Discover the power of self-compassion, by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

This episode explores Silvia Vasquez-Lavado's journey of self-discovery and self-compassion as she attempts to climb Denali, interwoven with personal growth and overcoming past traumas.

1. Strength and vulnerability are not opposites; embracing both can lead to profound personal growth.
2. Overcoming physical challenges can mirror the process of overcoming emotional and psychological barriers.
3. Self-compassion is a crucial tool for healing and recovery, especially from personal traumas.
4. The journey towards self-compassion can be as challenging and rewarding as any physical expedition.
5. Committing to self-compassion can transform personal adversities into sources of strength.

1: Introduction

Silvia introduces her journey and the profound impact of climbing on her life. She sets the stage for a story of overcoming physical and emotional challenges. Silvia Vasquez-Lavado: "The mountains are my temple, I can't drink there."

2: The Accident

A bike accident leads to a severe concussion, introducing unexpected obstacles in Silvia's life, including the discovery of a brain tumor. Silvia Vasquez-Lavado: "Let me out, I've got to climb a mountain."

3: Denali Attempts

Silvia recounts her repeated attempts to climb Denali, reflecting on her personal growth and the lessons learned with each failure. Silvia Vasquez-Lavado: "Mountain, what am I doing wrong?"

4: Self-Compassion Training

After her physical and emotional trials, Silvia engages in compassion cultivation training, learning to apply compassion inwardly. Silvia Vasquez-Lavado: "When love meets suffering, the heart is trying to be compassionate."

5: Final Summit

The culmination of Silvia's journey as she reaches the summit of Denali, reflecting on her life's trials and triumphs. Silvia Vasquez-Lavado: "Hi everybody. This is my 7th summit and I officially have become the first openly gay woman to have reached this milestone."

1. Engage in mindfulness practices to enhance self-awareness and emotional resilience.
2. Consider undertaking physical challenges to mirror and manage life’s psychological challenges.
3. Join support groups or training like compassion cultivation to learn and practice self-compassion.
4. Celebrate personal milestones and reflect on the lessons each brings.
5. Share your experiences with others to help both yourself and them grow.

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado is the first openly lesbian woman to climb the famous Seven Summits, a bucket list of the highest mountain on every continent. But while preparing for the seventh summit, a peak that has eluded her climb after climb, she realizes that she can’t charge forward with the same conquering mentality. Denali — the highest mountain peak in North America — leads her to discover the importance of self-compassion over the desire for conquest when dealing with life’s greatest obstacles.
Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story at: www.meditativestory.com

People

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

Books

"In the Shadow of the Mountain"

Content Warnings:

Mentions of suicide and sexual abuse.

Anya Profumo
Hi listeners. I'm Anya Profumo, a member of the meditative story team. Over the next several weeks, we are going to run some of your favorite episodes from the meditative story library. This is an opportunity for us to share the content you've told us you love as we rest, recharge, and plan for the future. Please enjoy.

Now onto the show.

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
The path to the summit is wide open, a stretch of snow that comes to a knife point and suddenly drops away to rows of mountains far below the edge of the world. All my thoughts recede. Triumph gives way to humility. I walk in all of the beauty around me. I'm walking with literally my mouth open, like my jaw completely opened wide, taking in all the available air.

The beauty is all almost unbelievable. What a privilege to take this walk.

Rohan Gunatillake
Silvia Vasquez Lovato is the first openly gay woman to climb the famous seven summits, a bucket list of the highest mountain on every continent. As she reveals in her memoir, in the shadow of the mountainous theres a fragile person hidden inside that superhero who charges up mountains in todays meditative story. Were joining Sylvia as she pursues that 7th summit, the peak that has eluded her climb after climb. Denali as she readies herself for this trek, events reveal to her that she cant just charge forward. She discovers the importance of self compassion over the desire for conquest when dealing with lifes greatest obstacles.

Wed also like to let you know that todays story includes the mention of suicide and sexual abuse. So please take care while listening. In this series, we combine immersive first person stories. Breathtaking music and mindfulness prompts so that we may see our lives reflected back to us in other people's stories and that can lead to improvements in our own inner lives from. Wait.

What? This is meditative story.

I'm Rohan and I'll be your guide.

The body relaxed, the body breathing. Your senses open, your mind open.

Meeting the world.

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
In the entrance hallway of my apartment sits a painting of the green goddess of compassion painted by a friend from El Salvador. It is vibrant, festive, full of color. Greens, yellows, oranges. I used to think I knew what compassion means. I used to think I have so much of it.

