A Journey Into Awareness

Breast Cancer Awareness opens October, but October becomes a journey into awareness.

15 years ago I got a phone call from my gynaecologist's office.
“Miss, we need you to come back to the clinic.”
“Oh. Why? What's wrong?”

It had been only one week since my regular gynaecological examination. I went back. Before I even entered the doctor's office, I had my file in my hands. I looked at the papers and there was one word that seemed to swallow everything else around it:
Cancer.
Then I sat in front of the doctor. He was speaking, but it felt as though he had suddenly switched to a language I had never heard before. Medical words. Results. Explanations. Procedures. I honestly had no idea what he was talking about. I went home and called my mum.
“I have cancer.”
“What do you mean, you have cancer?”
“I have cancer.”
That was practically the only thing I carried home from that appointment. I didn't really understand where it was, exactly what it was, what would happen next or what treatment I might need. I just had this enormous word—the big C word—inside my head, my heart and my thoughts.
Cancer.
And in some way, I still have it.
I was very, very lucky. I needed a relatively minor operation. No chemotherapy. No radiotherapy. No long journey through cancer treatment afterwards. I was lucky enough to continue with my life. Not everybody gets that story.

My mum didn't. Last year I received another phone call. This time it was my brother.
“I have one good news and one bad news.”
And somehow, at that very moment, I knew. I cannot explain how. Somewhere inside me I knew this was going to be the end of her earthly life. And yet I hoped until the very last moment. Even on the day she died, there was still something inside me thinking:
She's coming back, right?
I still wait for her phone call.
That is the strange thing about love and fear. Your hopes can become bigger than what you know.
Maybe tomorrow there will be another treatment. Maybe she will suddenly improve. Maybe the doctors are wrong. Maybe this isn't really happening. You hope because the alternative is almost impossible to accept. And sometimes it still happens.
Cancer entered my body once, and it entered my family in a completely different way.

And through my work, I hear it again and again in other people's stories.
In 2024, an estimated 20.6 million people worldwide were newly diagnosed with cancer. Around 2.43 million women were diagnosed with breast cancer. About one person in five is estimated to develop cancer during their lifetime. Perhaps that is why it sometimes feels as though cancer is never very far away. 

But October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and rather than beginning with disease, I want to ask something else. 
Could awareness begin before illness forces us to pay attention?
What does awareness actually mean?
Not just knowing that breast cancer exists.
Knowing your own body.
Knowing what is normal for you.
Noticing when something changes.
Going for appropriate screening.
Taking persistent symptoms seriously.
Understanding hormones.
Looking at sleep, movement, food, stress, emotions and environment.
Asking questions.
And sometimes simply admitting: something doesn't feel right.

Awareness is not fear.
And it is not a promise that if we do everything correctly, nothing will happen to us.
It is a relationship with the body we live in.

''Your body speaks before your mind is ready to listen.''

I have used this sentence before. The longer I work with people, the more meaning it has for me.

I work hands-on, mainly with visitors to Tenerife. People from Britain, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and many other places. Men and women, different ages, professions, habits, cultures and lives. Working mostly with visitors means I meet many different bodies rather than repeatedly seeing the same few.
Different scars.
Different skin.
Different posture.
Different relationships with pain.
Different relationships with touch.
And behind every body there is a story.
Massage sometimes creates a strange little space where somebody finally stops doing and simply is.

And people talk.
I haven't slept properly for months.
It started after my husband died.
My stomach gets worse when I'm stressed.
I know I need to slow down.
I had cancer.
My partner is going through treatment.
Sometimes people don't say anything at all.
But there is still a body under my hands.
A jaw that doesn't want to release.
Shoulders permanently raised.
Breathing that seems unable to reach the belly.
Tension appearing again and again during a difficult period.

None of that means somebody has cancer. Sometimes perhaps the body is simply saying:
Enough.
Something has changed.
I don't feel safe here.
I need rest.
Please notice me.
Cancer can develop silently. Someone can eat well, exercise, meditate, know their body and do everything supposedly right and still become ill.

So awareness is not immunity.
Illness is not proof that somebody failed to listen.
But maybe there is value in knowing ourselves before illness has to introduce us to our own bodies.

