After discovering meditation in university, Urszula built and ran a successful communications agency. For 20 years, she was effective, responsible, and always “on.” In the 2020 pandemic lockdown, she built MyMeditation.Space, which has since become her life’s work. The tipping point came in 2021, when a cancer diagnosis forced her to stop controlling everything and start listening to her body.
In this excerpt, a cancer diagnosis arrives by email, and a Chinese medicine practitioner’s words set Urszula on a completely different life path. Hear the full conversation on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
Yuganov Konstantin
Kevin Young opens this conversation by asking Urszula to go back to her childhood: “Bring me right back to the start. What was life like for a little Ula?”
URSZULA: I was, I am, a fast learner. I did a lot. I was always in two schools, normal school and music school. And after that, two subjects in university and a few companies, so a lot of stuff… I could do everything, whatever I dreamed… no one could stop me. I was my own boss, doing whatever I figured out was good. I just followed the moment. But when I got cancer, it really stopped me because I got it in the moment that I thought I was living quite a sustainable life… It was so funny because when I got the diagnosis that I had cancer, I was doing the OSHO facilitation course, talking to my body-mind-consciousness. It’s a process in which I lead myself; that’s a little bit like hypnosis. I relax and open a dialogue between my body, my mind, and my consciousness. I talk with parts of my body, which I never usually do. In this method, the body is just like Compassionate Inquiry® says: it created coping mechanisms because they were useful once, even if they’re not useful anymore. It was quite deep, and I was doing this mapping, checking with myself, and going very deep down. And during this process, I learned that I had cancer.
KEVIN: That’s a big statement… But then you said, “I got this message,” right?
URSZULA: It was the crazy Covid time… Normally you don’t get this sort of message in an email… And I got an email with the message that I had cancer, first stage, and all this stuff. I thought it was a mistake, as it’s not possible that I could get such a message in that way. So I just totally… No, I didn’t read this message. But the next morning the doctor called me to confirm it.
Next, Urszula described going to a Chinese medicine practitioner, something she’d wanted to do for years but had never before had a “reason” to do so.
URSZULA: She looked at me, checked my pulse, and said, “But you are totally drained.” I said, “What?” I just… I couldn’t understand what she was talking about because I didn’t feel that way. What does that mean? In her opinion, my body was very tired. I didn’t feel it. I had this energy, but I didn’t feel it in the body… She said this related to the meridian of the gallbladder, a point of wind. She used Polish words and said, “You have to not think.” I said, “The mind doesn’t read…” But she was impatient with my mental explanation and said, “No. Just let it go.”
Even then, Ula’s first move was to try to manage her way out of it:
URSZULA: I just thought, okay, so I will use Excel, I will list all the tasks I do and I will re-manage this stuff so I can do less. It was my approach at that time that I could manage this somehow. Looking back now, after five years on this journey, I have huge respect for that moment. When somebody doesn’t feel something, they really don’t know what that means, because a person only feels what they feel. I was in that moment, and I could only feel what I could feel.
KEVIN: I’m getting a picture of prior to 2020, a successful, busy, effective, efficient woman who was doing a lot herself, managing a lot. I’m getting a picture of this hyper-independent woman. And even as you described, when you got that cancer diagnosis, you said, “I can do it all myself.” I can manage this. Here’s another thing that I can manage because I can manage everything.
KEVIN: So I’m really keen to know then, Ula, here is a woman pleasing everyone, working really hard, raising her family, running her businesses, managing her cancer diagnosis, really worried for your children, and discovering a lot about yourself. So what happened then? You decided, hey, I’ve discovered this thing, and I want to teach that to others. Tell me a little bit about that decision.
URSZULA: Yes, I wanted to share it, so I created a kind of meditation room in the building. I just started to do this. All during the illness and the process of recovering, while I was redefining my reality and how I perceived it, this idea kept growing, because I was looking for new methods, new ways I could do it better. And especially with all the respect that all of us have, totally different ways; for some of us it will be a meaningful conversation that starts the change, for another it could be massage, and for another it could be dancing. These sweet spots can show up in so many different moments. So that’s why my idea was that we need to gather this in a holistic way, with respect for each person’s own journey.
KEVIN: Give me an example, what does that actually look like?
Urszula’s answer lands back in the body, not the mind:
URSZULA: How bodywork helps us to get access to this “yes for us”… because sometimes when we are in tension, when we are tight, we really don’t have access to thinking about other solutions… It’s when the body is more relaxed that then somehow you have a bigger window.
Asked later what she actually sees happening in people who come to her MyMeditation.Space, Urszula shared the transformative experience of one specific person:
URSZULA: Before cancer, I was leading meditations for my employees… and one of my editors, a girl who was really shy, who had been “the invisible person” in the office… she joined us regularly. After some time, I could hear how loudly she laughed when she entered the building. She started to take up space, started understanding that she could be someone, that she could have a voice… And after that she changed her job.
KEVIN: A successful process for her was to just realize who she was, not who you wanted her to be or who OSHO or the Buddha or God or anybody else wanted her to be, just how she wanted to be.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the full conversation, and if it resonates, please subscribe, rate, review, and share.
Editor’s Note: This post comprises edited excerpts from The Gifts of Trauma podcast transcript. Selected passages have been carefully woven together to create a cohesive narrative that speaks in the guest’s voice and faithfully represents their perspective. – Rosemary Davies-Janes
