Talk About Cancer

Find beauty in the path

• Episode 26

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Tara talked about the multiple transformations she has had to go through: from being a caretaker to survivor to thriver, and from natural ways of healing to eventually facing her fears of chemotherapy.

You can find Tara's bestseller book Grace, Grit, and Gratitude on Amazon and connect with her on Instagram @taracoyote.

Please follow the podcast if you are enjoying the show. Would also be awesome if you can leave an honest rating and review so I know if I am serving the interests and needs of you listeners out there.

Have topic suggestions or feedback about the show?  Contact me on Instagram or email me at talkaboutcancerpodcast@gmail.com. 

Thank you for listening!

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My reflections on the conversation:

Tara is the only person I’ve spoken with to date who has said “thank you” to chemo. It’s an incredible statement, especially because she’s had such a traumatic experience with her friend’s chemo treatment. It’s also a powerful example of her message to us - which is to find beauty in the path. Rather than focusing on the incredibly challenging parts of her cancer journey, she’s grateful to be alive and appreciative of the transformations the experience has brought her. As she called it - shining the diamonds of our souls.

Also, I had a light bulb moment when Tara was talking about being a caretaker for her friend Deb. Tara helped me understand something I didn’t back when I spoke with Kunal in episode 22 - that it was a privilege to take care of a loved one. But Tara’s explanation of her experience as her friend’s caretaker made sense to me - that to show up for someone when they are so broken down is humbling and makes you understand how precious life is. Now I understand why Kunal referred to the caregiving experience as a privilege. 

SPEAKER_00:

Hey everybody. Welcome to episode 26 of the Talk About Cancer Podcast. This is Serena. I am looking for diverse caregivers, family members, friends, and other co-survivors to come on the show to share your stories. Please contact me by going to TalkAboutCancerPodcast.com if you're interested, or point others my way if you feel they have an important message for us to hear. In today's episode, Tara talked about the multiple transformations she has had to go through from being a caretaker to survivor to thriver, and from natural ways of healing to eventually facing her fears of chemotherapy. Just a heads up. You will hear an impromptu soundtrack of chickens, birds, and wind chimes throughout our chat. I really like having them in the background because it feels like we're hanging out with Tara and her year and Kwai. Let's dive into her story now, and I will check back in with you at the end. Welcome to the Talk About Cancer Podcast. Let's start with a quick intro and have you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, where you're from, and anything else you'd like to share with our listeners.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much for having me here. My name is Tara Coyote. I currently live in Kauai, Hawaii, in the middle of the ocean. My story in brief is that I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in September 2016, which is almost five years ago now. I chose an exclusively natural path of healing cancer for two and a half years. I refused the chemo surgery and radiation that was offered to me. And then a very stressful incident occurred in my life, which caused the cancer to spread to be stage four. It was in my lungs, my liver, my spine, my adrenal glands, my hip. And during that time, I decided to move back home to Kauai, Hawaii, where my dad is from, where I lived many times before. And when I moved back home to Kauai, I was referred to hospice. I was literally dying. I could not lay down to sleep for two months because I had so much cancer in my lungs. I would be choking in my sleep. I was walking with a cane because my left hip was breaking, and I had to face my fear of chemotherapy, which was extreme. I was terrorized with the thought of doing chemotherapy. Just a slight bit of backstory. My best friend had died exactly a year before I was diagnosed. She died from leukemia, and I had a lot of trauma being with her for months at the hospital for 22 months while she was ill. So I had a lot of trauma associated with her health experience and her death that petrified me about doing chemo. So during this time, it was spring of 2019. I like I said, I was literally dying, and I had to choose did I want to face my fear and do this chemotherapy or did I want to live? And I decided I wanted to live, I want to find my way through it. And I did nine months of chemotherapy. And at this time, I still did natural therapies, just to be clear. I really believe in an integrated path of healing, natural and um allopathic, which is conventional medicine. And um, during that time I broke my left hip and I had to have double hip surgery because of the bone metastasis, so I had to learn to walk again.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it was it was really hard. 2019 was a hard year for me. And then in February 2020, I finished treatment and the cancer had retreated in all the areas in my body. It's been um a while since then, obviously, and and the cancer keeps disappearing, the tumors keep shrinking, my bones are growing back, and I keep getting clear scans and clear blood tests, and I'm just so grateful to be alive. That's my story in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_00:

