speaker-0: Before we begin, a word about this episode. It holds the story of my cousin Tom, who died of cancer at age 13. I talked with my aunt, his mum, about his death and about her ongoing connection to him. If you've lost a child or someone you love, or if you're walking through serious illness right now, this may be very tender. Please take care of yourself as you listen. You might choose to listen with someone beside you or to come back to it another time. There are support lines in the show notes.

speaker-1: Overall I think I'm a completely different person from Tom's death. I think all of us are in the close family. don't think we'll ever be the same.

speaker-0: He was like a little sage and he was very wise and very calm.

speaker-1: Wouldn't it be amazing if you were just brought up through an education where they just said you do your best for you. You thrive, you love yourself and let yourself love other people and receive love. And wouldn't it be amazing if education all sprung from a place of love for yourself and other people.

speaker-0: Welcome to Stand in the Circle with me, Dr. Rosalind Watts. I'm a clinical psychologist, researcher and founder of ACER Integration. This podcast is about how we get connected in a culture that pulls us apart. We talk about the hardest experiences of being human and the circles of care we have needed, couldn't find and are searching for now with stories from people who've lived it and researchers and practitioners. Healing in community is the old way. the work of our time is to rebuild our connectedness to ourselves, to each other and to the living world. Welcome to Stand in the Circle. I'm Dr. Rosalind Watts and this month we are inside the territory of cancer. In the UK, one in two of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetimes. More of us will face cancer in our lifetimes than ever before and more of us will survive it than ever before. Modern medicine has done incredible things for survival rates, but the disconnectedness of modern culture means that many people walk this path alone. So we will look at the other important medicines that our culture has forgotten. Connection to community, connection to nature, to purpose, and to a sense of being part of something larger. And we will hear how that can hugely support people experiencing cancer and those who love them and look after them. And we will of course explore the psychedelic frontiers, plant medicine, that other type of ancient medicine that our culture has forgotten, but is now remembering. And we will see what hope this cutting edge research offers to those walking through the mountainous terrain of cancer. I see all these things as offering shards of light when we are walking through dark places. They are all ways to stand in the circle even when we feel very alone and very frightened. In this episode, I'll share my own family's story through my aunt Emilia, who walked her son, my cousin Tom, through a rare form of cancer called DSRCT. He was diagnosed at 10 and he died at 13. And I'll tell you about my own discovery of carrying the brachy gene and the preventative surgeries that led to. And we'll keep coming back to what holds us, what connects us, the three ways we can stand in a circle with cancer, with ourselves, with each other, with the wider world. Then over the course of this month in subsequent episodes I'll be speaking with members of the ASA community and also psychedelic researchers about what community, nature connection and psychedelic medicines might offer people facing cancer and the people who love them. And the week after that, week four of Cancer Month, I'll answer your question. So if at any point listening you have a question, please submit it. Details of how to do that are in the show notes. Some of these conversations run long and I really wanted to include as much as I could. So settle in. You don't have to listen all at once. You can always circle back. So as I already said, in the UK, Cancer Research UK estimates that nearly one in two of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetime. Half. Around 420,000 new diagnoses every year in this country. That's roughly 1,200 people every single day in the UK. being told that they have cancer. In the United States, over two million new diagnoses this year alone and a lifetime risk of about one in three. And as I already said, survival has never been higher. Five-year survival for all cancers combined in the US has reached an all-time high of 70%. And that's up from 49 % in the mid-70s. And that is an extraordinary achievement of modern medicine. But the treatment is getting better, while the community around it is getting worse. Many people living with cancer feel lonely because of it. One in five people over 55 with cancer are alone at home during treatment and recovery. And loneliness in cancer patients is now linked in that research with higher mortality. So being alone makes the disease harder to survive. And carers report even more loneliness and more stress than patients. More than 40 % of cancer carers meet the criteria for depression. There's a term in the palliative care literature, social death. It's the moment a person becomes their illness in the eyes of the people around them. The invitation stops, the conversation turns awkward, friends pull back because they don't know what to say. So cancer is not only a medical event, it's a social event. It's a body event. It's a meaning event. It often... changes the way we see the world. And almost all of that happens at home, in private, with far too little help and far too little company and connectedness. That gap between what cancer asks of us and what our culture knows how to give is what this month is about. And I want to introduce you now to my aunt Emilia. She's a solicitor, a mother of four, my cousin Tom. died of cancer when he was 13. He was first diagnosed at 10 with this rare cancer called DSRCT and years of treatments and surgeries and different hospitals. And through it all, Amelia walked and then when the time came, lay beside him. And I asked her to talk with me about what held her, what was missing and what she found.

