Interview with Charlotte Bell about Yoga, Mindfulness Meditation, and Breast Cancer Nina Zolotow
Nina: Tell us a bit about yourself and what your life was like before your breast cancer diagnosis.
Charlotte: Before my cancer diagnosis, my life was extremely busy. I managed Mindful Yoga Collective, taught weekly yoga classes, wrote a monthly column for Catalyst Magazine, worked a part-time job doing social media and writing Hugger Mugger Yoga Products’ blog, and edited all the content on Yoga U Online. I also play oboe and English horn in the Salt Lake Symphony and at the time, played in a chamber folk sextet called Red Rock Rondo, which is still technically together, but is currently dormant because of all our other projects.
Nina: Why did you decide to study Buddhist style mindfulness meditation in addition to yoga, and what role did your meditation play in your life?
Charlotte: I was first introduced to vipassana meditation at a yoga retreat at The Last Resort in the Cedar Breaks area of Southern Utah. At the retreat, we practiced vipassana three times a day. After the retreat, the teachers, Pujari and Abhilasha Keays, felt I was ready for one of their five-day silent vipassana retreats. I couldn’t attend that year, but decided to take a deep dive the following year and attended a retreat in January of 1988.
I definitely didn’t take to meditation immediately on that first retreat. In fact, I spent the first three days plotting my escape. (The Last Resort was only accessible by snowmobile in the winter, so my plans had to be somewhat elaborate!)
On the evening of the third day, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and to prepare for bed, still feeling enormous frustration, but still trying to be mindful. As I reached for the doorknob to the bathroom, I felt the movement of my arm; the cool smoothness of the knob; the process of turning it; my biceps flexing as I pulled the knob toward me; and the intricate movements of my body as I walked through the door. The experience was exquisite. It was as if I was turning a doorknob for the first time in my life.
It made me realize the richness—and the importance—of being mindful, of even the most pedestrian of life tasks. The next day, I fell into a state of peace that I couldn’t have previously imagined. Of course, that gave way to the usual monkey mind later on, but a seed of possibility had been planted that made me see the value of practice.
Since then, mindfulness has been an essential part of my daily practice. I’ve gone through periods of practicing 20 to 30 minutes, and currently practice 60 minutes a day.
Nina: What happened when you were diagnosed with breast cancer? How were you feeling?
Charlotte: I received my breast cancer diagnosis on the first day of an 18-day metta (kindness)/vipassana (mindfulness) retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in 2016. I had had my annual mammogram 12 days before the retreat. A week later, the clinic called me back because they wanted to check something that they thought could be suspicious. I had an ultrasound and needle biopsy two days before leaving on retreat, and the timing worked out that the first day of the retreat would be the day they got the biopsy results back.
When I first heard the words “invasive ductal carcinoma” I felt an immediate shot of adrenaline. This lasted through the day. My partner was on the retreat with me. Since the retreat was silent, we had decided beforehand on a thumbs-up or thumbs-down signal for me to let him know the results. I gave him the signal when we were in the meditation hall, preparing to sit in the afternoon. I remember being more concerned about his response than my own during that meditation.
Nina: You told me that your long-time meditation practice was really helpful during this time. Can you let us know how? And what did you practice during this period?
Charlotte: The day of my diagnosis was the first day of the nine-day metta portion of the retreat. I consider this to be fortuitous. I had practiced metta regularly and on long retreats for years, so I was aware of the way that metta can soften the edges around pain and difficulty. But a cancer diagnosis was completely new territory for me. Fortunately, the retreat managers allowed me to use the phone in the office to make the necessary appointments for after the retreat so that I could hit the ground running when I got home, and I could be confident that I’d done all I could. That way, I could let go of worrying about details and focus on practice.
After 28 years of practicing metta, this retreat was the first time I felt compelled to do a lot of kindness practice for myself. In metta practice, you traditionally start with yourself and expand your metta outward to mentors, friends and family, and others. But metta to myself had always been a challenge, probably due to growing up in a family that rated selfishness as practically a mortal sin. So it took a cancer diagnosis for me to finally feel compelled to practice for myself. I practiced for others as well, but I spent more time with myself than I had in the past. When I returned home, I noticed that my usual habit of berating myself was no longer my first response when I made some sort of mistake. The self-metta practice had changed a longstanding unhealthy pattern.
Throughout the retreat, I was pleased and surprised to notice that my mind never went into any drama about the diagnosis. While it was not the diagnosis I had hoped for, my mind never descended into “why me?” or “poor me” or “what did I do to deserve this?” or any other such machinations. I saw the diagnosis simply as a new context for me, and I felt so grateful to be in a place where I could integrate this new context without distractions. I felt a profound sense of equanimity throughout the entire retreat. In a practice meeting with Joseph Goldstein during the second half of the retreat, I told him about this. I said, “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop [to start to freak out about the diagnosis], but it just isn’t happening.” He replied, “This is why we practice.”