I always felt love for my friends and the sorrows of others. I give much of my time and energy to others in my work life, my love life, and my causes. On my way to climbing Mount Everest, I brought a group of women to base camp who, like myself, were survivors of sexual trauma so that they could experience the strength of their own hearts and bodies and rewrite their stories from pain into power. That was exactly one year ago. Now, from the command center in my living room, I am setting out to climb another peak, Alaska's mountain alley.

It is North America's tallest. It will be my final of the so called seven summits, the highest peak on each of the seven continents. I'm about to become the first openly gay woman to claim this honor. Denali is the only mountain to have evaded me, to have said, no, not this time. I've scaled Everest, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus.

But Denali has rejected me twice. I must return. I've promised someone I will.

I'm living in ten days. My place is a mess. My sleeping bag place. Out in front of the fireplace. All my brightly colored puffy jackets are laid out in a row.

Then come the nesting metal pots, plastic boots down, booties, rope, my sturdy tent and the inflatable sleeping pad. Stacks of high performance clothing pile height on the sofa, gear on almost every surface. While packing for a new peak, I'm still celebrating the previous one. Last night, to celebrate my one year anniversary of summit in Everest, I went out with friends for dirty martinis. I'm drinking in preparation for not drinking.

The mountains are my temple. I can't drink there. But my drinking haunts me. Today is just a hangover. I stumble over my gear, late for work.

Should I drive or take my bike? It's too late to find parking, and it's a gorgeous day. I put my laptop in a knapsack and then, for good measure, I add in a couple of training weights. They are made of sand and weigh five pounds each. This close to departure, every bit of training counts.

I grab my house keys and briefly consider helmet or no helmet. I catch a glimpse of my dark curls in the mirror. Do I really want helmet hair? I leave the helmet on the dining table. I live on Twin Peaks in San Francisco, a steep incline overlooking the city.

Coming down is a bit like falling off a mountain. I don't pedal at all. I like the adrenaline. Pastel colored houses whizz by. I can still smell the fog, which has only recently lifted.

The road opens to a vista of the San Francisco Francisco skyline. Beyond the city, the bay sparkles.

The distant hills of Berkeley and Oakland remind me of miraflores of Lima, where I was born.

My bicycle rattles as I fly down Market Street.

I start to cross Castra Street, a broad avenue that cuts through San Francisco lined with palm trees. Bright. The sight of antique trolleys rumble past. Out of nowhere, a truck cuts me off. I swerve hard and catch my front tire on the trolley tracks.

I fly over my handlebars head first, propelled forward by my weighted pack. My eyes blink to adjust as I awaken.

Where am I? I feel plastic straps wrapped tightly around my nose and mouth.

I'm in an ambulance.

The oxygen mask wrapped over my face feels familiar. I wore this on Everest after arriving at camp three in a whiteout. I crawled, exhausted, into my tent, remove the oxygen mask over my face, hugged myself, and wept. But the ambulance is still moving and my head is bleeding.

Let me out, I tell the attendants at SF General. They transfer me from a gurney to an ER bed and then roll my bed from scanner to scanner. I'm nauseous and I have a headache. I'm cold. The oxygen mask presses hard against my face and there are huge, bright fluorescent light.

A nurse shaves my head so the doctors can look at my skull. I'm annoyed. The doctors keep coming and going without telling me anything. I've been to emergency rooms many times. Why haven't they taken me to a better hospital?

And why aren't they releasing me? What's the big deal? I've fallen and my head is going to hurt for a little bit of I just take the day off. I need to go home and pack. I saved up my vacation days.

Ive paid, planned, and organized for months. When I first summited mountains, I was driven by ambition, fear, a desire to walk along the knife edge of life. I want to connect to my younger self, the little girl who is all by the mountains and the sunsets and the innocence of a wild place, but with an alley. I'm also driven by a promise to Lori.

I keep trying to explain, but nobody will listen. Hey, I say to a nurse. She looks impatient. I scowl back. Hello?

Ive got to get out. Ive got to climb a mountain. Tell me something. She brings a doctor. He says he has good news and bad news.

This should be the start of a joke, but its not. Hes stern, almost harsh. Youre not bleeding anymore. He cuts me off before I can interrupt him. But we just found a small tumor at the base of your brainstem.

You're not climbing anything. What? I'm frozen. Estate quieto. Just like when I was a child being scolded.