speaker-1: So Tom was my third child, still is my third son, and ⁓ quite a spirited, lively, artistic brother to two older sisters. And when he was born and was always a bit of a tag along, so they would dress him up as a girl and he'd puddle along and he just used to fit in and was very funny. sensitive, kind, intelligent. The minute I picked him up from school, he'd say immediately what homework he had to do and when he was going to start and when he was going to finish it. And had very straw blonde hair, bright blue eyes and little pink cheeks. You end up in just a completely different world, ⁓ a world that you never knew existed of medicine, support, air conditioning, operations. chemotherapy, a whole, you just disappear. It's like you're taken from normal world and you're spirited away into a completely separate universe. And you don't know the rules and you don't understand the language. And all you know is that you wish whatever was happening was happening to you and not to your 10 year old son. I remember him waking me up in the night and I remember him saying, I'm struggling, mum. A lot of my family had arrived in the house and people were We've got a blended family, so there were various different half-sisters and sisters and lots of people came because we told them that Tom was dying. So the house was kind of lit up. I was lying with my arms around him. It was like I was in another place, just me and Tom, and just breathing with him and started to count his breaths, because every breath was like a gift. And within that instance, It was like a video was being played. It was like a door opened and a video was being played under my eyelids. It was very different from an imagined thought. My imagination isn't very... I've got an imagination, but it's not very colourful. I don't particularly invent images. And if I try and think of a face of somebody I've just seen, I find it very difficult to... visualize people or things when they're not there. But this was completely different. It was just like a video was being played in my inner sight. And I saw a tunnel. I saw a woman. She was a young woman in her 20s. And I remember her so clearly now. She was the pale face, the very pretty with a slightly pointy chin, quite pronounced cheekbones, dark hair coming down in a slightly 1970s hairstyle. She was wearing a gown and she was holding something in her hand. And I do remember looking at her face thinking she's so pretty. She's coming through this tunnel. You could see light, a pure, pure white, powerful light on the outside of the tunnel, sort of infiltrating its way through this, what seemed like a dark, solid material, like it was almost semi-permeable. I can't describe it. Then I opened my eyes and thought, How can I have closed my eyes and been watching this woman when I should have been with Tom? And I held him and his breathing was very shallow and I carried on counting his breaths. And then he made a little gurgle and then there was no more breath. And he died. And just at that moment, my sister walked into, opened the door, walked into the room and I sort of almost put my hand up like... The air felt so thick, everything felt so solid, the atmosphere was so, I don't know, heavy. And I felt so held by it and can't describe it. And I wouldn't have consciously known it, but it was almost like I didn't want her to speak to break that moment. And I just think I sort of whispered something like, it's happened. was almost like it was a good thing at that moment. It's so strange to say that. And she looked at me and sort of nodded, she understood. And she said at that time, she saw Tom sitting bolt upright on his bed with all his hair back, pink cheeks, looking just beyond her with his blue focused eyes, like he was ready, he was looking at somebody and ready to go. And looking back on that, I'm sure that the woman I saw was an angel or a guardian or... Some people have said, it have been a relative, but I don't know anyone who could have been. And that Tom was seeing her and was ready to go. he, like, if there was anybody who would have been, he'd have been happy to go with, it would have been a beautiful young woman with dark hair, ready to meet him. He'd have loved that. One of my best friends, her daughter died a week after Tom in a car accident. And we're very, very close. And for two or three years after they both died, we were probably each other's lifeline. Overall, I think I'm a completely different person from Tom's death. I think all of us are in the close family. don't think we'll ever be the same. We're probably better for it. And we probably absorbed some of his love and some spiritual wisdom or definition through his dying. And but still, it's painful and intensely sad because it goes against the natural order.

speaker-0: I have a memory of Tom saying something to you about the body just being a meat suit.