Congratulations for getting through that super tough period of your life and being where you are today, it's amazing. And I know we're gonna also talk about your book and all of that. But going back to the beginning, you talked about the fear that you had about traditional treatment and that coming from you know your experience being a caregiver for your friend, and why sort of it then impacted your own experience of cancer when you were diagnosed?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, that's a great question. I think because when my friend was diagnosed, she was 44 when she was diagnosed, and she was my best friend for 19 years, and it just threw my world upside down. I had had a friend die a few years earlier from cancer. She was 39, and that really scared me, and it it made me aware of that point that people that are younger can die from cancer. And so when Deb was diagnosed, I realized I need to do everything I can to be with her because if she dies like Morgan did, I'm gonna regret not showing up for her. And it it brings up emotions when I talk about it because it's you know, she was so close to me. But um yeah, it was it was a really powerful, profound experience being with her. It was traumatic, it was so hard, it was one of the hardest experiences I've done, but I grew so much, and it was also one of the most beautiful experiences, too, to show up for somebody when they're so broken down. I mean, Deb was a dynamo, she was a bicycle and pedestrian activist, and she did amazing things in Washington, DC, and she was such a leader, and she was a vegan, she was so healthy, and then she got diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, which is the most aggressive form of blood cancer. And immediately when she was diagnosed, she was sent to the hospital and had to stay there for months. So it was a very profound experience just to be with her and just show up in that way. It it humbled me and it really taught me how precious life is. It was really fascinating for me because I was one of her main caretakers. So I had this view of what cancer was as a caretaker, and I thought I knew, but then when I was diagnosed, it was this sense of like, oh, now I really understand what Deb went through. It was just whole deeper awareness of experience there.

SPEAKER_00:

How did you eventually get through that fear that you had about getting, was it chemotherapy or radiation, or maybe both?

SPEAKER_01:

It was chemotherapy. Um, yeah, I really did a lot of soul searching. I was living, like I said, back here in Kauai where my dad's from, and I've my family goes back here in Kauai to the 1870s. So I feel a lot of strong roots here and connection with the the earth. That there's a word in the Hawaiian language, it means mana. It's like the power that's in the earth. I I feel it very strongly here. So I I really dug into this deep strength to see like, can I do this? And honestly, my son, who was 26 at the time, I thought of him, and it was really my love for my son that made me go, like, okay, he's doing amazing in his life. He was in graduate school at the time, and I don't want him to lose his mom at this age. That'll just turn his life upside down. So it was really my love for my son that gave me the courage to say, okay, I'm terrified, but I can do this. And it was such a powerful experience because once I did chemo, I'm not gonna say it was easy, it was very, very hard, but my fear of doing chemo was much bigger than the actual experience. Like fear usually is fear, I like to think think of it as like false evidence appearing real. So it was really understanding, okay, my fear of chemo is just a fear, it doesn't have to be terrible because before my concept of chemotherapy, and and I was in the public eye doing natural treatment before, like I was being interviewed on podcasts and writing and all this, like they thought of me as the natural healer woman. And and so it's almost like I had to eat my words and become humble in the experience and understand that I thought chemotherapy was poison, it would kill me, and then I had to turn that thought process around and think that chemo is the nectar that will heal me, and it did. So thank you, chemotherapy.

SPEAKER_00:

Is that hard for you to tell people now?

SPEAKER_01:

No, it's not. It it was really hard when I was facing that decision because I had so many people following me that were applauding me for my natural healing, and then I had to say, you guys, I was wrong. I'm really sorry, but I really want to live and please support me. And most people were very understanding because they saw what was happening to me and they wanted me to live. But it was very, very hard to make that announcement. And I coming out with a book um August 8th, very soon, Grace and Gratitude, and I talk about this whole experience of having to really face all these difficult mental constructs that kept challenging me.