My mum, smoking and the problem with one easy answer

When my mum was diagnosed with lung cancer, one question came very quickly:
Did she smoke? Yes.
She had smoked when she was younger, as so many people around her did in the 1980s. She had stopped more than twenty years before her diagnosis. Smoking unquestionably belongs to the story of lung cancer. It is the largest established risk factor, and quitting substantially lowers risk over time. But it is not the only risk. Radon, asbestos, air pollution and several occupational exposures also cause or increase the risk of lung cancer.
My mum had also worked in a chemical factory. She had lived surrounded by asbestos. What had she breathed? For how many years? Which substances? Which combinations? 
Were they important?
I don't know.

And that is my point.
When "former smoker" went into her medical history, it seemed to become the obvious explanation.
But a risk factor in a population is not the same thing as knowing what caused one individual's cancer.
Statistics are incredibly valuable. They show us patterns we could never recognise from individual stories alone.
But statistics depend on what we measure.

Smoking is relatively easy to ask about:
Do you smoke? Did you smoke? How much? For how many years? A lifetime is much harder to put into a box.
Twenty years inside a factory. Something in the air around a home. An exposure nobody recognised at the time. Several exposures interacting. Recent grief. Emotions. Trauma. Genetics. Chance.
Things that happened forty years before anybody thought to ask.

That difference matters to me enormously.
Not because I want to deny an established risk, but because one person's truth is always larger than one statistic.

Our environment is also emotional
And then there is another kind of environment.
Not only what we breathe, eat, drink or touch. There is the environment we experience emotionally.
The relationship we go home to.
The workplace our stomach reacts to before Monday morning even begins.
The person around whom we feel completely safe.
The person around whom our whole body seems to prepare itself.
Loss.
Love.
Fear.
Loneliness.
Financial pressure.
Caring for somebody.
Moving country.
Divorce.
A childhood experience.
Trauma.
Grief.

The same event can pass through two people and leave completely different traces.
One talks. Another becomes silent. One cries. Another cannot. One reaches for cigarettes. Someone else runs. Another eats. Another loses their appetite. Another works until there is no time left to think.

So I keep returning to a question:
Where does emotional experience end and physical experience begin?
We already know they communicate.
Fear changes our breathing. Stress can disturb sleep and digestion. A memory can make the heart race. A smell or voice can produce a physical reaction before the conscious mind has even worked out why. Chronic stress has measurable physiological effects. But when we ask whether psychological stress itself causes cancer, the evidence is much less certain. For breast cancer specifically, large prospective studies have not found a clear association between perceived stress or adverse life events and developing the disease.

So I do not want to tell somebody:
Your grief caused your tumour. That can become terribly cruel.
But I also do not want to stop exploring emotional life simply because we cannot connect one emotion to one diagnosis.

This is where approaches such as biodecoding interest me—not as a diagnosis and not as a proven explanation for cancer, but sometimes as a guide to another question. If it suggests looking at grief, perhaps I explore grief. If it raises relationships, fear, sexuality, nurturing, identity or unresolved conflict, perhaps I ask myself whether something there needs attention.
Not: This caused my cancer.
But: What else about myself have I never looked at? What do I carry? What repeatedly triggers me? How does my body react? What do I do afterwards? What helps me return to balance?

Sometimes a map doesn't have to prove where the illness came from to help us notice somewhere we have never looked.

Ancestors, modern medicine and the “New Age”

Human beings have been asking these questions for a very long time.
One of the earliest surviving medical descriptions associated with cancer comes from ancient Egypt—and remarkably, it describes tumours of the breast. Imagine medicine then. No mammogram. No biopsy. No microscope. No pathology report. No DNA. No hormone receptors. A person. A pair of hands. A breast. Something hard that had not been there before.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus described advanced breast tumours and, in one case, essentially admitted there was no effective treatment.
There is something about that honesty I like. We see it. We know something is wrong. We don't know how to cure it.

Later Greek physicians tried to explain cancer through an imbalance of the body's humours, particularly “black bile.” They observed something real. Their explanation was wrong.

Other traditions developed different languages.
Traditional Chinese medicine connected emotions with functional organ systems and spoke about Qi, blood, stagnation and constitution.

Ayurveda looked at constitution, digestion, lifestyle, mental state and imbalance throughout the person.

Today medicine speaks a very different language: Genes. Mutations. Hormones. Viruses. Immune systems. Inflammation. Carcinogens. Cell signalling.

We know incomparably more about cancer biology than an Egyptian or Greek physician did. And yet our starting point remains surprisingly familiar: 
Observe.
Something changed.
Why?