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, did. Yes, he did say that.

speaker-0: And I remember you telling us, and I also remember Tom having a phase where he was incredibly, he was like a little sage and he was very wise and very calm. We had a family gathering and he was just incredibly, he felt like a little wise old man. It was like a little kind of guru.

speaker-1: He'd sit back a bit like this and he'd listen and go, hmm, yes, hmm. I remember he'd been to stay with you on the boat. And I remember him coming back and saying, I do love Rosie. I do love Rosie. She just really needs a solid relationship.

speaker-0: Very wise, Fionnters.

speaker-1: He also said, coming back on the train once from London, he looked at me and he said, Mum, dying to me is just going to sleep. And I love sleep. So it's fine. Don't worry about me. It's just a long, long sleep. And I said, ⁓ it's good. And he said, the only thing I worry about is you, because you'll be sad. I don't want to make you sad. I mean, he wasn't like that all the time. did have tantrums.

speaker-0: for you, like in that time, what was it actually like? What did you feel? And thinking about that sense of kind of connection, did you feel, what were you connected to? You were connected to something at that time. What was it that was holding you?

speaker-1: Well, it wasn't particularly spiritual at that time. But I felt more than any other time in my life I had a purpose. And when he died, I remember saying to somebody, those are the best three years of my life. And I don't think that now, but I thought it then, because when he died, I dedicated three years just to keeping Tom alive. I mean, it was obviously really hard, but I felt completely contained and a purpose and focused. So I found it, yeah, I felt very, like I had a reason to be on this earth.

speaker-0: So your connection was really just to Tom. It was this deep, deep connection to each other.

speaker-1: I'm sure that shared death experience was due to that. We'd got so close at that point that I sort of tapped into his, what was meant to be for him.

speaker-0: When after having that shared experience and then he was gone and there were no more breaths and then Tom wasn't there anymore, what was that? How did you navigate that?

speaker-1: I I sort of retreated into myself for a couple of years really and I hardly saw any friends, saw family. I didn't like family events because Tom wasn't there and I found it incredibly hard, which I don't find now. But I do remember one of the first family events, I think you might have said, let's all have a big group hug. And that really helped because then it was recognized, saw Lucy, Lucy helped. And then it was the Brexit day that changed it when... I heard the outcome of Brexit and I felt really bad because in Lincolnshire there was a very pro-Brexit side and I thought I've done nothing. And I organised a community picnic saying everyone in Stamford is welcome or something. What I called it, diversity picnic. And it was a big outing for me because I'd hardly seen anyone for two years. And suddenly there were 250, 300 people all eating cakes on the meadows. I was giving them leaflets. And I think it was that that jogged me out of myself. and got me to thinking about something else.

speaker-0: So you found the new purpose, had a bit of time to hibernate and then found.

speaker-1: Exactly.

speaker-0: And thinking about communities, you talked about how it was so helpful when people just came in and left a casserole or did the gardening or just did something really practical and how unhelpful it was when people said kind of platitudes or pitying.

speaker-1: I think sort of being there rather than pittingly being there, sort of texting and showing that you're conscious, that you're not forgetting what's going on. Because you do feel everybody else is having this amazing life and you're still stuck there. So I think sort of texting regularly and saying, you don't need to answer this text, I'm not expecting an answer, but just saying, thinking about you, love you, sort of thing. Just means a lot, a sort of gift without a need to respond.

speaker-0: What through that time did you need that our culture doesn't offer?

speaker-1: think probably more, think, wouldn't it be interesting if we grew up in a world where nobody said you're guaranteed an ideal life? Wouldn't it be interesting if you didn't go to a school where everybody thinks they're going to be a princess or an actress and live till 100 and have the perfect marriage? Wouldn't it be amazing if you were just brought up through an education where they just said, you do your best for you? You thrive, you love yourself and let yourself love other people and receive love. And wouldn't it be amazing if education all sprung from a place of love for yourself and other people and everything sprung from that rather than a culture which says you've got to pass this exam and you'll earn money and then you'll get married and then you'll live till you're 80 and then you'll have grandchildren and then everything will be perfect and you'll never have an argument because life isn't like that. And then you feel as though you failed. love and hurt and everything are all fine. And even death, it's okay. And wouldn't it be good if we didn't say, ⁓ yeah, my aim in life is just to be happy. And we're not sort of brought up because the minute you've got that happiness goal, then you're marketed, ⁓ buy this and you'll be happy and have this and you'll be happy or get married and you'll be happy. And it's not how it works. So wouldn't it be amazing if it was just about loving yourself, loving other people, that's where everything springs from that fountain. And that you can learn things through that and that you sort of bought up through some Buddhist existential loving environment where you learn things because you love to learn them, because you want to and you want to help people, you want to be kind and wouldn't it be amazing when spiritual experiences were accepted just as much as physical experiences that they were accepted in just the same vein.