A brain tumor. My mother has died of cancer, and now maybe I'm dying. Denali is falling out of my reach. I'm going to break my promise to Lori. I want to fight.

I've experienced many things that made me feel helpless I was abused by a family friend as a child, beaten by my father, rejected by my family for my sexuality. Then I lost Laurie, my partner, to suicide eleven years ago.

I didn't choose those things, but I conquered my helpless feelings with strength. Now I am 42 years old, an executive in Silicon Valley. Being soft is dangerous. Walking to Everest base camp, I had to push the other women who wanted to turn back. I wanted to sum it I wanted to hurry so I would have no regrets.

But now I see I'm made out of tissue and bone and water and cells. My brain concussion is so severe that doctors keep me in the ICU for ten days. I have massive headaches. Friends visit. They cheer me up and make me laugh.

San Francisco's grand Lesbian Ball, the annual national center for Lesbian Rights Gala is in a few days, and we imagine my fancy suit and my half balding head. I am so grateful for these friends. In the quiet hours, I lie in the mechanical bed with scratchy sheets and let the gratitude come.

It washes over me, stronger than the fluorescent lights. I remember the magical vistas I have seen, the dawns breaking over soaring peaks. The thin air sparkling with ice crystals. This is a softer feeling than I've ever experienced before. Yes, I am vulnerable.

I've had a hell of a life. So much love, so much loss. Maybe it's time to go. Remembering the awe, the gratitude I am opening. It doesn't feel scary.

It feels wonderful.

The tumor turns out to be benign. My body has weakened, but I want to summit Denali more than ever. Not just for Laurie. It's the same feeling I had when I saw Everest for the first time. The same feeling when Laurie passed.

A need to give and to walk until there was nothing left of my heart to give.

Rohan Gunatillake
Alongside Sylvia's gratitude for her life is the urge to conquer her next peak. How human. Really. What calls you rest? Adventure?

Maybe a bit of both.

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
Mountain alley always has something to teach me.

As it comes into view from our propeller planes tiny windows, the sight is breathtaking.

I'm taken by the majestic views of the surrounding peaks. Everything is white, shiny, bright white. We land on an airstrip built directly on the Cahillma glacier, the entryway to climb the west Patras route. The first time I attempted, and fail to climb an alley, I realized my marriage was crumbling and that I needed to spend more time with my mother, who was dying. The second time turned back again.

By weather and bad timing, I learned humility. What would the unpredictable 20,310ft tall mass of stone and ice teach me? This time, this is my third attempt. We get to the 14K camp known as the midpoint. Nestled below the upper mountain and with expansive views of the entire Alaska range, a storm is building.

We spent our days building up snow walls to protect our tent from being flattened by the ferocious winds of and snowstorms. It rages for eight entire days. There are other teams at the 14K camp. As the weather continues to beat down on us, people start turning around. My ten neighbors, climbers who seem much stronger than me, turn back.

What if I can't do this? Building up my strength has taken almost a year at sea level. Impatient, I've been drinking again. Never on the mountain. But has this slowed me down?

Mountain? I ask. What am I doing wrong?

A small window of better weather opens. We take our chance. Everyone below thinks we're going to get killed. Midway to high camp, at around 16,000ft, we get caught in ferocious winds. Gear blows away.

When we finally arrive at the high camp below the summit, I'm depleted. Still, I press on.

I've paint a picture of Lori to a small tibetan prayer flag, along with a photograph of me as a young girl in Peru, wearing my turquoise tracksuit. Silvita, as my mother called me. I've hidden this photo for years.

The path to the summit is wide open. A stretch of snow that comes to a knife point and suddenly drops away to rows of mountains far below the edge of the world. All my thoughts recede. Triumph gives way to humility. I walk in all of the beauty around me.

I'm walking with literally my mouth open, like my jaw completely open wide, taking in all the available air. You can't do that on Everest because of the altitude. The beauty is almost unbelievable.

What a privilege to take this walk.

No other summit is this beautiful. No other summit has taken so much. A brass pin marks the top like a giant thumbtack hammered into ice. I kneel in front of it, weeping. I feel the wind whip through my soul.

Hi everybody. This is my 7th summit and I officially have become the first obligate woman to have reached this milestone. And I want to dedicate this incredible achievement to love, to equality and love around the world.

When Laurie jumped from the Golden Gate bridge, I thought it was an end, but really it was a beginning. Against heaven and earth, I've managed to get here. My grief spills into the snow. I send my love to Lori and to Sylvita, the little girl within me who started this journey. But Denali also takes my strength, my body.