SPEAKER_00:

So we talked about one of them, which is, you know, like you said, you had to sort of shift your paradigm essentially about like your notions of what's gonna heal you. What are some other mental constructs that you talk about in the book that challenged you?

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Um, speak about this experience in the way when I was doing chemotherapy, I did uh two months of AC, my hormone-positive breast cancer. So two months of AC, and then I guess it was seven months of taxol. And the first two months, they were the hardest where I really had to face the demons in my mind. I mean, not only was it very hard physically, I lost 20 pounds, you know, there was some nausea. It was it was very, very difficult in that way, but it was almost like the mental challenges were harder. Like it, it was actually really healing in a strange way because it made me have to be clear with my relationships and and and figure out what relationships were healthy for me to be in, what relationships I had to take more space from, what was toxic for me. And then also to really work through layers of healing. There was a lot of trauma I had to work through, like I said, around my experience with Deb and other childhood issues. And the beautiful gem of it all was to really come around to this sense of worthiness and self-love of myself. There's um this word, a dear friend of mine, Kiony Hanalei, he's Hawaiian, and um I've learned a lot from him. He talks about this concept of aloha ma, which is self-love, self-worth, that sort of thing. And I really came to awareness of my own self-love within myself through that experience. Like it was really a gift to allow me to really cherish who I am and to know that I'm valuable.

SPEAKER_00:

How do you think your experience so far has impacted then your reaction to then your mom being diagnosed? And I don't know if you're her caregiver now. And then also your horse, which I I know that's like your spirit animal. I see it all over your pages.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. There's two parts to that. Um I've had a lot of friends with cancer. I didn't say this earlier, but another dear friend, the mother of my niece, she also died young from cancer a few years after Deb did at the age of 47. Um, and that's after I was diagnosed. So it's been really hard. Like you said earlier, there's been so much cancer around me. Around the time Deb died, my dog also died from cancer. And so when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, which was two years ago, it just hit me deeply of like, oh my gosh, another person close to me. And it really, really hurt my heart of, oh no, here we go again. Um, but I gotta say, my mom's been so inspiring, and it's it's really fascinating. She's told me that my own experience and the way I've faced cancer, not allowing it to cripple me in fear, has really inspired her. So it's been this kind of crazy experience to be like, okay, my mother's going through this, and now I am too, and how we can support each other. But it was really, really hard. I was grief-stricken when she was first diagnosed, and um, I am not her main caretaker. She lives in Northern California. I live in Hawaii, so I'm 2,500 miles away. I have been out to visit many times, even with the pandemic and COVID, which has been nice, but that's been hard to be far. Um, let's see, my horse, blue, was diagnosed with, he's got a blue eye, and he was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma. There were tumors around the outside of his eye. And that was a year and a half ago. And that was hard on my heart too. It was after my mom was diagnosed, and there was a sense of like, oh my gosh, now my beloved horse, and what's up with this? And actually, I mentioned my friend Keone before, but he told me after my horse was diagnosed, he said, You have so much cancer in your field, you have to energetically disattach from this energetic, as it were, because it keeps affecting you. And when he told me that, I realized it was true. I had to energetically separate from it, and um, I proceeded to treat my horse in the same way I've treated myself through natural medicines, herbs, and some conventional medicine too. But he's actually doing really well. The tumors around his eyes disappeared, and the vet's just stunned at how well he's doing.

SPEAKER_00:

So wow. Just from just from like the herbs that you've been giving your horse?