speaker-0: There are some people who I've spoken to for the other episodes of this month in this podcast, who have talked about having psychedelic experiences that gave them the sense that the connection they have to a loved one is truly enduring, that it doesn't end with death. And so I just wondered, obviously, this connection you had with Tom, both through his illness and the shared death experience that you described earlier. that none of that came from a psychedelic experience, but I'm just curious what you might make of people who describe this experience from psychedelic.

speaker-1: After Tom died, really, bought a book from a flea market in Malta Moabray and it was talking about how to be a psychic. And I loved it. It was very, it was written like a DIY. It was a bit like how to mend a coffee table really. And it was close your eyes and paint it yellow behind your eyes. Close your eyes and paint it red. Close your eyes. And it was really working on what maybe was that inner vision that I saw. was sort of really working on exercising. And I really, really worked on it. I'm ringing in my ears as I talk about it. And I read it and read it and read it, filled in notes. And then I was getting the train. And I'm good on trains because I have to be in one place. So it was probably about three hours to Birmingham and then another hour to Leamington. So I was four hours and I was doing, and I thought if any time I'm going to have a spiritual experience, this is my... chance. I'm never going to be at home uninterrupted for four hours. And I got to Birmingham absolutely nothing and I was like, a waste of time. Meditating all that time. I don't like meditating. I've tried my hardest spiritual beings, you know, come on. I'll give it one more go. Angels, if you're listening, I've got 20 minutes left and then, you know, we don't have any time. I closed my eyes, I did one of the meditations, let myself go deeper, which maybe is what the kind of psychedelic drugs help sort of unlock something in your mind or switch off that active bit of your brain that inhibits the spiritual side. I don't know how it works, but somehow I got myself into that place where my conscious mind wasn't buzzing around with its million lists. And for a split second, for just literally a split second, this woman's face, again, just like the woman I saw come towards Tom, came in from here down the top corner of my eye. And it was just part of her face. It was her eye and just the bit of her face, like at an angle, just within my inner vision. just slid in. And in that moment, I felt completely unconditionally loved. Like, I've never felt anything like it, like this love, like, I don't know, like, I can't explain it, I just was completely loved, with no butts and no having, it was just incredible for that split second, just as her face was there. And the minute I felt it, I rejected it. My knee-jerk reaction was, not me, not. why I don't deserve that sort of love and the message I sort of got back it wasn't a voice but it was yes you and everyone you know you you don't have to do anything to deserve it you and you and everyone and then she was gone but it was incredible and it made me feel at the time like ⁓ I don't love very well as a mom because I can't ⁓ I wasn't loved properly by my mother or But then we're humans and we've just a fraction of whatever that subliminal amazing love is. We're just like a tiny little raindrop from this storm of love, you know. And yeah, so that connection buoyed me on for a while. But now I can't feel, I can say it, but I don't feel, as I talk about it, I can't feel it again. It was so physical.

speaker-0: So is that something, one of the things that's changed about you?

speaker-1: I'm not frightened of dying. I don't want to die painfully particularly, but I'm not frightened of death. I think it's just a hug and I think it's reaching out to people, telling people, if you're not sure what to say, say, what do want me to do? Asking people, not necessarily always bringing up the dead person or the ill person or whatever, but just being really normal, but really listening, looking at the signs, being really responsive, being really receptive, being there. being able to respond when somebody wants you to, being able to do something when they want to say something. You know, let that person be the queen, king of the show and enough going on and just be servile to them. I don't want Tom to be defined by his cancer. I want him to be defined by who he was. And the spiritual experience means a lot, who he still is. And that's my love that I hold Tom still alive in my heart. little cavern in my heart with a little candle burning and he's almost more present to me than anybody else in my life. And that's how I want it to be.