Over the next two days, the descent becomes harder and harder. When I return to the Cahill glacier, where the plains land, the ice is so beautiful. I drop to my knees. I can't rise on Everest. I experience an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment with Denali.

I'm spent. I look back at the mountain and think, you can't conquer this. I need a bath. I need a hug. I need to go home.

Rohan Gunatillake
What happens if we play with the idea that in our lives there is nothing to conquer? Feel the freedom of that. However quiet. Become intimate with your energy. In this moment.

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
Back in San Francisco, the feeling of needing to be held doesn't go away.

But on my return from Denali, I experienced heartbreak separating from my girlfriend. And I'm devastated. I'm lonely. I'm tired. In the hospital, after my brain injury, I had let myself feel vulnerable.

On the mountain, I had let myself feel vulnerable. But now that vulnerability feels empty without the walk ahead of me, without love to hold me. One evening after therapy, I go for a drink with a friend. I find myself driving and then not even remembering how. I arrive at another friend's house.

I pass out. I'm physically sick for five days in a strange apartment. I'm ashamed. I tell myself, okay, Sylvia, it's either one more drink or you're alive.

The Stanford campus is manicured to perfection.

Palm trees, cut grass, red tile roofs, birds chirping. On the third floor of a building at the school of medicine, I enter a sunlit classroom where the chairs are arranged in a semicircle. We're here for an eight weeks long seminar on compassion cultivation training. A neurosurgeon friend has recommended this class. A friend who showed me a quote that would change my life.

When love meets suffering, the heart is trying to be compassionate. When love meets suffering, the heart is trying to be compassionate. I know suffering in myself and others, but until now, I only met it with love and compassion for others, not for myself. I've been unable to extend this grace to myself, but now I recognize my life depends upon it. And so we practice.

First, we learn to send compassion to all beings, then to specific beings, and then to ourselves.

We do it over and over. At first, it's easier to hold young Sylvia in my heart. It is through her, finally, I learn to reach my grown, heartbroken self.

Our last week assignment is to write a compassionate letter to ourselves. I procrastinate. On the morning of our last class, I opened my computer and let my heart speak. Dear Silvita, tears start pouring down my face. I write about everything.

My drinking, losing lorry. My recent breakup.

For the first time, I really understand the damage I have done to myself through my drinking and my numbing with sobriety. I feel. I feel the pain, but also the gratitude and the awe. I feel my heart opening the way it started to. In my hospital room after I read my letter aloud in class.

I look up. Everyone in the room is crying. They see what I am experiencing, that something massive, like a mountain, has shifted.

The self compassion lets me stay sober. How to explain it? Maybe this image comes from so many years of alpine climbing.

I think of myself as a figure in a snow globe.

Life knocks you and shakes that snow globe. It just throws you like that. I've learned that it's contained passion that calms the uncertainty, calms the snow, takes away the craziness. When you can settle the brain down, it opens up. And this is the key to figuring out, okay, where's the pain?

What is triggering the pain? Where is this coming from? Lets connect it. Lets send it love.

I continue to explore where my love can meet my suffering. My father grows roses, red pink, exploding in the lush garden of my childhood home in Lima.

The rose bushes are interspersed with my mother's favorite plants, birds of paradise. I marvel at how all the delicate, brilliant blossoms persevere through my mother's death and father's decline.

The smell of roses overpowers me as I open the carved mahogany front door. Inside, my father lies in his room, unable to walk. His frailty alarms me. He's unhappy, sober. I can see it, feel it.

This man was never very happy, except when tending his garden. He failed to protect me. But he's my father and a human being. Hes worthy of compassion. I think of Sylvita, the girl in the turquoise tracksuit.

She darts between rooms. Shes worthy of my compassion, too. I honor her with my writing. I sit beside my father and take his hand. I stay with him even though it hurts to see him in pain.

I tell him about the book I'm writing. Much of it is about climbing Everest, the track where my softness and compassion began. That was when I felt the magic of being one star in the universe. The mountains, especially Everest. And then Denali showed me that strong is not the opposite of soft.

Strength alone is not enough. I have finally learned that surrender, children, will take you further than conquering. Our biggest mountains are inside of us. At home. There are no sacred rules to follow, no ropes to hold onto.

Nothing for me to conquer.

In my childhood house, there is pain. My father's, mine. I send that compassion. I sent him love to help him on his journey, a journey all beings will someday take. Lying in his ground floor former office, now converted into his bedroom, my father strokes my hand.

