at the end of her life. I reread it this morning and was surprised by how it reflects what I am experiencing now, only now I get it in a whole new way. To read what I wrote, check it out in the newly launched Continuum Media Library:

https://www.continuumteachers.com/media-library/the-continuum-of-uncertainty 

Thank you for being in my life and making this leaky boat ride so fabulous,

Bonnie

Life Moving Forward

Life moving forward needs to be different. This is always true, but now, more than ever, the necessity to change some of the ways we live is evident. Whether it’s Covid, fires, drought, hurricanes, politics, racism, or cancer, we are being called upon to live differently. 

 
I ask myself each day what I can do to bring balance and connection to this disconnected world. I begin with my own body. I believe that having a diversity of movement and breath within myself opens me to a greater diversity in my outer world. I listen. I respond. I am coherent in the face of chaos.
 
As we all know, life has been filled with distractions, hence my late follow-up to my post from May. I had a follow-up scan in August and we have decided that there’s nothing new rising on the cancer horizon. The PET scan is a very sensitive and fickle test. It seems ironic that too much movement, the very “medicine” that helps to inhibit cancer growth, can also create a “hot spot” on a scan. None of the suspect areas that lit up in the previous two scans are new. They are just glowing more brightly than they have in a while. Most of them looked better this time. None of them were worse. I have chosen to go back to scanning every 6-12 months, depending on how I feel. Considering that right now, as I enter my 11^th year with Stage 4 cancer, I feel the best I have in over a decade, I will continue living and caring for myself as best I can until my body tells me otherwise. I am resting my mind after this false alarm.
 
We all have some issue that causes us to implode with fear. Whether it’s coronavirus, fire, or cancer, we are all at risk of embodying a rigidity that we imagine keeps us safe from the unwanted. Perhaps in the moment of being stalked by a predator, our primitive brain triggers this paralyzing survival response, but in our modern world, the catastrophes that trigger our fears are not usually helped by playing dead.
 
No one expects catastrophe. The day before an earthquake, a fire, a car accident, a cancer diagnosis, or a pandemic descends upon us, we rarely suspect that life will change suddenly and drastically.
 
I did not expect this pandemic. I expected something else: a climate catastrophe, an oil crisis, a toxic spill, a war, but not a pandemic. If you replace the word, "illness" with "pandemic" or whatever else scares you these days, in John O’Donohue’s poem A Blessing For A Friend On The Arrival Of Illness, our old lives do indeed feel distant. 
 
Now is the time of dark

invitation

beyond a frontier that

you did not expect.

Abruptly your old life

seems distant.

 
Our old way of life is not only distant, it is gone, and I'm fairly certain that I don't want things to go back to exactly the way they were. Of course, I'd love to hug people, teach a class in a room full of people breathing deeply together. I’d love to travel. I long for theater and live music to return. I'd love to go to a comedy club and share the air with other people’s laughter, or go out to eat with friends. I'd love everyone to be earning a good living and have access to good food, health care, and affordable housing, but oh, that didn't exist before! We need to find a new balance in many aspects of our lives.

Nothing before has made

you feel so isolated

and lost.
When the reverberations

of shock subside in you,
may grace come to restore you to balance.
May it shape a new space 
in your heart
to embrace this illness (pandemic) 
as a teacher
who has come to open 
your life to new worlds.
May you find in yourself
a courageous hospitality
towards what is 
difficult, painful and unknown.

Courageous hospitality is something I've practiced for almost 11 years - with cancer. Like the pandemic, I would prefer to live without it, but since it's here, I am willing to listen to its message and allow it to open a new space in my heart or any other place it needs to inform me of another possibility. I learned that being in relationship to cancer is the way to successfully co-exist with it, and perhaps this approach is necessary with coronavirus. We can't kill it, so let's learn what we can from it, and find a way to co-exist with this difficult, painful, and unknown entity.

Co-existence is not a popular approach to this virus or anything else in our culture, when you look at the overall ethos of our way of life. We have a cultural of killing. We kill the viruses, bacteria, and fungi that live in or on our bodies with antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, hand sanitizer, deodorant. We kill weeds with herbicides like glyphosate. We sterilize the soil so that our food will grow without weeds. We "freshen" the air. We wave ultraviolet wands over suspected contaminated areas. We put poisonous chlorine in our drinking water. We even kill people who are different and deemed unwanted. There has to be another way to connect and co-exist with difficult, painful, and unknown entities.
 
