Treating Chemotherapy Like a Retreat: Emotional Wellness During a Life Crisis with Ira Tolchin • Ep 68
How can something good come from something we consider bad or scary? Today, we're talking about how a life crisis can become a turning point for growth, the difference between pain and suffering, and how using Zen practices can help your emotional wellness.
I’m joined by Ira Tolchin, a former top journalist in Israel and breast cancer survivor. She made a radical, empowering decision to treat her chemotherapy like a retreat rather than a punishment, and her experience is something we can all learn from.
Always Being "On" & Caregiving Alone
Before her cancer diagnosis, Ira spent two decades as a consumer affairs reporter and documentary maker on Israeli television. She describes it as a world with no room for self-love.
There were no limits. Calls in the middle of the night, assignments that couldn't wait, and personal life completely mixed with professional life. She said journalists measured themselves by others' opinions, ratings, and results— never by the process.
Ira raised two boys alone inside all of that, juggling ambition with motherhood. And the frustration that comes from living in a world where men don't face the same pressure and conflicts, because ambitious men often have someone else, like a dedicated wife, handling family and home responsibilities.
She shared a moment that captures this perfectly: she once arrived at a primetime news show carrying her sleeping two-year-old son in her arms because the babysitter situation fell apart. Sitting in the makeup chair next to the Israeli Minister of Education, she asked how the minister had managed such a great career alongside three children.
The answer was simple: her husband was the dominant figure at home. That’s great for her, but not every woman has that, and not every woman wants to step back from her career to raise children to make it all work.
The deeper problem, Ira says, is that even when you look successful from the outside, on TV in the spotlight— it doesn't mean you love yourself from the inside. There can be a hole there, and you'll chase being loved anywhere, anyhow. She eventually came to understand that self-love isn't narcissism. It's being aligned with yourself and listening to your body.
Career Change & Cancer Diagnosis
Around 2020, Ira made a career shift. Zen practices had genuinely changed her. She took a role as a spokesperson and health promoter for an Israeli cancer association, wanting to do something meaningful. Cancer had never touched her family or close circle, but she felt it was an important cause.
Then, a year and a half into that job, she found a lump in her left breast. It was a tumor. It was cancer. And she was alone, in the middle of a war, with two children to care for.
Getting Through Dinner
The first night after getting the message from her doctor, her thoughts were a mess and her feelings were devastating. And she still had to cook dinner and put her kids to bed. She couldn't tell them anything yet because she hadn't processed it herself and didn't know the stage of the disease.
What got her through that dinner? Her Zen training. She made a conscious decision to be present. At that moment, her role was to be a mother. She was having dinner with her children. She was listening to them, experiencing it with all her senses. The thoughts and feelings were there, but they weren't relevant to that moment. She separated what was really happening from what she was thinking about it, and she got through it gracefully.
Why She Treated Chemo as a Retreat
This is the part of Ira's story that made the biggest impact for me, and I think it’s an incredible real-life example for us all to pay attention to. She made a deliberate choice to reframe what chemotherapy would be for her. Not to deny what it was, but to give it a different meaning.
She knew the stigma well. Even working for a cancer organization, her internal image of chemotherapy was people losing their hair and being close to death. She had to face that stigma head-on as the person now inside it.
She’d had a lot of experience with retreats, so she asked herself: what is a retreat?
When someone goes to a meditation or yoga retreat, they step away from regular life. They're with themselves, eating healthy food, meditating, writing, learning about themselves, healing emotionally and physically. That's the whole point of a retreat.
So Ira decided that's what chemotherapy would be. She would stay home. She would focus on nothing except her health. She would eat healthy food and be only with people she loved. She would not work or go out. She would use the time to heal not only physically but emotionally, to learn everything possible about herself, and about how she deals with difficult situations and pain.
The Difference Between Pain and Suffering
Ira brought up a distinction I think is so important: pain and suffering are not the same. Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.
Ira explained that pain lives in the body, and it’s just a part of being human. But when you sit with pain and layer thoughts on top of it, like "Why am I alone? Why is this happening to me? When will it end?" those thoughts make the pain bigger and bigger. And that’s where the suffering comes in.
This isn't about pretending things are fine. It's about not generating additional suffering through runaway thinking.
Three Real Practices for a Life Crisis
We don’t encourageToxic positivity – it does absolutely no good to tell a person who’s in crisis to “just stay positive.” Ira says this is like walking up to a person lying broken on the road after a car crash and saying, "Just get up, what's wrong with you?" It's not helpful. It's not honest. And it doesn't work.
Here’s what Ira recommends instead:
#1 Have a clear direction.
Where do you go from here? For Ira, her direction was simple: heal. Health. Nothing else mattered. She set her career, outside commitments, and other people's needs completely aside. She describes it like being a ship in a stormy ocean. You can be taken anywhere by the rocking waves. But if you have a North Star, a lighthouse, you keep orienting toward it even when the waves are pulling you off course.
#2 Validate your feelings.
Every feeling is valid. You cannot tell someone not to be afraid or that everything will be okay, because you don't know that! What you can do is acknowledge what's real without getting swept away by it.
#3 Manage your attention and intention.