speaker-0: Thank you, Auntie. Thank you for all of that. So that's my Auntie Melia, Tom's mum. And her story has been included in a study with a book and an upcoming documentary as well about shared crossings. So shared crossings are conscious, connected and loving end of life experiences shared between the dying person and their loved ones or caregivers. And details of this. study are in the show notes and details of the meditation book my aunt used also there in the show notes. She found her way through the hardest thing a person can face. And she was held by the three circles we talk about on this podcast, connection to self, to others and to the wider world. These are three ways back to connection when life cracks us open and sometimes feels like it's cracking us closed. So the first standing in the circle with yourself. My aunt and my other upcoming guests this month all talk about the extreme demands that cancer has asked of them, whether it's been affecting their own body or the body of someone they cherish. All my guests this month describe being suddenly transported from normal life to a very different parallel existence, from the moment of hearing the unthinkable diagnosis and having to somehow bear that to the long relentless days of hunkering down with this now relentlessly demanding life of hospitals and treatments and fear. And this is a kind of physical marathon, incredibly demanding and not something that can be done alone. My guests also describe a clarity that came about what matters, a clarity of values and purpose. For my aunt these years of total dedication to caring for Tom and she talks about how she's been changed by the experience, her values have changed. She cares much less about achievements, the trappings of success, and much more about accepting the pain and messiness and unpredictability of life and focusing on just loving others and receiving love. And Rebecca from ASA, who you'll meet next week and who is living with metastatic breast cancer, describes a radical turn towards her own body rather than fighting for survival as if it were a war. talks about listening to what her body actually needs. moment to moment and giving it that meditation, nutrition, movement, rest, not as a grim regime, but as a way of being present with what is happening rather than bracing against it. She describes stopping the frantic push to simply survive and instead choosing to belong to her own life, to pay attention, to be here. She calls it living today and finding the small miracles inside a single day rather than losing the present to fear of the future. And Catherine, the following week, will talk about how her sister's cancer led her to change her life completely, her values changed completely. She left academia and she created a beautiful sanctuary in a huge forest in Vermont where people will be able to take their last breaths surrounded by the people that they love. Which brings us to the second circle, standing in the circle with community. When cancer enters, the village steps up. the people who bring food, walk the dog, hold the children, drive you to the appointment and do it again the next week. My aunt was encircled by an invisible rotor of household support. She told me that she'd arrive home and there would be pots of food. She didn't know who had left them. The gardening would have been done by someone. She needed new blinds on the windows and she came back one day and the blinds would be changed. She had no idea who had done it. And when Tom died, as she described, her house was full. And it was such a painful, sad moment, but the connection in that house was so strong, so full. The tenderness, the gentleness, the hugs. Everyone there knew what mattered and it was only love. And my aunt also experienced the less helpful, less connected aspect of the village. The people she bumped into in town who didn't offer help, but just suddenly cock their head to one side and said in a pitying tone, and how are you? when they remembered about Tom and she recognized that it can be so hard to know what to say. And so there is that social death, people who just back away because they don't know what to say and they don't want to make it worse. Her advice is just ask, what do you want me to do and be normal? She also told me about someone she didn't know well, who she bumped into, who just gave her this massive, loving, real hug, just held her. And it was exact what she needed. So what helped her most was people who could be present and attuned and listen to whatever it was that she needed in any moment. And that kind of community made a huge difference to my aunt. And she told me that Tom was also really boosted to see the village showing up for his family. But this is rare these days. My aunt lives in an old fashioned countryside town where people know each other. But in many places, a lot of the structures that used to gather us around someone in illness have been stripped away by modern culture. And so we really need to bring new structures in. Across the month, the importance of community for my guests is so clear. Rebecca talks about the deep emotional presence and support she has received from the various communities she's part of and how regular sharing circles have helped her process her emotions and help her make meaning and stay open to life. belong, to find connection and coherence within her body and beyond it. And you might be listening to this thinking, well, you know, I just, I don't have that kind of community. And, know, that's what Acer is there for. It's a community waiting for anybody that feels that they need that kind of community and doesn't have it. That's why we're there. And, you know, building community is not easy. And many of our guests this month talk about ⁓ our efforts to do this when we didn't feel that we had the village holding us. And we needed to create that kind of community, sometimes in the hardest circumstances and how we can take those steps to start doing that, even if it feels impossible, how