SPEAKER_01:

The herbs, yeah, and uh amazing diet. I give my horses just grains, this is this mixture of herbs from Australia. I mean, I I have very fortunate horses. I I treat my animals better than I treat myself in many ways. Not totally, but but yeah, he's doing really, really well. And um, I think too, like I was saying, the whole energetic connection with cancer, I because I feel like I have a healthy relationship with cancer and I don't live in fear about it, you know, I think of myself as a thriver and I'm loving my life, I'm enjoying my life, I'm aware of the cancer situation, and I get monthly shots once a month for cancer treatment, which knock me out for a few days. But I I don't allow it to limit me. I'm so grateful to be alive and to be happy. So I think something shifted in me once I realized what was happening with Blue and his cancer diagnosis to free up my mental mind state, which also helped him because we're so connected.

SPEAKER_00:

And when you mentioned that your friend said that you need to energetically detach from cancer, what does that mean to you? And then how do you detach energetically?

SPEAKER_01:

I will try to explain that one. Um, all right, so I'll go back to when I was first diagnosed. When I was first diagnosed, one of my close friends, his name's Martin, he's a DJ, Martin, DJ Dragonfly. He had gone through a crazy cancer experience where he almost died and he had to do treatment. And I called him up and I said, Okay, Martin, I'm now dealing with this. Please give me advice. What should I do? And the most valuable advice he gave me, he was basically saying, don't allow cancer to be your story, which I love to repeat that to other cancer journeys because it's so easy, and this is applicable to anything if you have arthritis or any other situation where you get can become so wrapped up in the story, and it's really hard when you have a life-threatening diagnosis because it's so easy to let it limit you and say, Oh, I can't go out and do this because I have cancer, da-da-da-da-da. So his advice to not let it become your story was amazing because I could see through it to see, okay, I'm on this cancer journey, but that's not all of me. I am Tara, and you know, I can enjoy life. And yes, I'm dealing with this, but it's not all of who I am. So when I say disattach from the cancer energetic, that's what I mean, to not let it limit me. It's so easy to become a victim and think, oh, poor me, poor me, I'm gonna die. And it takes a lot of inner strength to see through that and find the beauty and the gems of the experience. So does that make somewhat sense? Sometimes it's hard to explain the whole energy concept.

SPEAKER_00:

It could be a little woo-woo. It it makes sense to me. I mean, I think based on my conversations with folks, I feel like people use different words, but it's similar, right? So I feel like people sometimes call that mindset, keeping hope, right? And then like I think also like what you said, don't let cancer define you. I think even though you say energetically detaching, I think people do a form of it and they call it slightly different things, and they have slightly different ways of doing it. Um I mean, you've gone through some pretty tough moments. I mean, to sort of hear the word hospice for a lot of people feels like the death sentence, right? And I I know for my dad, for example, when he heard that, I felt like something just fundamentally shifted in him. Um and so what do you do to get through those really tough moments? Like some people say meditation, some people say gratitude. There are a lot of writers. Um, some people find healing in creating music. So, what what do you do to get through those really tough moments that you've had to walk through?

SPEAKER_01:

I think for me, and I talk about this in my book, is realizing that there is a deeper strength within us that can get us through anything, but you just have to dig down and find it. I think about faith. For me, it's not necessarily a religious thing as it is for other people, but it's having the faith that every challenging experience we have is there to grow us. And I talk about shining the diamond of our soul. You know, diamonds are birthed under pressure, they have to have tremendous pressure, but like once you go through that heart, hard experience, there's a beautiful diamond. So for me personally, and I like you said, I'm obsessed with horses and they're all over my Instagram wall. Um, it's my horses have helped me through every challenging experience. I work as an equine facilitated learning instructor. I ran a horse retreat center in Northern California where I would lead people on workshops in a healing capacity, um, and that was very powerful. So for me, a lot of my strength and my faith comes from the natural world and horses, to be honest. Like I get so much um just a deep sense of peace from being around them, and it's it's it reminds me of how strong I am to be around them. But I think just in general, too, just like I said, having the faith that I can get through whatever hard experience I'm going through. Like, for example, when I broke my hip, it was so hard because I was stuck in a bed, you know, I was reliant on everybody for everything. Even getting to the bathroom was really challenging for a period of time. And my partner and I broke up two weeks after that. We had been together for four years, and we broke up two weeks after I broke my hip when I was stuck in bed, and I was dealing with a crazy mold invasion in my yurt where I live now, and I had to move out, and I was going through chemo, so in my mind, I was like, okay, it's not gonna get any harder than this. And it was almost funny how absurdly difficult it was. And another thing I'd like to say is humor and laughter. If I can always find something to laugh at, which even in the situation being stuck in bed with all those hard things happening, it was so absurdly funny to that experience I was in. So I always try to find humor in the situation. There's always something to laugh at. You can always turn a situation around and find the beauty. But yeah, being goofy and having a sense of humor is just gold to me personally. That's one of my big coping techniques.