He tells me over and over that I am his daughter and he loves me. Silvita. Mi hija. Mi hija. Cuanto tequiero?

I stay with him. I'm aware that I can give compassion without losing myself and that I can suffer without giving into suffering. I tighten my grip on my father's hand. As he weakens, I feel the awe of this passage. I find myself forgiven.

The damage created by my family and created by myself. The compassion I spend so much time directing outwards at others finds its way inwards to myself. I don't feel empty. I feel connected.

I feel love.

Rohan Gunatillake
Thank you, Sylvia. That was really special. One of the ways I think about what I do is that I'm a bit like a sommelier. Matching meditations to go with our stories each week, complimenting them and drawing out their flavors even more. And listening to Sylvia today.

The meditation practice I want to share with you is called tonglen. It's part of the tibetan tradition, and the word means something like taking and sending, and is a classic compassion practice. And like many tibetan practices, is one that will deepen and deepen over time.

We'll do a simplified form of it so they can get the sense of it. It has a visualization element which can take some getting used to. We'll give it a go, and let's see how we get on. Remember, we're not aiming for a particular result. The process is what matters here, and we start by being comfortable.

Life is hard enough. We don't need our body to be overly tight or tense or in a pretzel shape to do some meditation.

Notice the activity of the mind, full of the momentum of the day so far, and let it settle down by itself, particles settling down the bottom of a glass of water, so that what is left is just clarity, the gravity of our wise intention doing this practice together, inviting calm and stability and spaciousness to emerge.

Know the body as it is, and let it be as it is. If there's something we can do to feel more comfortable, then let's do that. But again, just letting the momentum settle itself down and letting what is left emerge and be in the foreground. Clarity, spaciousness, awareness. Open and bright.

Get a taste of that, however quiet it's here. Turn to it.

Now. Tonglin uses the breath in how it works. The idea is that we breathe in that which is challenging or difficult, and breathe out relief. Lightness. Freshness.

So let's try that being gentle on ourselves. Breathing in. Breathe in. Feelings of heaviness, of tiredness, of friction. Breathing out.

Breathe out a sense of brightness. Light. Relief. If you have that sort of mind, I invite you to do this with visualization.

Breathing in difficult or negative energy across the whole of your body into every cell. And then it is transformed. Breathing out, radiating out beautiful energy through every cell of the body. Take your time. It can take some practice for a visualization to come into step with the rhythm of the breath.

Now bring to mind someone in your life you wish to help, someone you can visualize clearly. Take your time. Again. Be gentle on yourself. Connect with what theyre feeling and breathe it in.

When breathing out, send out the strength, solidity, courage, relief that they need.

Breathing in. Taking. Breathing out. Sending breathing in. Breathing out.

Taking, sending now, in this final part, just let the target of your meditation, your compassion, grow out. Expanding the range of your compassion practice, however, feels right for you.

Breathing in. Taking.

Breathing out. Sending, breathing in. Taking out sending.

The idea of taking in. The difficulties of others can feel like too much. But this is the kind of practice that really matures and evolves over time. A lifetime of inner adventure and the people I know who've made Tonglin their main practice are among the best I know.

Sylvia, thank you for sharing your story and for your work. The world is a better place for it.

And thank you. The world is a better place for what you do too. Go well on behalf of the team at Meditative Story, thank you for spending time with us today. We love creating the show for you and if the show serves you in a meaningful way, wed love to hear from you. Would you take a minute right now to write us a review in your podcast app?

When you leave a review, it really inspires our team and were a group who derive so much energy from understanding how meditative story impacts you. Its also a way for you to pay it forward by helping others discover the show. So if leaving a review speaks to you today, we'd really appreciate it.

Meditative story is a wait what? Original our executive producers are Darren Triff and June Cohen. Jay Panjabi is our supervising producer. The series is produced by Dorothy Abramsen. Original music and sound design by Ryan Holiday.

Our script writers are Peter Keckley, Florence Williams and Hannah Brenture. Technical sport from Robin Wise mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh.

Special thanks to Emily McManus, Anna Pisino, Sarah Tata, Kelsey Capitano, Tim Cronin, Sami Oputa, Leah Sarametis, Colin Haworth, Janeme Ezekwena, Charlie Menezes, and Adam Heine. And I'm Rohan Gunutilika, creator of the Buddhafi Meditation app and your host.

Visit meditativestory.com to find the transcript for this episode.