The Lotus is Born in the Mud

Thich Nhat Hanh famously wrote: No mud, no lotus. The pristine lotus flower blooms from mud — dark, thick, and unappealing. It is asking us to consider stepping into those murky spaces within ourselves, trusting that an inner wisdom may emerge.

At the early stages of the unraveling of my metastatic cancer diagnosis, I underwent several investigative tests to look for evidence, mostly invisible to the eye, where the metastasis might have infiltrated and settled.

One of the tests was a brain MRI. I didn’t know what to expect. I had never experienced one before. My nervous system was already in fight-or-flight mode after painful biopsies that had left me physically and emotionally exhausted and scared. The thought of my brain glowing red on the screen felt like the ultimate personal catastrophe.

Looming large was the word shame.

The shame of failing my own survival story.

Had I assumed this identity of survivor in childhood?
“If anyone can do it, it’s Gaby,” I remember my mother saying about me many times. I wonder what hopes she laid onto me—my sweet mother, a survivor herself of the Holocaust.

If I placed enough obstacles in my path to overcome them, would that make me a good survivor? What kind of heroic BS was I playing with?

If the machine blinked red, my story might end like my sister Karen’s, who died of metastatic breast cancer in her brain twenty years earlier. Once the cancer reached her brain, it was all over. I remember her last few weeks: she was so tired, unable to talk, her eyes the only part of her still expressive, letting me know she loved me.

The MRI room was cold, below average temperature, with fluorescent lights that seemed to suck up all human warmth.

“Would you like a warm blanket?” the technician asked.

It helped.

“Do you have any metal in your body?”

“Yes, implants in my teeth.”

I wondered what the machine did when it encountered metal. Would it confuse it with a mass?

I lay inside the sliding narrow tunnel; my head placed in a contraption that looked like a baseball catcher’s mask. My eyes were closed, headphones playing classical music over the earplugs.

The scan began.

Very loud rhythmic drumming.

At first the sounds were eerie—like panicked heartbeats, insistent and intrusive.

I don’t like enclosed spaces. I can become extremely agitated when there is no obvious way out or no end in sight. Once, I got stuck in an elevator for fifteen minutes in Rio de Janeiro and had a full-blown panic attack, my brain diving into darkness like piranhas circling “what ifs.”

I know panic. This wasn’t that.

I was afraid of what the scan might reveal, but not of the enclosure itself.

Those early days after diagnosis were a time of completely unregulated emotions. I was in great physical pain: the tumor under my left axilla was several centimeters large, pressing on nerves that radiated toward my chest and arm. My movements were stiff. I dragged my feet as if walking through thick wet mud—any slight change in posture triggered excruciating nerve pain.

My focus narrowed, as a firing cannon, pointedly sharp at reducing the discomfort. All I could feel and taste was darkness. The “what ifs” had already become “it is.” And I had no capacity to process my feelings while the pain was so alive in my body.

I kept thinking in surprise – “cancer is fucking painful.”

Yet on that day, the MRI set the course of my relationship with the illness.

As the incessant sounds of drumming beat through my head, I began to relax into the rhythm, aligning it with my heart.

Thump — breath in.
Thump — breath out.

My eyes remained closed. A pulsating purple light began to take shape and expand inside them, filling my inner sight. Time became malleable. I felt it slowing down inside the tunnel, like those early photographic studies of motion where a single second contains many frames.

And then time dissolved.

I had never given much thought to angels or to reaching out to deceased family members. This might be a good time to come clean: I don’t know if I believe in the afterlife. Even now, working in end-of-life care and spiritual support at the edge of life, I have absolutely no certainty whether our souls meet a creator after our bodies fail.

And yet, in that moment, I knew what to do.

I called my sister.

“Karen, can you help me?”

I literally asked.

And she came.

Her voice was as clear as day.

“I’m here, Gaby. Don’t be afraid. I’m never going to abandon you,” she said. “You are safe.”

Was it divine intervention? Was it life force? In Judaism, angels are called, Malachim, messengers of God. I believe Karen was my malach, an angel, wrapping me in loving kindness, telling me that no matter what, I was safe.

Her presence hovered above my body.

Karen’s voice sounded exactly like hers, and she appeared as young as when she died, at forty-one – short dark hair, light brown skin, soft chocolate-colored eyes, straight white teeth.

Skeptics might say it was imagination, wishful thinking, or fear. Does it matter? Not to me.

Her spirit infused mine with a brilliance that filled my body with love. That moment was real to me. A tiny fissure had opened in my timeline, and Karen reached through it to show me something I could not see before. What was happening—the cancer, the pain, even the possibility of death—was not there to attack or hurt me.

It was there to release me from my hero narrative. A narrative centered around my ego: I am at the center of life. I must overcome, conquer, survive.

A narrative heavy with shoulds and must-haves.

Karen didn’t come to save me from death. She came to set me free from the burden of surviving. It was obvious – I had been clinging to a storyline.

Something loosened. The grip I had on my life softened. It wasn’t that I welcomed death, or that I was ready for it, or some other spiritual mambo-jumbo.

It was something simpler. It was presence. A physical, emotional, and spiritual environment that was not fighting. An environment that allowed for growth. My sister had come to show, connect, and remind me of the soul stationed in my body. Where before I had no faith, something opened. And not in a cure of the illness, but faith in unearthing a more brilliant version of myself.

She showed me the beauty of the lotus is not just survival, as my heroic-self once believed.  it is about our capacity to reach inward into the darkness and pull out something alive, my own lotus.

It is our capacity to love ourselves, brilliantly and boundlessly.

When traveling through darkness, rooted in our physical experience, we sometimes forget our light.

Karen reminded me of mine.

And in that narrow MRI tunnel, I understood for the first time:

The lotus does not bloom in spite of the mud.

It blooms because of it.