SPEAKER_00:

What is it that you do with your horses that you find particularly therapeutic?

SPEAKER_01:

It's actually scooping their poop that does it. I'm totally kidding. That's a joke. That's a joke.

SPEAKER_00:

There's the humor.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost finds something loud. It actually is very therapeutic. It's very meditative to scoop poop, but that's not my answer. That's silliness. Um there's something, and we talk about this in the horsework I do. Um, horses have incredibly big hearts. And there's this institute in Santa Cruz, California, it's called the Heart Math Institute, and it talks about how our hearts are actually more powerful than our brains. You know, we're we're so taught as human beings to reside in our brains. It's all about what we think, what we do, da-da-da-da-da. But when we're allowed to drop into our heart and our gut, for that matter, our instincts, that's where our power and our healing lies. And a lot of why I think horses are so powerfully healing is because they have such huge hearts. They're incredibly calming to be around. Um, and I actually don't really even ride that much. Um, I have a relationship with them on the ground. You know, I hang out with them. It's I do exercises with them. I have a round pen, so there's some active exercises and more reflective ones I do with them. But it's just being around them, to be honest. And it's really, really hard to put into words unless you've had that experience. So it's just, you know, some people love dogs, some people love cats. It's it's a sense of feeling connected. It's very grounding and calming.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. How big are their hearts?

SPEAKER_01:

Ah.

SPEAKER_00:

Do you know the numbers? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, I know size-wise, I mean, nobody can see my hands here except for you, but I think they're about this big. I mean, probably the size of our heads. That's the size of our heads, yeah. I mean, they have huge bodies, they're a thousand to a thousand five hundred pounds, depending on how big they are.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm just curious, you know, for most of us that want to have a connection with an animal, I mean, when you live in the city, you're limited to cats and dogs because they can live with you in the house. Um, did you grow up with horses? Like, was that always something that was in your family? Is that why you came to have such a connection with them?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I well, my parents grew up traveling quite a bit. They would lead safaris around the world. And so my brother and I would spend the summers with my cousins in New Hampshire. I'm originally from California, so we would spend the summers there. And my cousins had horses, and so I think it was from the age of 10 on. I we would stay there for many, many years in the summer. And um, yeah, I was definitely a horse crazy young girl. I begged my parents for a horse, but they said, no, no, no, no, it's too much money, da-da-da. Which in retrospect, I would have been a much better behaved teenager if I had a horse. I would have gotten to much less trouble. But, anyways, that's a side note. I've already told them that. But um, yeah, it was pretty much from being around them in the summertime. And then once puberty hit, you know, I kind of forgot my love of horses, like many young girls do, and I got into boys, and it wasn't only until later on, 20 years later or so, when I had a very hard incident with the man I was married to at the time, that I remembered my love of horses, and my relationship with horses got me out of a very hard mental state of mind, so which inspired me to do the horsework. So, so yeah, I've been back around horses for about 10 years now. So that's my horse story.

SPEAKER_00:

What inspired you to write your book?

