My teacher Talyaa has lasers in her brain.

Isn’t that a lovely opening line? Attention getting, makes you postulate “what on earth is going on?”

My teacher Talyaa lived in a cocoon named Karen Murphy for decades. When I met her she was a Type A, Montessori doll sewing mom. She had a growing mommy blogger internet presence and wrote for Strollerderby. At the time, that was all the cool kid cred anyone needed.

She has a son with Down Syndrome, I mailed her some information to a PO Box in some East Coast state.

I met her in person once in some cha cha San Francisco area at the end of Guy Kawasaki‘s driveway as we were leaving a party at his house.

Over the next three years, her life evolved into a butterfly, including a cross country move, a name change and finding her soulmate. The details of that are her story at Wild Goddess Life.

She held my hand through my summer of  xanax of wine, when all the pain seemed to catch up with me and I couldn’t claw out. She was my teacher, she gave me tools to get me out. She was that friend who jumped in the hole with me and said, “I’ve been here, I know the way out.”

She showed me the way out.

Just before her 50th birthday she found out the spot on her foot was melanoma that was spreading through her body. This stalled her blog relaunch, her life work and everything she was planning on doing with the next half of her life.

So followed the next revolution of her life, medical treatments, dietary treatment, community building, all that digging deep and figuring out what was going to work for her to extend her life beyond that 4 months the doctors were giving her.

It worked. It is working.

She got better, but as cancer does, it found ways around what she was doing and wound its way back into her brain.

Which leads us back to why she has lasers in her brain as I write this. Today is brain surgery day for my friend, my teacher.

So if you would, please, send your light, your healing, your love to Talyaa Liera and the doctors and the lasers working to heal her today.