Where your attention goes, your energy flows. If you spend all day asking why this happened or worrying about what comes next, you're living in the past and the future simultaneously, and your body is surrounded by noise. What a body in crisis needs is quiet. This is where mindfulness practices, breathwork, journaling, and body awareness become tools rather than luxuries.
Thoughts Are Not Facts
One of the most useful things Ira shared is how Zen practice approaches difficult thoughts. It doesn't work to argue with a bad thought or replace it with a good one. When thoughts are unmanageable, Ira says the first step is simply to stop.
You can't stop thinking by trying to stop thinking. But you can interrupt the spiral by grounding yourself in the present moment. What can you hear right now? What can you see? Can you bring your attention to your breath? These aren't complicated instructions. They're simple redirections that help you come back to yourself.
Ira meditates for half an hour every morning, and that daily practice is part of why she had something to draw on when the crisis hit. A regular practice builds a baseline. When something unexpected rocks your life, you already have a foundation under you.
She also noted that she didn't build that practice alone. During the pandemic, she joined a Zen teacher's daily Zoom meditation at 6:45 every morning. She's honest: she wouldn't have done it by herself, and I agree it’s much easier to build healthy habits like this when you do it with others. Community accountability made it sustainable for her. And now, she offers the same thing to her own students.
Even Losing Her Hair Brought Lessons
Losing hair during chemotherapy is, for many women, one of the hardest parts. Ira connects it to something she learned from Buddhism: hair, in that tradition, represents the ego. Buddhist monks shave their heads to release it. They say that hair is what makes you different from others, and what you believe makes you beautiful or not. When it grows back, they shave it again.
For Ira, who had been a presence on television, where appearance is part of the expectation, looking in the mirror without hair became a powerful, uncomfortable, and ultimately transformative experience in self-love. Not the performance of self-love, but the real version.
Losing Friends & Strengthening Family
Some friendships didn't survive the crisis. Even friends she had known for 30 years. People just disappeared, and Ira was very angry. But she doesn't blame them. She says people genuinely don't know how to behave when someone gets sick, and once they've stepped away, coming back means having to face themselves.
When the hard times hit your life, it’s like a filter. You’ll find out very soon who shows up, and who your real friends are.
But her family showed up for her in a big way! Her parents flew in from Russia and lived with her and her children for four months. She hadn't expected it, and it was a tremendous blessing. Because of war and the Corona pandemic, they hadn't been together much in recent years. Her health crisis cut through all of it. Having them there gave her the chance to reconnect, to revisit old wounds, and to build a new kind of loving relationship with them. She calls it one of the unexpected gifts of the whole experience.
How She Told Her Children
Ira's boys were twelve and eight when she was diagnosed. A week before she got her biopsy results, a classmate's mother died of cancer without anyone knowing she had been sick. Her son came to her and asked her to promise that she would tell him if something was ever wrong.
She told him yes, of course. And even though she was already in the middle of testing, she assured him everything was okay. She realized afterward that even though she hadn't told her children she was going through tests, her son had felt that something was going on.
Once she had her CT results confirming it was Stage 1 and treatable, she sat her boys down and told them the truth plainly and calmly. She said there was a lump in her breast that could have been dangerous if she hadn't caught it in time, but she was going to take care of it and get through it.
What mattered deeply to her was that they stayed children. She didn't want them to grow up too fast or take on adult responsibilities during her time of treatments, surgeries and healing. So she kept cooking dinner. She kept doing the dishes. She protected their childhood even while navigating her own crisis. And she's glad she did.
Self-Love Is the Foundation of Everything
Ira comes back to self-love as the thread running through everything. Women are socialized to take care of others, to make themselves smaller, and to believe they are not enough. Many of us live inside that belief for years. The emotional healing starts with understanding that you are enough right now.
Whatever you do to yourself, you also do to the people you love. Whatever you do for them, you also do for yourself. Being kind to yourself is not selfish. It is the foundation of being kind to anyone else.
A Practical Reminder from Ira
Before we wrapped up, Ira made a point to say directly: do your breast self-exams, your ultrasounds, and your mammograms. She caught her cancer at Stage 1 because she was paying attention. Early detection changes everything!
Ira Tolchin was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel at the age of 15. For nearly two decades, she worked as a journalist for Israel’s leading television networks, living in a constant race of breaking news, deadlines, and pressure. Ambition pushed her forward, but over time she began searching for a deeper sense of balance and meaning. More than a decade ago, Ira began her journey into personal development, became a certified coach and Zen teacher, and started exploring the power of mindfulness, meditation, and self-compassion. Her path eventually led her to work as a health promoter for the Israel Cancer Association — and two years later, life brought her face to face with the very challenge she was helping others navigate: she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Through chemotherapy and surgeries, she discovered the transformative power of gratitude, presence, and the ability to find inner peace even in moments of uncertainty.
After her recovery, Ira transformed her personal journey into her life’s mission. Today, she is a speaker, Zen teacher, and founder of Moment of Zen, an initiative dedicated to helping people navigate life's challenges through meditation, mindfulness, and practical tools for inner growth and emotional resilience. Ira has a unique ability to put deeply human experiences into words, helping people feel seen, understood, and less alone. Through her lectures, workshops, and teachings, she guides others to transform crises into opportunities for growth, reconnect with themselves, and discover that the peace they are searching for is already within them.
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