Olympic Chaos : A Week of Universal Tough Love

a week of my life

Hello lovelies, welcome!

I’m Soul Surgeon, Dr. Tamy, inviting you into the journey of self-discovery. Permission Slips is a weekly newsletter blending personal stories, ancient wisdom teachings, and tangible life tools. Along with sprinkles of poetry, art, and stories from the battlefield of raising 5 kids. Whether you’re deep in the spiritual path or just beginning, come join me!

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Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash

Today’s Permission Slip : I give myself permission to partake in the Chaos Olympics✨

This Week

Over the last few newsletters I’ve taken you through my journey into Soul Surgery, along with delineating the ABCs of Soul Surgery. And, in Ode to Chocolate I shared a moment of pure devotion for my beloved sweet.

But this week, my lovelies, this week calls for a different approach.

I’d love to gift you a beautifully crafted, well-thought-out piece of writing but my brain is currently tap-dancing on a cluttered stage of exhaustion. Though I have plenty of other topics to share with you, they’ll need to wait for a space to open. So instead, being the messy human that I am, I present you with a screenshot of my life.

During this past week - which I lovingly dubbed The Chaos Olympics - I was both a contestant and the reluctant referee of my life. So here it is - one week of my life, in all its absurd, emotional, and mildly unhinged glory : love and loss; an iguana; a displaced crown; a doctor’s visit; new friends; termites; acupuncture; and a spiritual guru thrown in for good measure.

Buckle up.

Monday : Crowns and Conversations

Starting my day with the usual daily morning routine - meditation, qi gong, morning walk, journaling, and writing to my beautiful Stacker subscribers. Mid-morning, feeling a bit meh about breakfast, I grab for the next best thing: a hand full of popcorn. Light, crunchy, harmless... or so I think.

Second bite in, and crunch! I feel a strange crack in my lower right molar. Oh no. My tongue does the immediate reconnaissance mission, and yep - my crown had made a grand exit. "Oh gosh, I think I lost my crown," said the queen. 👑

I immediately call my friendly dentist - who also happens to be a close friend. Which, let’s be honest, is a unique dynamic. There’s something slightly unsettling about making small talk at a dinner party with someone who has, on occasion, been deep inside your oral cavity. But I digress. I’m grateful he squeezes me in for an appointment in the early afternoon.

Meanwhile, I attend my online session with my Transformational Coach - a place I cherish, where I get to hear myself talk and have blind spots brought to light. An hour after my session, I jump onto a pre-scheduled podcast interview, sharing my spiritual journey into Soul Surgery. All the while the landscapers outside stage an aggressive symphony of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. Nothing says “deep spiritual wisdom” like yelling over a weed whacker.

Then it was off to the dentist, where - thankfully - the queen gets her crown back. Turns out it wasn’t broken, just… unglued. And honestly, that seemed to be the theme of the week: I felt myself becoming a little more unglued with the passing of each day.

Tuesday : Salad. Sweet Potatoes. And the Shock of Impermanence

Starting with my usual daily morning routine grounds me before entering the arena of life, with all its inevitable curveballs. This allows me to show up with a finely tuned instrument of mind-heart-and body.

Today, I’m especially excited to have lunch with my dear and vibrant friend Merle, who just celebrated her 80th breath-day. We’d been planning this for a while, but with her busy schedule as a published author, along with her husband's progressive dementia, her ability to meet is limited. I cherish my many eclectic friendships that span across generations - from 25 to 85 years old - deep connections don't recognize age, they thrive via heart resonance.

I’m happy to take the near-hourlong drive to have our long-awaited lunch : a simple salad and sweet potatoes to suit our sensitive digestive systems. Between bites, she asks about my experience on the magically transformative five-day silent retreat I had just returned from, and I ask her about losing her best friend of forty years to kidney cancer, last month. Transformative in a different way. Tears flow. Tender laughter peeks through. And our hearts soften in the presence of shared grief and gratitude.

Then, back home. I sit in an hour-plus of bumper-to-bumper afternoon traffic, as I hear my phone relentlessly bing with incoming texts. At a red light, I glance down - just for a second - and feel my stomach drop.

A dear friend of twenty years, Edith, just 62 years old, had died. Entirely unexpectedly.

Sunday night : She was at a wedding, celebrating, dancing, eating cake.
Monday : Hospitalized with a nasty cough.
Tuesday morning : Today. Gone. Funeral tomorrow. Overwhelming viral pneumonia had taken her in 48 hours.

I arrive home in a daze, too stunned to process, too exhausted to fight it. I spend the rest of the afternoon at my art desk. Art frees me of thought, allows the colors bleed onto the page. My mind keeps going in and out of a thought-dance with how quickly life can shift from joy to devastation.

Impermanence pulls up a chair beside me, sitting closer than usual. And tomorrow, we’ll meet again - at the burial.

Wednesday : Doctors. Funeral. And Iguana Shenanigans

I started Wednesday with my usual daily morning routine before diving into the day's emotional marathon. First up: a Zoom call with my daughter and her new neuro-immunologist. We’re still piecing together the puzzle of her health, a long and painfully frustrating journey towards diagnosis. By the time we wrap up, I take a deep breath, gather myself, and head to my car. Sit. Deep inhale. Slow exhale. Then press the red ignition button labeled Power, because that’s how I start a funeral day, feeling the power of the breath.

The service is at 1:30 p.m. I drive steadily, wanting to arrive on time. Showing up late to a funeral felt like all sorts of ironic, and I’m not in the mood for it. The midday sun is merciless. The air thick. The casket - a simple cream-colored pine box with an engraved Star of David on its lid. We all stand humble in our aliveness as the Rabbi prays in foreign tongues. He offers the kind of comfort one can only attempt to garner when addressing three grieving young-adult children who, 72 hours ago, were dancing with their mother at a wedding.

Sweat beads cling to my upper lip, keeping my mouth closed with all the words that haven’t yet been spoken. Then, just as the moment arrives to lower Edith’s coffin, a sudden commotion breaks at the edge of the gravesite. People gasp. Whispers spread. And then, we hear the word :

Iguana.

Somehow, in a perfectly Edith-esque plot twist, a rogue iguana manages to slip into the freshly dug grave. Now, I don’t claim to be an expert in Jewish burial laws, but I’m pretty sure lowering a coffin onto a live iguana isn’t exactly kosher. What follows is an impromptu circus act: the funeral workers peering down the hole, exchanging looks, and debating who is going to volunteer to retrieve the reptilian trespasser from the depth of the earth.

We, the mourners, start crying and laughing, all at once. Because of course Edith would pull this final prank. Hey guys, not quite ready to go in just yet - here, have an iguana! Enjoy the show!

After some creative maneuvering (and what I assume was an existential crisis for at least one funeral worker), the iguana is safely retrieved and scampers off to freedom, blissfully unaware of the welcomed chaos it had caused. The casket is finally lowered. I join others in lifting the unexpectedly heavy shovel and scoop dirt to throw onto the casket, as tradition dictates. Then come the bulldozers. The body has returned to the earth. Finality. Slumped shoulders. Quiet grief. Edith’s children, now motherless. Her grandchildren left without their Sunday morning ice-cream buddy.

As the crowd disperses, I know where I need to go next.

Sabrina.

My oldest daughter’s best friend, gone since 2016. Buried just a short walk from Edith. I always visit when I’m there (which, thankfully isn’t often). Always sit on the marble bench overlooking her grave, staring at the too-young, full-color image of her sweet, smiling face engraved on the grey stone. And today, for the first time, I ask something of her.

I tell her about my daughter - in case she didn’t hear. About the two years of silent estrangement. About how my heart is broken in ways I never imagined. About how my daughter often shared that she felt Sabrina speak to her in the wind. In the breeze. By the ocean. And then I dared ask Sabrina :

If it’s not too much trouble - could you take a little ride on that wind and whisper to my daughter in Costa Rica, where she lives now. Tell her that her mother loves her. Tell her she’s missed by her brothers and sisters. Tell her the door to my heart is wide open. Please, Sabrina. Tell her. Because she may not know.

I sot there for a while. A long while. Letting the weight of it all sink in between the sweat and the sobs - Edith’s fate, the iguana, Sabrina’s grave, and the last two painful years with my daughter.

The rest of the day is uneventful. My head - foggy. My heart - heavy. My art desk calls to me. So that’s where I stay - between liquid blues and blacks, painting my way through the weight of impermanence.

Photo by Renee Elias on Unsplash

Okay, my lovelies - LET’S PAUSE for a sec - I know, that was heavy.

By now, you’re probably in need of a deep breath (or two), a bathroom break, or an oversized spoon with a pint of Breyer’s ice cream called Death by Chocolate. Or maybe that’s just the chocoholic in me. You do you. Take your break. Then come back. We’re almost done with this week, coming on Thursday, what more can happen?

Thursday : Termites. Trauma. And Tolle

Thursday was a bit of a blur. I go through my usual daily morning routine. Somewhere in the middle of my meditation, I find myself crying, my heart softening - grief and presence doing their unpredictable dance.