How do we find connection while living in isolation? Most of us have opened to the unexpected world of Zoom and other online platforms. I've participated in events that I could have never attended in person. I've seen and heard and felt so much unexpectedly, even while on an unstable internet connection. Emilie Conrad, the founder of Continuum, called the internet a “prosthetic device” for communication and connection. It may not be as good as the real thing, but it is better than having no opportunity to be together. And like the people who have amazing prosthetic legs that allow them to participate in the Paralympic Games, being together on Zoom grants us superpowers. We can gather without the fossil fuel we would use to travel. We can participate from the comfort of our own homes. People can attend who would not be able to make it in person.
 
This fall and winter I will be offering an online study group based on my book, Engaging The Movement Of Life, for those who want to dive more deeply into what my words mean to them as a felt experience in their bodies. If you’re interested, go to: https://www.bonniegintis.com/teaching/ for more information.

As we move towards autumn and winter, we must become curious about how to keep connection alive in relative isolation. All life is phasic: inhale/exhale, expand/contract, coil/uncoil, fold/unfold, flex/extend, contract/relax, sleep/wake, form/dissolve. There is constant interchange between receptivity and expressivity. Seasons come and go and so do pandemics as the phases of life move forward.

 
What has changed in you and your view of life moving forward from this unexpected unfolding? What are you learning? Where and how do you find refuge and respite? Life moving forward needs to be different. What does this mean for you?

Wisdom Arrives On A Warning

Everything is unfolding slowly these days: the opening-up of society in this middle stage of the pandemic, my tulips, the plot in the book I'm reading, my own writing, and my ongoing relationship with cancer. I had a PET scan last Friday, and as is usual these days in so many aspects of life, the information it provides is not great and is somewhat confusing.

I got a preliminary result by email yesterday. I can't get a phone visit until May 13th here with my university-based oncologist, but I do have a video consultation with my "second opinion" oncologist at Dana Farber (in Boston) this Thursday, May 7th. I find it amusing that I will be getting my second opinion before my first. Life is turned upside down and backwards these days!

I don't have access to the actual scan to look at it myself, so I am dependent on the written report until I have my appointment on Thursday to clarify things. Here are the high points:

• My breast tumor (my 10th one) is about the same size, but is not as metabolically active as it was last October. That means the cancer cells are dividing more slowly than they were.
• I have a new "tiny" spot glowing brightly in my sternum - damn! 
• My 3rd rib shows increased cancer activity - but it doesn't hurt anymore. Go figure!?!
• They did not even mention my 2nd rib, which showed up on the last scan as a new place of possible spread. I have no idea if it stopped lighting up or if they missed it.
• The lymph nodes in my chest are lighting up in the same way as they've been for a while. They are not in my lungs, just around the area of the upper chest. They seem to be processing something...but what, and why for so many years?

I am mostly feeling disappointed. I had hoped to prove the trend to be wrong, but there's too much evidence that something is going on to ignore it. I don't want to cross that fine line between positive thinking and denial. I am also wary of the other fine line - the one between heightened awareness and paranoia. I am committed to my practice of staying grounded in the present and not allowing my mind to make things worse than they are.

It's easier to stay present and be clear about choices when I'm feeling relatively better than I have in a while. Steve & I hiked up Snake Mountain, the highest point in the next county south of us last Saturday, along with our friends Patty and John, whose birthday we celebrated on the summit. It was 8.2 miles round-trip. It's the longest hike I've taken in 11 years! I bow to the spirit of the serpent, symbol of the movement of water on land, and the mythic representative of transformation. I shed my skin in tribute as I move through this time in my life. Thanks to John for having a birthday and giving me the reason to hike that day up a mountain named after my favorite symbolic creature.

It's hard to be afraid of cancer when I am feeling so much better. Way back at the beginning of this ordeal, 10 1/2 years ago, I felt horrible. Deep down, I knew that something was terribly wrong way before I was diagnosed. Now, I have to find a way to balance information, sensations, and my gut-feeling about what's happening. It's not easy finding this balance. I'm exploring ways to be with what's unfolding, and I'm immersed more deeply into uncertainty. I have some waiting (a most challenging practice) for my 2 appointments to move into some phase of making choices. I have a sense that nothing is happening quickly and that I won't be taking any drastic measures.

I listened to Krista Tippett's interview with Ocean Vuong this week (https://onbeing.org/programs/ocean-vuong-a-life-worthy-of-our-breath/) and was moved by so much of what he said. He described how "wisdom arrives on a warning" and I have chosen this as my contemplation for this very challenging week. We are all surrounded by countless warnings in these times. How can I discern the difference between wisdom, useless information, dogma, and propaganda?
What matters most right now?

