In the fall of 2022, I weighed 205 pounds and my blood pressure was hitting numbers that frightened me. I was turning 52. And one morning I simply decided: I’m taking myself back. I’m not abandoning myself anymore. Five months later, 55 pounds were gone. I was teaching fitness classes again. I looked, everyone said, amazing.
But I could feel it. Underneath the smaller, stronger body — something was still wrong. And it wasn’t just menopause, and it wasn’t just hormones. My body wasn’t done talking.
The intense night sweats were dismissed. The swollen lymph node and rashes were dismissed. The pain in my body no one could explain was dismissed. I continuously reached out to my doctor, who continuously told me it was just menopause.
On the early morning of a photo shoot I’d been planning for months, I drove myself to the ER at 6 a.m. instead of cancelling the shoot — the pain was too intense and my fear was too profound. The ER doctor looked at my ultrasound and said, “You need a biopsy.” The show went on. I then drove myself to the photo shoot. In fact, the photo you see at the top of this page was taken later that same day.
Still, my family doctor insisted: “You do not have cancer. You do not need a biopsy.” I cried and asked her, “How do you know?”
It took another year — a year of my body still talking — before I found a new doctor who listened and did an endometrial biopsy. At that point I was also bleeding again after a couple of years of being in menopause, and so sick with pneumonia. I was at my wit’s end.
And there it was: cancer. I needed a radical hysterectomy. My body had known the whole time.
I need you to understand something: this is not a story about cancer. It is a story about a woman finally trusting her body over every voice that told her she was fine.
Your body is speaking to you too. Maybe not about illness — maybe about desire. About the book you want to write. About the conversation you’ve been rehearsing for ten years. About the life you keep postponing until everyone else is okay.
I built this masterclass experience five weeks after walking out of Princess Margaret hospital — in the most certain, most alive chapter of my life. And on July 15, I’m going to teach you to listen the way I wish someone had taught me thirty years ago: