The Chemo Sessions + 17-Minute Meditation

Can meditation help with cancer?

Click above for this week’s guided meditation

“What will meditation do for you? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Probably something in between. It's worth a try.”

- Kelly Kelbel

Hi Friends -

Can meditation help with a cancer diagnosis? It can definitely help mitigate some of the discomfort from treatment. And for some, it can change their experience of the whole ordeal.

Image Credit: Yellow quartz, designed by Kelly’s friend Nettie Fisher. Kelly writes: “Yellow quartz represents abundance, confidence, clarity – all traits that we may want to invite into our bodies.”

That’s our subject in this week’s “Real People, Real Practice” post, featuring a body scan by my friend Kelly Kelbel (the second of two “embodiment” practices she made – the first is here). I met Kelly and her partner, Tony, at one of my retreats a few years back. At the time, she had just finished dose-dense chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, as well as new specialty medications for a rare and aggressive disease, Inflammatory Breast Cancer. Her journey was harrowing. Not just the treatments, but also the poor care she received at the beginning, the dismissals from various medical professionals who underplayed or misunderstood her symptoms. She had to trust her own instincts and advocate for herself, until eventually she found a team of oncologists in Boston who got her the right diagnosis and treatment plan.

Kelly made this guided practice for folks with breast cancer, although, as she notes, you don’t have to have cancer for it to be supportive. I share some of Kelly’s words about how meditation has specifically helped her below.

That help – that care – has already propagated outward. Tony, a musician, made her a gorgeous song “for comfort and uplift”: Treatment 1. Kelly wanted to share that feeling and connection, so she began to write and record meditations for others in similar situations. Her Substack newsletter – Chemo Sessions – was born. Please subscribe to Kelly’s publication if you know anyone facing cancer, or if you just want to support her work. “The idea,” says Kelly, “is that people could go into their infusions with a companion, read some words from people who have been through chemo treatments, and do a guided meditation.”

What’s helped you during your own health crisis? Maybe a specific form of meditation, or something else entirely. Share thoughts in the comments if inspired. Our aim has always been for the comments section to be its own resource, a place to swap stories and practices and connect to a community of fellow caring humanoids.

“Real People, Real Practice” is a regular column where I make a custom guided meditation in response to someone’s curiosity or situation. You can submit a request here, I’m going to start doing more of these. And sometimes, someone else – like Kelly – has a practice so perfect that I couldn’t possibly improve on it!

Kelly and Jeff in October 2023, a few days before a major surgery

Jeff: Kelly, can you summarize how meditation has helped you?

Kelly: I feel like meditation has saved me. How dramatic! I wasn’t drowning, and aside from this really aggressive cancer diagnosis, I was fine. Except I was stuck in serious ruminating thoughts, always replaying conversations or rehearsing potential interactions. I could not get out of my head. And I questioned my worth and value as a human. And I was somehow very aware of my body while being totally dissociated. I used to wake up and go to the to-do list in my head. What I would accomplish, what I would produce. I didn’t feel happy even though I had a really beautiful life. I felt busy, like I was always working toward something to be appreciated later.

Now, I wake up with a lightness. Is this happiness? I wonder. I think I’m actually smiling, too, and all because of my aliveness. It’s so simple and so fucking hard, too. Meditation has helped me grieve so much loss while holding gratitude for so much beauty. It has helped me make sense of the sorrow and expanded my appreciation for joy. Meditation invites me to think more clearly, less obsessively. I will say that I am less productive. There is something about facing my fears, facing my death, that actually got me to pause, to slow down. If you are talking with me, I’m now in the room with you, listening with my body. It takes more time and heart to listen like this, to live like this.

I started meditating with your intro to meditation course on the Calm app, and the ease of it got me to do it. After a few weeks, on the way to chemo, my partner Tony noticed that I was different. He asked how, why, what was happening. Cancer created anxiety in me that I hadn’t experienced before. Meditation created equanimity, and that was new to me, too. My current meditation practice is focused on embodiment, on finding home inside my own body, deeply inspired by the book The Wakeful Body by Willa Blythe Baker and also by the teachings of Sebene Selassie. A phrase came to me in a recent meditation when distracted that I now use daily: Return to my body.

Jeff: Friends, I hope Kelly’s words and practice can be a support, whatever your situation. I don’t think we all need to meditate in this life, or even to meditate when things get hard. But I do think everyone can benefit from some kind of deliberate practice. Some way to interrupt the narrow convictions of the mind, and come into direct contact with the broader landscape of the present moment.

It’s always amazing and mysterious to me what people find there / here. I’ve heard many describe a similar pattern: through illness or life challenge or the death of a loved one, through the practice of accepting what’s here, people find support and perspective and even transformation in ways they could never have imagined. Sometimes that acceptance is forced on them. Other times, through grace, it just happens. Maybe both are a kind of grace.

Thank you Kelly for your creativity and care. If you live in the Asheville area and are curious to meditate with Kelly, Tony and her community, check out Kelly’s Experimental Meditation Club at the excellent AyurPrana Listening Room.

Let’s meditate!

Jeff

A few quick notes—

• The next Do Nothing Project (DNP) is Sunday, March 29 at 8pm EDT. Link here. *NOTE: Beginning April 12, the DNP will be for paid subscribers three times a month, and free for everyone the first Sunday of the month. I’ll say more about this shift in the weeks to come. As always, full scholarships are available to anyone who asks – just email info@jeffwarren.org.

• New to Home Base? We are a community of continual learning and practice, with over 70 free guided meditations in our audio library, over 60 extended meditations, over 365 meditations on YouTube, and a growing number of community practice videos. New writing, new audio meditations, and new live community practice sessions happen every week.

• Did you find me on Calm or Happier? While the meditations I recorded for the apps live on in perpetuity, I no longer record new meditations for them. My latest work happens here; becoming a paid subscriber is the best way to support that work. If you found this meditation and post helpful, but becoming a paid subscriber isn’t an option, you can also …

Many thanks!

Celebrating Our Neurotic Attachments – CEC Meditation

Monday March 30, 2026, 7:30pm EST
Online via Zoom

I’m bored by my enlightened disdain for my attachments. For years I’ve tried to unfix from my worldly neuroses. It hasn’t worked. So I’ve decided to celebrate them instead. In this meditation, we celebrate our neurotic attachments so fully that they float off us – sigh – like liberated ghosts on their way to a sparsely-attended poetry reading in Heaven.