I’ve known this and taught this many times to my yoga and meditation students: We can’t control what happens in our lives, but we can moderate our response to it. The equanimity I maintained throughout cancer experience was a testament to 28 years of mindfulness practice. Throughout the retreat and beyond, I’ve reflected many times on how grateful I am to have found this practice, and that I’ve put in the time and effort to be consistent with it. It has truly been transformative.
Nina: How about your yoga practice? Did yoga help support you during this time? If so, how? And which practices and/or philosophy in particular?
Charlotte: Yoga practice has supported me in much the same way as the meditation practice. In the past 20 years or so, I’ve been practicing from the perspective of the three yoga sutras that are concerned with asana:
2.46: The physical posture should be steady and comfortable.
2.47: It is mastered when all effort is relaxed and the mind is absorbed in the Infinite.
2.48: Then we are no longer upset by the play of opposites.
Having been born in a flexible body, I focused for years on doing extreme poses, largely for my own ego satisfaction. My dad was a gymnast, so I inherited some of his physical abilities. But in the early 2000s, I shifted my intention more fully to the sutras’ version of mastery—relaxing all effort and letting my mind be absorbed solely in the present physical experience of the pose. This has helped me develop equanimity in practice and beyond.
I initially learned how satisfying it is to combine mindfulness with asana practice on retreats at The Last Resort. Pujari and Abhilasha were students of B.K.S. Iyengar in the 1970s and ’80s, so there was a slow, mindful yoga practice each morning on their retreats. These sessions not only helped make the long days of sitting and walking meditation more comfortable, but they also allowed me to experience the joys of focusing inward in my practice rather than focusing on how I might push my body even further. So really, asana practice before, during and after my cancer diagnosis has been mostly another avenue for practicing mindfulness.
Since long before I was diagnosed, I’ve taught yoga for cancer patients. Currently, I teach at Huntsman Cancer Institute. Think about the language we use around cancer—“battling cancer,” “war on cancer,” etc. I feel that this sets up an antagonistic relationship with our bodies. Practicing simple asana from a more internal, and less forceful, perspective can remind us of all we can still enjoy about being in a living body. I feel grateful that I had the opportunity to explore this in my own body while going through the cancer experience.
Nina: What was the treatment and recovery period like for you? How did your meditation practice support you during treatment and recovery? And how about your yoga practice?
Charlotte: I was fortunate that my cancer was diagnosed at a very early stage (1A). It was an invasive type of cancer, triple negative, but the tumor was only 7mm. My oncologist said that chemo was an option, but she didn’t feel strongly about it in my case. I chose to have a lumpectomy and targeted radiation. I really felt pretty good throughout the process, although I experienced some fatigue a week or so after the radiation.
I continued both yoga and meditation practice, and stayed at a pretty even keel the entire time. In many ways, the process felt like a continuation of the retreat. I left the retreat so inspired by the equanimity I’d felt that there was a renewed sense of commitment that hasn’t faded.
It was also helpful to return to my yoga class sangha. Most of my students have been practicing with me for decades. There’s a cohesive, supportive culture that has formed among my students. Karma yoga is very much alive in my students, whenever anyone is going through challenging times. They stepped forward to help with tasks such as yard work and studio maintenance while I was going through treatment. Practicing metta for the supportive sangha was an important dimension of my yoga and meditation practice during that time.
Nina: Did you feel changed by this whole experience? If so, in what ways?
Charlotte: Of course. I’ve enjoyed a low-maintenance body for most of my life. I took good health for granted for a very long time. However, the year before my cancer diagnosis, I had to have my left hip replaced due to hip dysplasia. Three months after my lumpectomy, and two months after radiation, the right one was replaced. Having so many major health events in a span of less than two years definitely drove home the impermanent nature of these bodies. Yet, through all of it, I never felt that any of these issues were somehow a mistake. There’s a history of hip replacements and breast cancer on my mother’s side of the family. These things are written into my DNA.
What shifted—or maybe deepened is a better word—is my commitment to practice. While I’ve had a relatively peaceful four years in this body since my last hip replacement, I know that other things are going to come up. This is just the truth of living in impermanent, aging bodies. I’m immensely grateful for the years of practice that will help me navigate these challenges with grace.
Nina: Do you have anything else you’d like to tell our readers?
Charlotte: I can’t overemphasize the importance of regular practice. Even if you can commit to as little as five minutes a day, practice those five minutes. Consistency is the most important thing. As a classically trained musician, I’m intimately aware of how practicing scales and arpeggios can be mind-numbingly boring. But practicing musical exercises give you the skills to approach the music you want to play with confidence and ease. It’s the same with meditation. Over years of practice, you will hit plateaus, times when it seems nothing is really happening. But trust the process and continue to practice. In my own practice, I’ve realized that the plateaus are often times of integration, when the benefits of practice sink in deeper. When your practice integrates more deeply, it becomes your foundation, a state that you come from while negotiating the ups and downs of your life. And that’s the point of practice.
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