Chris Breen is a paramedic, a father and husband, and a friend to many. He has assisted at terror attacks in Melbourne and...
Women in Momentum- Lara Charles
Over the summer holidays, I read a book that had me thinking long after I put it down.
I recognised parts of myself in Lara Charles’ story, the questions inside the chaos, the recalibrations, the quiet shifts that happen over time. It felt familiar in the best way.
It’s a pleasure to introduce our Ponderers to Lara Charles, author of Joy, Regardless. Her memoir is honest and open, written with a clarity that makes complex seasons of life feel deeply human. The themes are significant: motherhood, illness, marriage, identity, yet the writing carries you gently. There is reflection here, experience here, and, woven throughout, joy.
Lara, a mother of four, understands how easily women absorb the idea that peace sits somewhere outside the life they are living. Her story moves through the realities of family life and personal challenge with candour and quiet humour.
In this conversation for Women in Momentum, Lara speaks about finding joy in the midst of uncertainty, navigating identity through illness and change, and what it means to grow without leaving your life behind. It is a thoughtful and generous exchange, and one I suspect many of our readers will recognise themselves in.
The title Joy, Regardless suggests a defiant kind of hope. What did “joy” mean to you at the beginning of your illness, and how did that definition change by the time you finished writing the book?
At the beginning of my illness, joy was synonymous with happiness. It was conditional and depended on circumstances. It was something I experienced when things were going well.
Now joy means something entirely different. It’s an inner state that remains, regardless of what is happening around me, which is sometimes joyful and sometimes painful. Words like grounded and centred come to mind, but it’s deeper than that. Joy is our true self, our true home. It’s the place within us that never leaves, no matter what life brings.
Your book is exceptional. What has the experience of being an author been like for you?
Thank you for the compliment. Writing is what allows my true self to speak. When I sit at my laptop, I can feel myself plugging into the space of the heart, the joy, regardless state.
It’s where everything feels honest and alive. It’s a great honour to write about what I’ve come to understand through this inner journey. It’s a privilege I don’t take for granted.
Your memoir charts a shift from rebellion to reconciliation, not just with medicine, but with yourself. Was there a moment where you realised the fight itself was costing you something?
Absolutely. There were many signs along the way, but for a long time, I wasn’t ready to release control.
The defining moment was the scene in the book where I’m surrounded by glass shards from the broken snow globe. In that moment, I felt completely defeated by the fight, and by life itself.
Those moments are devastating. But they’re also the birthplace of another way of being. When everything falls apart, something truer has space to emerge.
You hold space for both oncology wards and spiritual inquiry without romanticising either. In a culture that loves binaries, how did you learn to live in that tension?
Binaries come from living in the head, from thought. And I know that because I lived there for most of my life!
Thought naturally divides the world into polarities – right and wrong, good and bad – based on our conditioning and beliefs. The journey from head to heart in Joy, Regardless is the journey of recognising the part of myself that exists beyond thought.
When we begin living from that place, we start to see how polarised thinking plays out everywhere: in ourselves, in medicine, politics, relationships and culture. I live in that tension by remembering that the tension itself is thought, not the totality of who I am.
Much of the book reads as a quiet dismantling of who you thought you had to be, as a mother, a woman, a “strong one.” What identities were hardest to let go of?
‘Quiet dismantling of who you thought you had to be’. I love that you noticed that. It’s very true.
The ‘good wife’ identity has been one of the hardest to loosen. Intimate relationships are our greatest mirrors. Nothing reveals our unconscious patterns more than our partners! They see and trigger our unhealed wounds.
When I began to understand that my marriage wasn’t here only to make me happy, but to make me conscious (happy at times too), everything shifted. Being a ‘good wife’ no longer meant sacrificing my needs. It meant voicing them from my heart and noticing how that shift opened something new in both my husband and me.
You write candidly about motherhood while ill, without slipping into hero narratives. How did cancer reshape your relationship to care, both giving it and receiving it?
Cancer magnetised all my ‘stuff’ – my shadow.
Like many ‘good girls’, I learnt early on that anger and sadness make people uncomfortable. When our big feelings weren’t always met with comfort, we often learnt to manage them alone.
As an adult, this meant I rarely asked for help. I wasn’t vulnerable. I just coped.
Cancer exposed that pattern. But it was when we unexpectedly fell pregnant with twins, and I was suddenly caring for four young children while managing illness, that everything changed. I had no choice but to ask for help.
Life forced me to be vulnerable and remove my armour. In doing so, it revealed how care lives in both the giving and the receiving of support and love. And it is in the receiving that the connection deepens.
This line from the book says it all: “The very things I once believed made me more lovable – being good, holding it together, soldiering on without help – had become armour. Armour that kept me safe but also kept me distant.”
The memoir resists the redemptive arc we often expect from illness stories. Did you feel pressure, internal or external, to make cancer “mean something”?
I honestly didn’t, and I think that’s a result of the inner journey.
It’s ironic because I began that journey to try to heal my cancer. But when I arrived at the core of my being, what I found was acceptance. I no longer needed to fix or remove cancer. It was simply part of the theatre of this incarnation.
If cancer means anything, it’s an invitation to a different way of living.