day by day, small steps and the fabric of connection, the fabric of care can very, very gently, stitch by stitch, start to be created for us and for others around us too. So the third circle is ⁓ standing in the circle with the wider world. And I want to give a bit more detail about the third circle. So the conceptualization of these three circles has come from my research looking at how psychedelic therapy help people with depression feel more connected across the three domains of self, others, and world. And that's month one of the podcast talking about that. And this research led to the creation of a psychometric tool, the WCS. to measure these three domains of connectedness. And I think that the first two circles, connectedness to self, connectedness to others, are kind of self-explanatory. But the third circle contains these items. These are items from the psychometric tool, the WCS. I have felt connected to all humanity. I have felt connected to nature. I have felt connected to a spiritual essence in their secular or religious sense. I have felt connected to a source of universal love. I have seen things from a broad perspective, the bigger picture. I have felt that everything is interconnected. So those are the items from the third circle. And that's really what I'm talking about when I talk about connection to the wider world. Now we have, and we always will in this podcast, talk about nature, talk about connection to trees. Now we have, and we always will in this podcast, talk about nature and the healing power of trees. And taking solace from nature is an important theme for sure this month. Feeling part of the natural world with its cycles of light and dark. Rebecca talks about it in episode 2. Catherine talks about it in episode 3. So many people who've been impacted by cancer describe a deepened relationship with nature and my aunt certainly does. But I want to look at the spiritual connection that is part of the third circle. You might be listening, thinking, hmmm... Connection to a source of universal love. Yes, I felt that. Hmm, connection to a spiritual essence. Yes. Or you might be thinking, what on earth is this nonsense? I was brought up agnostic. My mum and my aunt Amelia are both down to earth, professional people and very intelligent and practical and no nonsense. And my sister is totally like that too. And my aunt and my mum, have both had direct spiritual experiences, and so have I. And ⁓ just a few each over our lifetimes so far. But they have felt absolutely real to us when they each happened. My aunt Emilia told me that she had said goodbye to any spiritual beliefs when Tom first got cancer. But then she had these experiences when he died, and then on the train. The experience of the pretty lady with dark hair coming to get him in the tunnel of light when he died. And her experience of being on the train years later and seeing the lady's face and feeling this overwhelming, overpowering, unconditional source of universal love. And my mom, when she left my father after discovering that he'd been having an affair with her friend, so it was a very, very dark day for my mom, she took us as little kids to my grandmother's house. And she was in a dark room, she'd put us to bed, she was in a dark room feeling very alone, very frightened, a lot of despair. And she heard an angel whisper, she didn't see it, but she heard the voice of an angel whisper to her in a dark room, we are all God's family. Which surprised her because at the time she had no spiritual beliefs at all, but it was incredibly encouraging and reassuring. It was very moving for her and had a real impact. And I had my own experience with the tree that I told you about last month. And I will, in this episode, tell you about my own experience with the pretty lady with the dark hair, which was an experience I had a few years ago. But also, my work with people in psychedelic clinical trials where there were many spiritual or mystical experiences for people who did not describe themselves as spiritual at all beforehand. And in adjacent fields of study like near-death experiences, researchers like Sam Gandy, David Luke, Samantha Treasure and others have been writing about the themes that keep popping up suggest that it would be unscientific to discredit or ignore these phenomena. And my experience in the AESA community where some people share about spiritual experiences they've had, whether from psychedelic therapy or meditation or just big life experiences that broke them open. So this is a theme that I have now seen many times from many different angles and all my guests this month talk about spiritual connection in some way. They describe being shown or feeling that connections to loved ones last beyond death and how that helped them. We've heard my aunt talk about her connection to Tom and next week we will meet Kim from ASA who talks about a psychedelic experience when her son had cancer that gave her this insight that her connection to him is inseparable. And Rebecca will talk about her own psychedelic experience and a connection she felt to her father who had died. And then in week three, we will explore these themes and others more deeply with Yvonne Boussin. And Catherine will talk about her own spiritual path, which really began when her beloved sister died from breast cancer, linked to having the BRCA gene. And that's B-R-C-A, the BRCA gene. And that brings us to my own strand of the story. So I'd spent years in psychedelic research and then in 2020 I started ASA, community built to help people stay connected after a big experience that cracks them open. And the first thing I learned is that you don't need a psychedelic for the door to open. People come to us after all sorts of openings and they walk a year together, 12 trees, 12 months, reconnecting to self, to others, to nature, and often to something larger. So the last podcast ended in 2020 with me first setting up ASA. So then I'll fast forward to about 2023. For the last few years, had been me and