Radical Embodiment In The Time of Covid-19

I ventured into the bowels of my local hospital this morning, Monday March 30th, for my 6-month follow-up scan. It was eerie being that out in the world, as if the zombie apocalypse had already passed and all that was left were a few abandoned cars scattered about in empty parking lots. I descended into the depths of the massive medical complex to the corner where cancer patients are injected with radioactive dye and wait in frigid, dark rooms to be scanned in a noisy scanner tube…but I never got that far.

At the registration desk, they told me my PET scan was canceled.

I was not only never notified, I spoke directly to someone in my oncologist’s office last week and we scheduled an April 1st follow-up tele-medicine visit to review my results. That person assured me the scan was on and that I would be contacted if there was a problem. When I didn’t receive my usual reminder call the day before the scan, I called to confirm. I spoke to a clerk and she connected me to the radiology doctor on-call, who told me that I was indeed on the schedule and she assured me that they would not cancel without contacting me…and yet they did.

I sat there at the registration desk feeling the heat rise in my masked face. My skin began to feel stretched so thin that I feared I would burst open. I felt so vulnerable. I was angry, disappointed, and frustrated, not to mention hungry and in caffeine withdrawal from the pointless fasting I did in preparation for the scan. I didn’t know whether to cry or yell, so I took a breath, thanked the clerk who was not at fault, grabbed the doorknob with a tissue, and ran to the deserted parking garage where I got in my car and cried. The magnitude of the social distancing in the cavernous garage meant that no one saw or heard me.

This is where my years of practice pay off. I can be patient and then I can wait a little more. I can wait for the emotional storm to pass, knowing that it is just bad weather and it will subside. I am thankful to be living with a non-aggressive cancer. I don’t fear that delaying my scan a month or 2 or even 3 will make that big of a difference in the big picture, even though I have had a bit more pain in my rib that has the largest mass of bone mets. My heart goes out to all those who have been recently diagnosed and need their scans and infusions and can’t wait until the pandemic passes. Life goes on during a pandemic, and so does disease. My gut sense is that mine can wait a bit.

Before driving home, I paused for a few minutes and dropped down into sensing how my body felt. I took a few breaths and exhaled for longer than I inhaled, and that allowed me to stay connected to my sense of Radical Embodiment. Why do I call it radical? Because what I learned in traditional health classes and "physical education" in school did not prepare me to deal with having cancer during a pandemic, but Continuum, Osteopathy, and meditation have given me those skills. These are all radical approaches to embodied living, ways of fundamentally changing the nature of something in a far-reaching, foundational, novel, and thorough manner.

Why do I call it embodiment and not mindfulness? Because I have come to not just believe, but experience that it is primarily through the body that we interact with our world, not through the mind. The body experiences things first, then thoughts happen. Embodiment is the conscious awareness of the many sensations that arise from inside the body that endow us with a sense of physical presence in the moment. Sensations keep us grounded because they only occur in the present. Cultivating a refined awareness of the many and varied nuances of sensations gives us a tremendous amount of information about our state of health, our environment, and allows us to choose where to put our attention, and what we need in order to care for ourselves more effectively.

Radical embodiment includes mindfulness; it’s not the other way around. Our silent-felt experience is primary, and mindfulness arises from the response to living that begins in the body and finds its way into awareness. Many people struggle with trying to access mindfulness through their thoughts, when it’s the body that holds the key.

Most people are oblivious of their bodies and take this amazing vehicle that carries them through life for granted. We don’t often acknowledge embodiment until something goes wrong, like illness, injury, or disappointment. Sensing what we feel inside our bodies increases self-awareness, self-reflection, self-regulation, and resilience. That’s what I needed this morning. I sat in my car and committed to my practice and my way of being in life. I felt my body respond and calm down with my prolonged exhalations. I felt the support of my seat and then decided that the sensation of the mask and gloves were no longer necessary or valuable and I ripped them off and tossed them in my plastic “contaminated bag.”

It's a strange time to be alive, but being alive is a good way to be. My body has the same basic needs and follows all the same rules, regardless of peace, war, or pandemic. Of course, I tailor the way I care for myself according to the necessity of the moment, but my body doesn’t respond differently because the governor told me to stay home. In fact, his directive has made me yearn for the wilderness. Since I can’t go on a trip right now, I can explore my own “portable wilderness”. I can discover the frontiers of my body’s wilderness anytime, anywhere. And that’s just what I did in the medical center parking lot before driving home. Sensing the wildness inside of my body refreshed me and readied me to face the rest of my day.

