“How Stories Heal Us!” By Suzanne Clores. +”The Extraordinary Project” Podcast!

How Stories Heal Us!
by Suzanne Clores

.

I met Lisa Zayas at a California healing conference, back when it was safe to gather in hotel lobbies, lay on indoor massage tables, and touch others with healing hands. The conference was sponsored by IONS (the Institute of Noetic Sciences) where Deepak Chopra would be speaking. My podcast, The Extraordinary Project , was a media partner.

I was on a mission to find a mind-blowing story, someone who had come within an inch of her life. Lisa stood still amid a swirl of enthusiastic tech people, taking a breath after a lecture on AI and healing. Something about her presence—strong yet vulnerable— told me she had an interesting story to tell. I can’t explain my urge to talk to her: out of a thousand people, why her? While either of us could have moved on to ten different activities, I plucked her out of the crowd and spent an incredible afternoon listening.

Lisa Zayas

40 years old and a veteran of the tech industry, Lisa told me of her remarkable and harrowing struggle to manage pain, fear, and imminent death due to stage four terminal breast cancer. Her story was intense, but what I remember most about our conversations was laughter. We clicked instantly, and her good humor was an anomaly. Who laughs in the face of her own mortality? This woman.

I have always been drawn to narratives set on the edges of women’s health. Most of the time, the stories I gather have unanswered questions at their core -like is it possible to know the future, and can we really talk with the dead? Lisa’s story was different in that her cancer, oxy addiction, and limited chances of recovery were not mysterious to her. She had participated fully in western medicine and was prepared to die. At the same time, she used the tools of meditation and QiGong to stay connected to her body. Somehow, she was able to heal.

I knew immediately that Lisa’s recovery process, and her relationship with famed QiGong master, Dr. Effie Chow

Dr. Effie Chow

who founded the East-West Academy of Healing Arts were a perfect fit for a docu-style audio piece on  The Extraordinary Project, my podcast that confronts our cultural attraction and aversion to intuition, energy medicine, and the mystical.

” QiGong and the Art of Feeding Possibility” spotlights the role played by meditation and QiGong in Lisa’s recovery from breast cancer, oxy addiction, and negative thinking. I love this story and its gritty truth about life and death. As we all know, women’s voices are still marginalized when it comes to healthcare. Stories like this one, about the life-saving benefits of complementary palliative care, don’t always get heard, even though they are often the very stories that change minds.
“QiGong and the Art of Feeding Possibility”  is 22 minutes long, and a wonderful reminder  of how much feeling like a loveable human being matters when on the road to recovery