There’s a recurring sense that illness stripped away cultural scripts you’d been living inside. What were the most dangerous or invisible scripts you didn’t realise you’d absorbed until they fell apart?
It wasn’t really the illness that stripped away the cultural scripts. Illness was the opening to the part of myself that isn’t bound to the cultural scripts.
As I began living more from that place, the ‘good girl’ scripts – and the broader cultural scripts we’re marinated in – became impossible to unsee.
Scripts around womanhood, whiteness, patriarchy, productivity and worth. They were all invisible until they weren’t.
Some of the scripts are dangerous to people of colour. Some to women. Some affect our emotional and spiritual health. Freedom requires that we examine all of them. Once you see them, you can begin to loosen their grip. And as we develop a sense of separation from these scripts, we’re no longer bound by them – which means we can show up in the world in a different, more conscious way.
Your spiritual awakening is presented as embodied rather than abstract. How did your body become a teacher in ways language or belief never had?
I had this moment of realising that I had gathered a lot of knowledge about living with less struggle, but it was all in my head. I wasn’t living it.
Wisdom becomes real and embodied through our actions and reactions: how we speak, how we listen, how we respond, how we show up.
Towards the end of the book, those things began to change. I started grounding myself physically in my body – feet on the earth, conscious movement, breath, time in nature, meditation, dance. As I did, the knowledge moved from my head into my body and my life. This is the divine masculine and feminine in symbiosis – action (masculine) rooted in the body, intuition and heart (feminine).
This line from the book is one of my favourites: “In those small moments of coming back to my body, I reclaimed parts of myself that had been buried by a culture that dismissed them. And, in doing so, I realised that wholeness didn’t come from thinking more, achieving more or being someone else. It came from embracing the beauty, the power and the joy of being exactly who I was – feet on the earth, heart open, fully alive.”
You describe joy not as happiness, but as a kind of wholeness. Do you think joy is something we cultivate, or something we remember?
It’s both. We do the work – therapy, reading, listening, unlearning – that’s the cultivating. And through that, we uncover what’s already whole – that’s the remembering.
It seems we have to go out to come in.
Writing this book required radical honesty, not just vulnerability. Were there truths you were afraid to put on the page because of how they might change how others see you?
Yes – the whole book is the truth I was afraid to release!
The fear belongs to the conditioned self, the part that lives in the head. When I return to the heart, to the unbound self – through meditation, nature, writing, dancing – fear dissolves, and I can do things like publish a book.
The conditioned self – part of me I call Laura – is still scared. She probably always will be. But I’ve made peace with her. I’ve befriended her. I can thank her for her fearful thoughts, understand their origins, and still choose to rise.
As both a writer and an educator working with people navigating cancer, how do you guard against turning lived experience into doctrine?
Please tell me if I ever do!
Doctrine lives in the head. Our ideas of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are subjective and deeply shaped by individual culture and conditioning. My ‘right’ may be someone else’s ‘wrong’. So how could I impose my path on anyone else?
Returning to the place within that doesn’t need to be right is what keeps me grounded. It’s not always easy, though. It requires constant vigilance, humility and self-awareness to notice when the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ creep in.
The book subtly interrogates modern productivity culture, especially for women. How did illness recalibrate your relationship to time, usefulness, and worth?
It taught me that I am worthy of rest. That I could do nothing and still be loved.
The conditioned self believes we must strive and achieve to earn our existence. The true self knows it is already whole.
That doesn’t mean I stop working and creating – I’ve just published a book! But my sense of worth is no longer tied to outcomes. I am whole, regardless of how well the book does. That’s freedom. We can still create and work hard, without being crushed by expectations.
You’ve spoken about reclaiming the feminine, not as aesthetic or ideology, but as lived truth. What does that reclamation look like in ordinary, unromantic daily life now?
It looks like power. The power of a peaceful warrior.
- The peaceful warrior votes X without blaming people who vote Y.
- She seeks justice without dehumanising the other.
- Holds two truths: the system must change, and so must I.
- Stands for peace without shaming those who can’t yet stand with her.
- She builds bridges where blame builds walls.
Where ‘good girl’ conditioning once silenced me, I now aim to speak from this place. It’s a power the world needs.
Finally, who do you hope finds this book, not in a bookstore, but in a moment of their life, and what do you hope it gives them permission to stop doing, rather than start?
While men have connected with the book, I wrote it primarily for women.
For the woman who feels restless. Who senses there is more. Who is struggling with motherhood, career, marriage, illness and can’t find a way out.
I hope Joy, Regardless, gives her permission to stop searching outside herself. To stop striving for wholeness elsewhere. To remember the compassion, strength and wisdom that already lives in her heart.
From that place, we can face anything. The restlessness dissolves. And we remember: this kind of joy is our birthright.
More about Lara:
Lara Charles explores life’s deeper threads through her thought-provoking writing, giving voice to the quiet truths that live beneath the surface. Her work has been published in respected publications nationally and internationally. She is the creator of the Deeper Threads Substack newsletter and podcast, and a teacher on the global cancer support website Thrivers Ark. Born on Darkinjung Country in NSW Australia and now based in Aotearoa New Zealand – where her book is set – Lara writes to guide readers back to their wholeness. Joy, Regardless is her debut memoir. Discover more at laracharles.com.
You can purchase her book by clicking here.
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