Serenity Rising: Healing with Cancer

Some mornings the only thing you can manage is to get up and brush your teeth, and Lisa Espinoza believes that might be enough for today. It is the heart of her book, First, Brush Your Teeth: Grief and Hope in Real Time, written every single day in the year after her youngest son Chandler died, and it became the thread she followed when breast cancer arrived in January 2022.   Lisa is an author an...

Dr. Katherine Willow ND has buried her mother, all three of her grandparents, her younger sister and her husband, all to cancer. For 43 years she has kept showing up for other families as a naturopathic doctor, and when Bron asks how she keeps choosing this work after so much loss, her answer is simple: the work chose her.   In this episode Katherine shares her own framework and her patients' expe...

Advice starts arriving the moment you are diagnosed with cancer, and it rarely stops. In the final episode of Season 2, Bron goes solo to talk about the advice nobody asks for, from the email linking to a cure made from ground apricot kernels, to the text blaming her lifestyle choices, to the coach who told her that her second diagnosis came because she had not done enough of the work after the fi...

Emma Victoria Johnson was 43, fit, healthy and diligent with her annual mammograms when she was told she had stage four breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes and liver.    Seventeen years earlier she had lost her mum to lung cancer within six months of diagnosis, so she knew exactly how fast this disease can move.   Within weeks, her relationship of seven years ended, the luxury beauty...

Gaylynn Kapri has been told to say goodbye more times than most people can imagine. This episode of Serenity Rising sits down with Gaylynn and her cousin LaVonne M. Chastain, the two women behind the memoir Get Up, to talk about the question that gives the book and this conversation its title. What does getting up actually look like when you cannot see a single reason to stand? Gaylynn's story doe...

This episode of Serenity Rising turns on a question most men are never given room to ask, what happens when a cancer you thought was behind you comes back twenty years later. Bron sits down with Michael Bovarnick, founder of the Prostate Education Project , who was first diagnosed with prostate cancer more than two decades ago, lived cancer free for almost twenty years, and then, at eighty-three ,...

Cheyenne Heflin was thirteen years old, at her first ever sleepaway camp, when a soccer game left her with a knee injury that would not heal.    Weeks later an x ray showed what her  orthopaedist  called an aggressive  tumour , osteosarcoma, a bone cancer that would take her leg above the knee and put her through months of chemotherapy, including a drug nicknamed the Red Devil.   She survived. But...

How do you tell your kids you have cancer, and how do you keep telling them the truth as they grow, without asking them to carry that truth for you?   In this solo episode, Bron speaks directly to parents navigating cancer with kids in the home. Drawing on her own experience raising five boys through two very different diagnoses, one curable, one not, alongside Cancer Council guidance and current...

Bryan Blackmon has a tattoo on the back of his neck that he got in Maui the day he learned his aunt had been diagnosed with breast cancer, a permanent reminder that she was not walking through it alone. It is one of the most quietly powerful things anyone has brought to Serenity Rising. But as Bron says at the top of this episode, it is not the whole story. Bryan is the founder of Crab Crew Life,...

What if cancer is not the enemy, but the teacher? What if the body is already whole, already complete, and it is the obstacles we place in our own path - the unforgiveness, the grief, the toxic patterns, the habits born of lovelessness that create the conditions for illness? Dr. Ellyn Hilliard-McLeod holds a PhD in holistic nutrition and has spent decades working within dividuals facing life-threa...

Bill Derrick has navigated three storms. Not setbacks. Not challenges. Storms. A family construction business that survived the Great Recession after five brutal years, including the day his father died twelve hours before the final loan was closed, and his brotherand he went to the signing anyway. Then an incurable blood cancer: multiple myeloma, diagnosed on Thanksgiving 2013, treated with radia...

In this solo episode of  Serenity Rising , Bron steps back into the early weeks following her own second cancer diagnosis and shares what she would tell herself now, three years on. This is not a highlight reel of resilience. It is an honest, practical letter to the version of Bron sitting in a doctor's office, and to anyone listening today who is sitting in their own version of that room. In this...