There is another distinction worth making.
Not everything we now call “ancient wisdom” is actually ancient.
Reiki is a much newer Japanese practice.
Many of today's familiar chakra–organ–disease charts are modern interpretations of older spiritual traditions.
Biodecoding is newer still.

The modern wellness world often mixes ancient medicine, spiritual symbolism, psychology and recent alternative theories until they appear to be one continuous tradition. They aren't. That doesn't automatically make newer ideas worthless. It simply means we should know where an idea came from before claiming that our ancestors knew it thousands of years ago.

And perhaps that is part of awareness too: being curious enough to explore tradition without turning history into mythology.

And yes, I have uncomfortable questions

I question things. 
Who decides what is safe?
Who funds the research?
What receives millions for investigation—and what doesn't?
How much influence do pharmaceutical companies have?
What about food companies?
Chemical manufacturers?
Governments?
Lobbyists?
When does somebody first suspect that something may cause harm?
How long before the public knows?

And sometimes I wonder whether what we quickly label a conspiracy begins with a piece of a story that has not yet been told properly.
That doesn't mean every conspiracy is true.
Suspicion isn't evidence.

But history gives us reasons to keep asking.

WHO itself now uses the term commercial determinants of health for the ways commercial activity—including products, lobbying, research funding, marketing and misinformation—can influence health and health policy. The same WHO also recognises that private industry is indispensable in producing medicines, vaccines and health technologies.

Both can be true.

There are also documented examples directly connected to women's health. Papers analysing internal documents released through litigation found that ghostwritten medical articles were used to promote menopausal hormone therapy and minimise perceptions of risks including breast cancer.
That is not a theory. It happened.
But cancer existed millions of years before pharmaceutical companies. That is true too.

So I cannot honestly tell you that pharmaceutical companies created cancer. I cannot tell you that somebody has discovered a universal natural cure and secretly hidden it from us. Our research hasn't shown that.

But I also don't believe awareness means handing every question to somebody else and saying:
You decide what I should believe.
Question the doctor when you need to.
Question the alternative therapist too.
Question the supplement promising a miracle.
Question the pharmaceutical advertisement.
Question something even when everybody accepts it as true.

And question your own favourite belief.

For me, awareness is not choosing a side.
It is remaining curious enough to investigate—and humble enough to change my mind when the evidence asks me to.

The breast is the doorway
October begins with the breast.

And it should. Millions of women receive a breast-cancer diagnosis every year. So know your breasts. Know what is normal for you. Notice when something changes. Attend appropriate screening. Don't ignore something simply because you are frightened of what it might mean. 

But I want the pink ribbon to open a larger door.

Awareness cannot only mean looking inward. Sometimes we listen to the body.
But sometimes we need to look at what surrounds the body.
The air. The water. The food. The workplace. The substances touching our skin. The medications we take. The culture we live in. The stress we normalise. The emotional environments we inhabit. The things we choose. And the things we cannot choose.

Then perhaps we look inward again. At our fears. Our habits. Our trigger points. Our relationships. Our beliefs. Our body.

Not because awareness gives us complete control. It doesn't.
Not because every disease could have been prevented. It couldn't.

But because there is value in becoming an active participant in our own health rather than meeting our body properly only after something goes wrong.

What if awareness began much earlier?

Earlier than diagnosis.
Earlier than treatment.
Earlier than fear.

Not necessarily “earlier enough to prevent every disease” — because that would be untrue and unfair — but earlier in our relationship with ourselves.
Maybe awareness isn't having all the answers. Maybe it is knowing enough to ask better questions.
To notice. To listen. To investigate. To change what we can. To ask for help when we need it. 

Maybe awareness is not something we practise only before illness. It matters after diagnosis too — when fear is loud and we need enough presence to ask questions, understand our choices and remain part of our own story.

Awareness is not only looking inward or looking around us. It is a state of mind: curious enough to question, grounded enough to listen, and strong enough to keep learning even when the answers are uncomfortable.

Awareness is not knowing everything. It is refusing to stop looking simply because someone has given us an answer.

And sometimes awareness is simply admitting:

I don't know. But I want to understand.

A Journey Into Awareness starts here.

Balaboa — learning, unlearning, listening.

''This article combines personal experience, observation, traditional perspectives and current research. It is intended to encourage awareness and curiosity, not to replace cancer screening, medical diagnosis or treatment.''