The fundamental basis of health is not the absence of disease, but the ability to adapt, and find ways to respond and adjust to whatever challenges we experience. Whether it is cancer, a paper cut, or disappointment, the body finds ways to repair itself as best it can, and then adapt to the new state of things. Health is not an object or a destination we will get to someday when the pandemic ends and things calm down. Being healthy is a work-in-progress, an on-going innovative, creative, adaptive process.

How are you creatively adapting to the state of the world right now?

My Real Life Radical Embodiment

September 29, 2019
I thought I was no longer going to report my health status in my blog, thinking that my many subscribers don't need or want this much detailed information, but so many of you protested when I announced this, that I will continue to let you know what’s up with my health. To fill in the blanks, I am posting 2 emails I sent out to a few close friends, colleagues, and loved ones during this past month. I will (formally) go back to the topic of Radical Embodiment in a week or so, but this blog post describes my experience of real life Radical Embodiment better than any formal definition.

My periodic scans and tests (PET scan, CT scans, ultrasounds, tumor markers, and other blood work) are actually a test of my spiritual practice. Living with cancer is an exercise in relating to uncertainty. Then having tests that don't always clarify what's happening is another level of challenge. I'm the same person before and after the test results, but information feels like it changes me. I know that's a mental construct, and I try to be amused by the workings of my mind, even when I'm upset about cancer, potential decrepitude, and dying. "There I go again," is my mantra, when I find myself crumbling from the effects of abstract information on my mood. I am curious about how to dance with this situation.

"Not the high mountain monastery
I had hoped for, the realface of my spiritual practiceis this..."

as the Kim Rosen poem, Practice says.

I had my annual PET Scan on September 28th. My oncologist, and 2 radiologists don't know what to make of the scan:

Perplexing piece of information #1: My 1 breast tumor is the same size (1.4 cm) but it lit up more brightly, which should mean it's more metabolically active...but if it really was so, they say it should have grown.

Perplexing piece of information #2: My right 3rd rib that has been lit up for 10 years is glowing more brightly, as well as rib #2 above it. On previous scans they've both been lit up at some point. This activity seems to come and go - no one knows why. One radiologist thinks that if my ribs had metabolically actively growing cancer for 10 years, that they would have been eaten away already...so perhaps it's not cancer. Garden variety inflammation can make things light up on a PET scan. We can send a man to the moon, but we can't tell the difference between arthritis and cancer on a $14,000 Scan!!! Good grief!!!

Here's perplexing piece of information #3: The lymph nodes in my chest (mediastinal, subcarinal) are not enlarged, but light up...which they almost always do, but once again, a little more brightly on this scan. My breathing is fabulous and my lungs sound and feel clear. Hmmm...

Perplexing piece of information #4: None of my other 9 places of bone metastases light up. When cancer wakes up, it often does all over at the same time.

I spent the late afternoon in the University of Vermont medical center. and I had my oncologist, and 2 radiologists looking at all my scans and everyone had different opinions, which shows what an exact science this is ;)

Here's the plan:
1. I had blood drawn to see if any circulating tumor markers are elevated in my blood.
2. I'm having a breast ultrasound next week to more accurately measure the size of the breast tumor. It's been a year since we measured it last by ultrasound, and at that time it was smaller than the time before. A PET scan is a notoriously inaccurate way to measure tumor size.
3. I will repeat the PET Scan in 3 months.

My gut feeling is that this is nothing...but what do I know?! I got fooled 10 years ago when this all took me by surprise. I am humbled by my inability to accurately predict what's happening here.

Once again, I surrender to the curriculum of the "advanced course" of my life. I am the same person today as I was before the scan, and I feel the best I've felt in 10 years. Right now, that's the piece of information on which I choose to put my attention.

October 26, 2019
Progress is a funny word in the realm of cancer. Most people think of the word in a positive light, but in cancer terms, it refers to "progression of disease." They make the disease the reference point, as opposed to the health of the person. In Osteopathy, we quote the founder of our profession, who said, "The object of the doctor is to find health..." I have to remind myself of this when I enter Cancerland (that's what I call the oncology department.)

We usually think of the word "negative" negatively, but in cancer testing, it's good to have a negative result. I am amused by the paradoxical lexicon of living with cancer. It’s a good thing that I am so easily amused because my life is full of paradoxical challenges right now.