Lee, the community manager, running Acer and holding the whole thing, the two of us, so often hunched over our laptops to make it safe and good for everyone else. And I had no time to see my friends and not enough time in nature and not doing the things that I know help, the breath work, the dancing, just parenting and cleaning and working and parenting and cleaning and working. So... I was back in that thing that I was doing before when I was a psychedelic therapist. That thing about my work being about supporting others to feel connected whilst being disconnected in my own life. And that's been my pattern, if I'm honest, for a long time, pouring everything into the mission, putting my own needs last until a crisis comes along and forces me to stop. And I'm only just learning now how to do this differently. So three years ago, 2023, the crisis came. Acer was still tiny. starting to grow. My daughter was eight at the time and she was splitting her week between me and her dad in London. She wanted to come and live with me full time and I couldn't yet see how to make it work and I missed her so much. I'd moved to be near nature but I hardly knew anyone there. I didn't have a village and I didn't have time to build one. And one week in every month, the PMDD I talked about last month made everything harder. And I was dropping the balls. I was juggling and dropping the balls, the dentist, the car tax, the friends I never saw, all the things that hold a life together, slipping through the cracks. And I told myself, I made this community and this daughter, and I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep feeding them both. And then I got COVID and flew back to back. And my body simply stopped me three weeks in bed. And in one feverish night, I had an experience I still can't fully explain. It was an overwhelming physical knowing that I was held and loved by a woman with dark hair who I understood at the time to be Mary, the archetypal figure, the religious figure of Mary. Now I am not and have never been religious. I had no interest in Mary or Catholicism at all. And the only thread was that after Tom died, I had been so drawn to the Ave Maria, the piece of music that I listened to many times every day for many months. It was the thing that allowed me to cry. And here's what I only discovered making this podcast. When my aunt told me about her vision, the young woman with dark hair in the tunnel of light, she also told me that it's part of this shared crossing study and that another family in it had the very same vision. when their child died, the same dark-haired woman and that family who were Catholic understood her to be Mary. And I hadn't known any of that when I lay in my fever and had that experience, but I came out of that saying the Hail Mary every day. It was just a small little thread to this source of love that I wanted to not forget. And not long after cancer came into my own life, not as a patient, and I want to be really careful here because what I went through is not what living with cancer is. but I had the BRCA gene. So a cousin on the other side of the family was diagnosed with breast cancer. And we realized that there was a pattern on this side of the family. So my sister and I went to be tested for the BRCA gene. We made a day of it, had lunch, and then had the test. And a few days later, my sister called to say hers was negative. And I was at my laptop deep in her presentation. when the phone rang again, I almost didn't pick it up because I assumed that I'd be fine too. And then the voice said that I had tested positive for BRCA. And I mentioned Catherine, the researcher whose sister had BRCA. And that was my first association the moment that the word landed with me. The scan showed that I didn't have cancer, but I was advised to remove the risk. So a double mastectomy and later my ovaries and fallopian tubes to be removed as well. And my first thought was how? I could barely juggle everything. as it was, how was I going to take months off for surgery? So I kept putting it off partly because I couldn't see how to step away without letting everyone down. And partly because I couldn't feel any safety net beneath me. I was the founder of a community built on support and I couldn't reach any of it for myself because I was holding it for everyone else. And in pouring myself into building connection online, I didn't have close relationships with my actual neighbors, with the people who could have brought a dish when I couldn't cook. So for a year I carried on as if everything was fine with my body feeling like a ticking clock. After the first episode of this podcast went out, several people who work in the psychedelic field wrote to me privately and they said more or less the same thing. I didn't know you felt disconnected too and me too. And these are people whose job is connection and presence and holding others. so many of them running on empty and not able to say it. The disconnection so many of us feel isn't a personal failing. It reaches the patients and the doctors, the clients and the therapists alike. A culture with not enough safety net, not enough time, not enough holding, not enough connectedness. And when serious illness lands on top of a maxed out modern life, it can tip into feeling impossible. And that's when we most need someone to notice. and reach in and hold us. So July, 2024, I was sitting outside my house at my laptop. remember my PMDD was raging that day, still half in denial about the surgery, still saying yes to work projects when I should have been saying no. And a friend rang and said, get in your car and drive 30 minutes now. And for once I did. And when I arrived, my friends were setting up a little festival. that I'd said I was too busy to come to. And they put up a tent that I could sleep in. So I let myself be held by the fields, by the trees, by the fire, by the friends. And I stayed up late talking and crying. And it was such a relief to be out in the dark under the sky, remembering the wide, wild