When cancer enters a family, most parents brace for the medical fight. What they donot see coming is that their child wants to help, and has no idea how. In this guest interview episode of Serenity Rising, Bron sits down with Russell Van Brocklen, known as The Dyslexic Professor, a New York State Senate funded dyslexia researcher and founder of Dyslexia Classes. Russell shares the exact process he...

What do you do with grief that has nowhere else to go?   In this episode of Serenity Rising , Bron sits down with Justin Anderson, known to his community as J. Vaelorin, a network engineer turned dark fantasy world builder. After losing his grandmother to cancer, Justin  channelled  years of unspoken grief into  VaelorinVerse , a fantasy universe where mental health is the magic system. This is a...

What happens when the woman who held her dying father through his final months becomes the same woman who holds you through two cancer diagnoses? In this deeply personal episode of  Serenity Rising, Bron sits down with her dearest friend and soul sister Kerri Chinner, a soul mastery coach, shamanic and energy medicine practitioner, and quantum biofeedback specialist based in Phuket, Thailand. Kerr...

Zulma Williams was six weeks out from graduating with her Bachelor of Social Work - finally stepping into the career she had always dreamed of when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was 46.  What happened next was not the story most people would expect. Instead of folding, Zulma changed the question. From 'why me?' to 'why not me?' From victim to CEO of her own ecosystem. She went on to co...

What if the fear and grief you've been carrying is stored in your body right now and learning to feel it, rather than push it away, is one of the most powerful things you can do for your healing? In this episode, Bron sits down with Ben Oofana, a meditation teacher and practitioner withover 35 years of experience working with people navigating serious illness, including cancer. Trained as a teenag...

Charmain Woods was told at the age of eight that she would be drowned in a bath. She washomeless by fifteen. By twenty she was a police officer. Over the next 24 years she would specialise in child abuse, sexual assault, and criminal analysis, rise to sergeant, become aqualified criminal profiler and then retrain as a lawyer, recently admitted to the New South Wales courts. And four years ago, in...

Sally Milliss has lived two of the hardest seasons a person can face and she has faced them in opposite seats. As a young woman she nursed her husband Steve through eight years of motor neurone disease, raising their son James, then just a toddler, while the life they had planned was quietly dismantled. Years later, cancer came for her. And she handled it in a way that surprised even herself. In t...

There is a kind of stress that does not announce itself. It just hums beneath the surface of an otherwise good life, slowly draining the energy you were saving for the things that matter most. In this episode of Serenity Rising, Bron explores the two layers of healing that  have to work together if either one of them is going to last. The inner work of living with intention, and the outer work of...

What if the question "who am I now?" wasn't a sign that something had gone wrong, but the doorway to the most important work of your life? In this guest episode of Serenity Rising, Bron sits down with her long-time friend and colleague, Dr Nat Green , transformational breakthrough coach, retired psychologist, and creator of the ABS Method and Archetypes of Transformation frameworks. With over 35 y...

Three small words that carry the weight of the world when you are living with cancer. How are you? It sounds like the most ordinary question in the world, and before a diagnosis, it was. Somewhere along the way, those three words became loaded, and answering them honestly became one of the hardest parts of moving through your day. In this solo episode of Serenity Rising , Bron unpacks what is real...

What happens when a medical scientist becomes the patient? And what does "N = one" really mean when the one is you? Kate's story spans forensic pathology, integrative oncology, and a breast cancer diagnosis received alone, mid-pandemic, in locked-down Melbourne. This episode weaves science and soul into a conversation that will stay with you.   SHOW NOTES In this guest interview episode of Serenit...

Am I going to die? Did I cause this? And who am I now? In this deeply personal episode of Serenity Rising , Bron sits with the three questions that arrive after a cancer diagnosis and rarely get the time and space they deserve. Drawing on lived experience, psychological research, and hard-won wisdom, Bron explores how to stop carrying these questions alone, and how to learn to live alongside them...

In this solo foundational episode of  Serenity Rising , Bron Watson takes listeners back to the very beginning...to the diagnosis that gave birth to The Serenity Project, and to the principles that have shaped it ever since. On the 23rd of February 2023, Bron heard the words again: yes, it's cancer. But this time was different. This time, the diagnosis was an incurable blood cancer. And somewhere...