I was deeply inspired to write Friday morning...and then the phone rang. Cancerland called with a last-minute opening for a breast ultrasound. I took it, instead of waiting until Monday for my scheduled appointment. So much for inspiration! I spent the remaining pre-appointment part of my day rolling on the floor, doing Lunar breath (you Continuum folks know what I mean...and the rest of you need to take a Continuum workshop so that you too, can practice this extremely valuable way of breathing.)

Ok, I don’t want to tease you, so here is the instruction in a nutshell:
Breathe in normally and exhale with the whispery sound of "ha." Now breath again, but this time when you exhale, close your mouth, allowing the air to exit your nose, and still imagine you're whispering "ha." This is the Lunar Breath. I also like to imagine that I am fogging a mirror on the back of my throat when I prolong my exhalation in this way. It's soft and gentle. It is NOT Ujjayi breathing from yoga. There should be no use of force or constriction in the throat. Most people find it supremely relaxing. (There is an urban myth that doing it can make you invisible. Emilie once forgot her passport at the Canadian border and did Lunar breath while the border guard managed to not see her sitting in the back seat of the car. Emilie could pull off things like that!...sorry, but I digress.)

My breast ultrasound is hard to interpret, like everything in my life these days. The radiologist says that my boob-buddy (sounds better than "tumor" or "mass") is very irregularly-shaped and hard to measure. It seems a little bigger to her, but she says it's tricky to measure such an oddly shaped blob. “We could be looking at a diagonal this time, which makes it seem bigger,” she tried to explain. It seems only about 2-3 millimeters bigger, but it could be the angle. So much for science! The take-home message here is that it isn't smaller. My disappointment feels like the floor dropped out from under me and I’m sinking in deep dark water. I am fortunate to know my way around deep dark immersion.

My tumor markers (from a blood test) are normal-ish - on the high side of normal. More inconclusive results - ugh! I need to test them again in 3 months to see if there's a trend. My next PET scan in on Jan 27th. It will be helpful to see if there's a trend 3 months from now.

I am waiting to speak with my oncologist. I have a gut feeling that I shouldn't accept that my cancer has made "progress" and wait to see what the January repeat of my PET scan shows. If it looks like a trend, then I won't fight with what reality seems to be. Nothing happens fast with my type of cancer, so I think I can take a few months to see what unfolds.

From where I am now, I am not sufficiently convinced that a few millimeters should define a trend that would make me sign up for a monthly injection of a new drug (Faslodex) for the rest of my life. That would be the next step if I decided to do a different treatment. It would literally be a pain in the butt. It gets injected into the butt muscles and it has to be done monthly in a hospital, even though I am capable of injecting myself. It's a fancier form of what I've taken orally for the past 10 years, that blocks estrogen receptors. It seems to work well in many women who stop responding to oral estrogen blockade. It has a lot more side effects.

Cancer is smart and evolves to adapt to the low-estrogen environment. It figures out new ways of growing when it’s deprived of its favorite fuel. So, until I am ready to switch my treatment medication, I will meditate on how this situation can evolve differently. I like to think of myself as a highly adaptable person. But how can I evolve without the cancer adapting to its new milieu? This is where the relationship with cancer gets tricky. I don’t want to take an aggressive warlike stance. But I want to outlive the metastatic trickster. How can I be in relationship to something I want to get rid of? This has been my decade-long inquiry, which is expanding now that the plot has thickened.

Life goes on, and it's my practice to find my way back to that inspiration I had yesterday morning amidst the distraction of scans and tests and the uncertainty of cancer progress. Many of you have been in workshops with me in which I ask you to bring your attention to a problem, an illness, injury, or something that you wish would be different in your body, and then I ask if you can feel the longing to feel better, the yearning to be cared for, and drop the object of your negativity. I find this exercise in perspective profoundly helpful right now.

My body is part of the natural world and what’s happening is being guided by the laws of nature. I’m not being singled out and punished. Nature is just doing its thing in this crazy world of ours. How can I support nature to express itself in my body like I do in my garden? I want to selectively cultivate flowers, not weeds, so I adjust the soil, the water, and what I feed the plants to alter their behavior. How can I do this with my body and the cancer that grows like a weed within me? How can I listen more deeply to my bones and discover what they need?

Writing helps me find the longing to live and express myself so that I can connect with other people. Love is a not-so-secret ingredient.

with gratitude for all your love,
I couldn't do this alone,
Bonnie