In this EP of An Illness Threatening Life Podcast Tonia catches you up on the creepy doctor from ITL EP 09 - #metooRX and an intense sign from the Universe about that experience - even if she doesn't know what it means. Let's just say a box full of otoscope tips sets the stage for ITL EP 10.

And down the rabbit hole Tonia tells the story of honing intuitive skills and sociological experiments on Bumble that might suggest we are a society living on the surface - even if there aren't a lot of peer reviewed articles about that.

Enjoy.

In this episode, Tonia breaks down some of her thoughts and feelings around the #metoo campaign. And then she tells a story about confronting rape culture and then being assaulted in a physician's office just last week. She is unapologetically angry, but she’s not surprised. Are you?

She is asking you to question where the onus lies and why it is so hard to victims to seek and see justice. She is asking you to consider your role. She is asking you to imagine what a true revolution in rape culture would look like, in medicine and beyond.

Chop wood, carry water is an old Buddhist proverb about living in the presence of process despite where we are in life. It is about approaching life as a gratefulness meditation and it is what Tonia believes to be the magic in her healing.

In this Illness Threatening Life Episode, Tonia talks about cycles of violence and her personal connection to it. She reveals an experience of sexual assault in her own life and the way that experience brought her to love. She challenges well known writer and teacher Rob Bell and calls for a solution to the cycles of violence that is both counterintuitive and directed at those who live in relative safety. It is a bold call for love, even as so many are being attacked and abused and drowned in misery.

In this episode of An Illness Threatening Life Podcast Tonia talks about her struggle with physical pain and resulting opioid addiction and engages in conversation with addiction recovery warrior Laura McKowen about using metaphor to understand avoidance in addiction and the pain that is the breaking of the shell that encloses our understanding.

In this episode of An Illness Threatening Life Podcast, Tonia nerds out on the war metaphor. She crosses into conversations about being an ally in social justice movements, the way that metaphors are not only engrained in our language but have significant implications in our lives, a little history lesson, and a conclusion about how the war metaphor is so dangerous when we are talking about cancer.

In this episode of An Illness Threatening Life, Tonia talks about all the cool work she is doing to serve young people, calls out some cultural ick that she has been experiencing and does a whole lot of teasing about upcoming ITL episodes and the amazing folks taking part.

In this episode of An Illness Threatening Life, Tonia tells moving stories about her early experience of breast cancer and how a Tibetan physician changed her life simply by orienting to her.

A warning to listeners that there are moments of passion in this episode where cuss words and tears slip out.

In this episode of An Illness Threatening Life, Tonia challenges the standard paradigm of grief. She argues that the experience of grief cannot be fit into clean stages and highlights work being done to allow us to grieve and experience loss in authentic ways. No matter how ugly.

In this episode, Tonia talks about the inspiration, themes and framework of ITL so you can gauge your interest.