SPEAKER_01:

Great question. Well, I was inspired when I got my great test results in February 2020 to do a movie, a Cancer Thriver film, interviewing stage four Cancer Thrivers who were beating the odds and doing really well. And then, of course, COVID hit and the world was shut down, and I live on this tiny island in the middle of the ocean, and there was no way I was gonna travel to people or people are gonna travel to me. So I thought, okay, I gotta scratch this movie idea, this documentary. What can I do? You know, I was on this tiny island in my year, beautiful place to be. I'm not complaining by any means. But I had been writing about my experience after Deb's death, because writing was my way to transform the experience of just immense grief and everything I was feeling. And then when I was diagnosed with cancer, I was writing and writing, writing, and I was blogging and sharing on social media. And so many times people would say to me, Tara, when are you gonna write a book? And so when COVID hit, I thought, okay, you know, I can't go anywhere. I'm relatively isolated. Hey, maybe this is a great time to take all that writing material and put it into a book. So I spent about 14 months. It was a lot of hard work. I worked on it every day just compiling all this information from the last 10 years of my life into my lovely book, baby.

SPEAKER_00:

What was that process like? Was it hard?

SPEAKER_01:

It was beautiful, and yes, it was hard. It took a lot of determination and commitment, and it was hard to write and edit the parts, you know, like about being with Deb certain times when I was with her, and then also my hard moments that were the most traumatic moments. But through the process of sharing my story, it was very therapeutic. Like I worked through some of the hardest parts to really understand why it had happened, in a sense. So yeah, it really brought me, I guess you could say, to the present moment in a sense, because it I had to work through things that I hadn't necessarily processed. Sometimes I would hit a bump and it'd be like, oh my gosh, this is so intense, and I'd have to step away from my computer and take a break. But um yeah, it was a really beautiful experience, and um, like any beautiful experiences, there was challenges too. It was a little bit of everything. I'm self-publishing, and that's a whole nother thing. If I knew how much work it would take to be at this point, I don't know if I would have done it. So it was really good. I didn't know, and I'm so glad I've done it. But yeah, it's taken a lot of just fortitude to get here.

SPEAKER_00:

Where can listeners find your book when it's published?

SPEAKER_01:

It will be on Amazon.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

So they can look up Grace, Grit, Gratitude, Tara Coyote, and I'm sure it'll pop up.

SPEAKER_00:

That's easy enough. Everybody knows Amazon these days. And before we wrap, any last words you want to say to the listeners?

SPEAKER_01:

Definitely. I would encourage other cancer thrivers or caregivers for that matter, because that's challenging too, just to keep going and find the beauty of the path because it doesn't have to be a terrible experience. I'm not saying it's easy by any means, but to find the beauty in the path. There's always um redeeming transformational aspects to any hard experience, and to really know. That you are stronger than you think you are. And I'm saying this having this image of like a butterfly. It's like a caterpillar goes into the cocoon and transforms itself into a butterfly. So I think it's an amazing opportunity for metamorphosis. So I would leave the listeners with that parting thought. Think of butterflies.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, thank you so much for taking time to share a part of your story and your experience today.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much. It's such an honor to be here.

SPEAKER_00:

Tara is the only person I've spoken to today who has said thank you to chemo. It's an incredible statement, especially because she's had such a traumatic experience with her friend's chemo treatment. It's also a powerful example of her message to us, which is to find beauty in the path. Rather than focusing on incredibly challenging parts of her cancer journey, she's grateful to be alive and appreciative of the transformations the experience has brought her, as she called it, shining the diamonds of our souls. Also, I had a light bulb moment when Tara was talking about being a caretaker for her friend Deb. Tara helped me understand something I didn't quite understand back when I spoke with Kunal in episode 22: that it was a privilege to take care of a loved one. But Tara's explanation of her experience as her friend's caretaker made sense to me. That to show up for someone when they're so broken down is humbling. It makes you understand how precious life is. Now I understand why Kunal referred to the experience as a privilege. And that's a wrap for today. Please follow the podcast if you will like to hear more stories from Cancer Thrivers, Caregivers, and family members. I would really appreciate it if you can leave an honest rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Podchaser so I know if I'm serving the interests and needs of you listeners out there. You can also share any feedback and suggestions directly to me by visiting talkabout cancer podcast.com. Thank you for listening.