Letting Go of Nausea: A Lesson in Surrender

There’s something about nausea that undoes me.

It always has. It’s not just the discomfort — it’s the panic. The helplessness. The deep-rooted fear of vomiting that I’ve carried since childhood. Even now, after everything I’ve survived, that feeling can bring me to my knees.

But lately, I’ve been learning something new. Something radical and sacred and surprisingly simple. It’s the practice of surrender. And like many of the most important lessons in my life, this one didn’t arrive in a meditation or on a mountaintop. It arrived in the back of a cab.

The Fear of Nausea

I was coming home from a beautiful wedding in London with my daughter. It was late, she was tired, and rather than take the train, we hopped in a cab for the long journey back to the suburbs.

But the driver was erratic — braking sharply, accelerating with no rhythm — and about ten minutes in, I started to feel that old, familiar churn in my stomach. Carsick. Dizzy. Nauseous.

And my mind spiraled:

“Oh no. I hate this. I can’t do this for 90 minutes. This is going to be hell.”

My fear of nausea has always been intense — tied to past trauma, childhood tummy issues, and a long-standing aversion to losing control. As a child, I’d rather sit in nauseated misery for hours than risk being sick. Ironically, I later developed bulimia in my teens — a complicated twist in a journey that’s always lived in my belly.

The Flashback

As we made our way through South London, I realized something eerie: this was the same route I used to take home from the hospital during my first cancer diagnosis. I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma then, and the chemo — especially the infamous “red one” in the ABVD protocol — made me violently nauseous.

After each treatment, I’d slump into the back of a cab, feeling like I might pass out or vomit or simply fall apart. And here I was, years later, in another cab, on the same roads, with that same sick feeling. My body remembered.

The trauma flooded in — not just the nausea, but the emotional imprint of those days. The fear. The vulnerability. The helplessness. It wasn’t just about motion sickness anymore. I was reliving a chapter of my life that had once nearly broken me.

The Mind’s Role in Suffering

But something had changed since then — and that something was me.

I’ve been immersed in the teachings of surrender over the past year — books like The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, The Present Moment by Eckhart Tolle, and You Are the Placebo by Dr. Joe Dispenza. Each one building on the last. Each one guiding me back to a simple but life-altering truth:

Suffering doesn’t come from what’s happening. It comes from our resistance to what’s happening.

And that night in the cab, I realized that most of my suffering wasn’t actually from the nausea itself. It was from the mental noise wrapped around it.

This is going to last forever. I can’t handle this. Why is this happening?

That narrative — the story of “I shouldn’t be feeling this” — was making me feel worse than the physical symptoms themselves.

The Experiment in Surrender

So I tried something.

Instead of resisting the nausea… I let go.

Not of the feeling — but of the fight.

I stopped telling myself how awful it was. I stopped mentally replaying old trauma. I stopped calculating how many minutes were left in the journey.

And I dropped into the now.

I said to myself: “I feel sick. That’s all. Can I just let that be true, without piling on a story about it?”

And almost instantly, my body softened. My breath slowed. My shoulders dropped.

The nausea didn’t vanish — but the panic did. And without the panic, the nausea itself became less sharp. Less unbearable.

The Science + the Mystery

Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work has taught me that our thoughts and emotions influence everything from gene expression to hormone levels. In cancer patients, mindset can affect outcomes by up to 60%. That’s not magic — that’s measurable.

But this moment in the cab wasn’t about willing my symptoms away. It wasn’t about trying to heal something in an instant.

It was about practicing a new way of being.

A gentle way.

A surrendered way.

A Gentle Invitation

If you’re going through treatment…

If you’re feeling nauseous, exhausted, or simply at the mercy of your body…

If you’re in pain, or discomfort, or grief…

I invite you to experiment with something.

Just for a moment, see what happens when you stop resisting what is.

Not because you want it to go away — but because you want to stop the war inside.

Let your body be where it is. Let your breath be a soft companion.

Let your mind drop the fight.

Surrender isn’t about feeling good. It’s about no longer needing to feel good in order to be okay.

The Soft Way In

Next time you feel unwell or overwhelmed, try this gentle practice:

1. Pause. Close your eyes. Acknowledge what you’re feeling, physically and emotionally.
2. Notice. Separate the sensation from the story. “I feel sick” is different from “This is unbearable.”
3. Breathe. Inhale softly through the nose. Exhale slowly through the mouth.
4. Release.Let go of the need to fix it. Let go of the judgment. Let go of the timeline.
5. Trust. That something shifts — when you soften.

Your path doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be gentle.

This is mine. May it support yours.

With love,

Jenny