Embodying a World without Cancer: Co-hosted by Cheryl Buck and Claire de Laszlo

As we head into season two of CancerTalks Podcast, Claire and Cheryl thought it would be nice to tell you a little bit about themselves and share the origin story of CancerTalks. Through this conversation, they arrive at a new realization of what CancerTalks is really about, namely, coming together to find ways to embody a world without cancer. If you find yourself unable to imagine a world without cancer, we invite you to listen to Cheryl and Claire’s conversation as they try to describe what it might feel like.

One of the many people who we think is embodying a world without cancer is Rupa Marya, co-author of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. On a recent podcast, Rupa describes what she means by deep medicine and invites us to rethink our understanding of health. Her description aligns perfectly with our vision of a world without cancer so we decided to share the whole thing right here, edited slightly for flow:

Deep medicine is recognizing that health exists beyond individuals. Health is an emergent phenomenon of systems within systems working in their optimum state. So we can try to get health as an individual, but we will not be as successful as [we would be] getting health for whole communities together... And by that, I mean the human and the more than human communities. I mean the water, and the air, and the microbes in the forest. So deep medicine is understanding how all of those things must intersect to create health, and that we have to open our perspectives and our ways of knowing to all the keepers of deep medicine, not just the doctors or the healthcare workers, but that our farmers, our frontline indigenous grandmothers standing up against Line 3 right now; that these are all people working for health. And when we work together and collectively and across disciplines together, we can create a different kind of reality. We can create a health for everybody. When we start imagining food as a right as it has been for thousands of years before capitalism, where our food and medicine have always been coexistent. They haven't been separated from each other—and it’s still that way in many cultures around the world. When we insist upon our medicine, being outside of the tiny vocabulary of pharmaceuticals, not that we abandon science, Western science, or we abandon even those pharmaceuticals, but we abandon the logic of domination that they have been structured by and that we take back our right to have access to these things to be healthy when we need them. And that we incorporate the full range of languages and vocabularies of medicines, be they plant medicines, medicines of song, medicines of relationships, in order to achieve a vision and a reality of our health. So these practices are not... I'm not just talking about things that don't exist. These are things that are an active practice in communities around the world today.

CancerTalks is an inter-dependent community project with a production team of three and we count on your contributions. We’d like to thank Karen Richmond for her generous contribution. If you've learned from or been inspired by these conversations please consider joining Karen and becoming a donor. To support us starting at $5 a month, or to make a larger tax-deductible contribution, visit Patreon.com/cancertalks.

CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. If you’d like to be in community with other cancer thrivers seeking personal transformation join us for free workshops on Zoom. Visit cancertalks.com to register.