At noon, still feeling emotions from the week’s events swirling around, I suddenly remember that I have uninvited houseguests that need to be tended to. A thriving termite colony is squatting in my bathroom and kitchen cabinets, rent-free.

The inspector arrives, an enthusiastic entomologist at heart, launches into a detailed TED Talk on the sex lives of termites - a level of information I neither asked for have the mental reserve for. But when we finally get to the bottom line, it was clear my house needs to be tented and fumigated, at the cost of thousands of dollars. The whole place locked up, covered in an ominous tent, filled with a gas designed to exterminate.

And that’s when something unexpected happens.

My chest tightens. A visceral reaction. Ancestral trauma surfaces. My mind flashes to my Polish ancestors, the ones who never came out of the gas chambers. The thought of sealing my beloved home and releasing deadly gas - on any living being - stirs something deep in me. I don’t want to do this to the termites. I really don’t want to do this.

Of course, logically, I knew this was different. But the mind is fascinating - how it weaves invisible threads between seemingly unrelated moments.

The inspector, blissfully unaware of my existential spiral, hands me a thick purple folder detailing the process. I place it on the kitchen counter, untouched, knowing better than to make big decisions during a week like this.

So instead, I take the rest of the afternoon to engage in the radical act of : doing nothing. The rest serves me well. I lay on the sofa staring at the curtains move ever so slightly in response to the air-conditioner blowing its loving breath. This is just the medicine I need before heading to Miami for an evening with Eckhart Tolle - the Guru of Presence himself. Two hours of pure, still awareness. Exactly what the doctor ordered.

That night, I sleep easier. Coming back to myself.

Present. Whole. Complete. Accepting life - just as it is.

Alongside death, termites, and iguanas.

Just this. Just now.

Friday : Needles. New Friends. And Nothingness

I wake up after a gentle night of sleep, embrace my usual daily morning routine. My body still tired, but my mind had stopped resisting reality - freedom! The waves of the week’s chaos are still present, but I’m not drowning in them. Instead, I let them roll through me, embracing the nothingness inherent in each experience. The Buddhist concept of emptiness has been my anchor in times like these - reminding me that everything, even chaos, is just passing through. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is permanent. Nothing needs to be grasped.

I move through my usual daily morning routine, because let’s be honest, without it, I’d be a slightly feral version of myself. Then, I hop on Zoom with a new kindred spirit I met on Substack - one of those beautifully deep, spiritual connections that make you wonder if the universe just slid someone into your DMs on purpose.

The afternoon of the last day of this week of Chaos Olympics is dedicated to Acupuncture, a.k.a. the reset button for my body and soul. There’s something paradoxical about surrendering to stillness while getting poked with tiny needles.

And yet, there it is - another reminder from Life itself. Surrender isn’t about giving up. It’s about softening into what is. The nothingness. The everything. The flow.

Photo by Jay Castor on Unsplash

Closing Thoughts

There you have it, lovelies.

If you’re still here, thanks for getting through it with me!

A week of Olympic Chaos - and through it all, my spiritual journey of self-discovery served as an anchor, carrying me through the hardest moments. Over the past 16 years, I’m grateful to have cultivated a toolkit of practices and principles that ground me - tools like mindfulness, meditation, presence, and radical acceptance - and they were there for me in full force.

It was as though everything I had done to prepare - every ounce of spiritual work I had committed to - is now my support system, holding me steady. I feel connected, present, and loving life in a way I hadn’t expected - no resentment, anger, or blame.

By the time I sat at the Eckhart Tolle event late Thursday night, it served as the perfect reminder : Life is just as it is - with its imperfections, surprises, and unexpected turns.

And in the midst of this Olympic storm-week I’m happy to say I came out holding the gold medal : presence, calm, equanimity, and grounded in the beauty of the present moment.

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Self-Inquiry Journaling Prompts✨

1. Reflect on a challenging moment from this week: How did your spiritual practices help you navigate it? What tools did you lean on to stay grounded and centered?

2. Think about the concept of impermanence: In what ways did the events of this week remind you of life’s ever-changing nature? How did you find peace within the chaos?

3. Examine your emotional reactions to unexpected challenges (like the termites or the funeral): How did you respond in the moment, and what did you learn about yourself through those reactions?

4. Consider the power of presence: How did being present in each moment, no matter how difficult, help you move through the week with calm and clarity? In what ways did staying grounded allow you to connect with life, even in its hardest moments?

5. Grief and loss can bring profound insights: How did your spiritual journey support you through the sorrow you experienced this week? What lessons did you gain from this, and how can you apply them in the future?

Offerings from Dr. Tamy

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