world beyond all of my worries. And then the next morning, A man walked into the camp and as soon as we started talking, we both had a strong, strange feeling that we'd loved each other across many lifetimes. So that was Thursday. And then by the Sunday, he said, book the mastectomy now. I will look after you. And he has. Ever since he's looked after me and my daughter who lives with us full time now. His name is Tom. He has very blue eyes like my cousin and he'd survived his own cancer years before. And sometimes I feel a little like my cousin Tom sent him. And I'll leave that as a feeling, not as a claim, but it moves me that after all of it, my human angel arrived with blue eyes and the same name. So where do psychedelics come into all of this? Well, this is a podcast that keeps returning to that frontier. And this month, The question is what these medicines might offer people facing cancer and the people who love them. When someone takes a psychedelic like psilocybin, a network in the brain quietens down. It's called the default mode network. The part that runs our constant inner commentary, the worrying, the planning, the story of me, it can quieten through psychedelics or through meditation or breath work or other things. My aunt, who didn't take psychedelics, but used that meditation book, described that on the train, something switched off the busy, buzzing part of the mind so that something else could come through. So for people with cancer, psychedelics have been studied in a few different ways. The oldest and best established is end-of-life distress. This is the profound anxiety, depression, and demoralization that can come with a life-threatening diagnosis. Trials at Johns Hopkins and NYU going back over a decade now gave psilocybin to people with cancer and found that a single session often brought large, lasting drops in anxiety and depression and a renewed sense that life was still worth living even when the diagnosis was terminal. Catherine, who you'll meet later this month, was part of that early world and she described how people would come in feeling so heavy and leave saying, even if I only have a week, I want it. I want my garden. I want the people I love. And alongside that, there's a growing interest in what these medicines might do for people who are living with cancer that isn't terminal but brings daily challenges, the fear that comes back with every scan. And there's early work asking whether psychedelics might help with the pain that comes with cancer, not by numbing it, but by changing a person's relationship to it, which is something that Catherine talks about in episode three. And... At MD Anderson, a trial is underway testing with acylocybin can reduce the nerve damage that chemotherapy can leave behind, the numbness and the pain in the hands and feet that so many people carry for years after the treatment. It's in the early stages, but if it holds up, it would push these medicines beyond psychology and into physical medicine. And Kim from episode two tells us about taking part in a psilocybin clinical trial as a carer. Carers carry their own heavy load and are often touched by depression and almost never get offered anything at all. So psychedelic therapy could offer some much needed connectedness and respite to cancer carers too. In all of this research, the medicine is never really the whole story. What the trials keep showing is that it's the preparation, the setting and the integration afterwards, the human holding around the experience that decides whether an opening becomes a lasting change or fades away. The medicine can open the door, it's community that walks you through it, which is the reason that the ACER community exists. And I'll be exploring all of this properly later this month with Yvonne Bosson, a palliative care doctor who works with people at the very end of life and uses the connectedness scale I mentioned to measure what shifts after psychedelic therapy. If you or someone you love is wondering whether any of this could apply to you, his episode is the one to listen for and I'll make sure the show notes point you. to where this work is happening legally and safely and any useful resources to learn more as well. So let's draw this together. Where have we been today? I told you that cancer is far more common than we let ourselves know and lonelier than it's ever been. That survival has never been higher and community around the illness has never been thinner. That the medical system does extraordinary work on the disease and almost nothing on the rest of what cancer is. I brought you to my cousin Tom. and to my aunt Emilia who walked him through it and found her way back through purpose, through community and through a connection to him that didn't end with his death. And I told you my own story, the gene, the missing village, what it took to finally let myself stop trying to do everything alone and let myself be held. And underneath all of it, the three levels we'll keep coming back to this month, standing in the circle with ourselves, with each other. and with the wider world that holds us. That's something bigger than us. Whether that's trees, whether that's something you can't touch that feels like love and makes us feel a sense of connection that goes beyond the material, that goes beyond the world we know. If you are inside cancer right now or holding someone who is, and this has brought up some things you would like to talk about, Macmillan Cancer Support in the UK and the American Cancer Society have help lines. And the numbers for those are in the show notes. And the show notes also include information about Acer, if you'd like to know what we do. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening to a podcast about the hard things. Three more episodes in our Cancer Month. One question underneath all of them. How do we stand in the circle with cancer together? Next week, Rebecca and Kim, I hope you'll join us. I'm Roz Watts. Thank you for standing in the circle with me today.