When doctors use the words rare and deadly in the same breath, life is never the same again.
For Sydney lawyer and mother Sarah Susak, those words arrived in 2017, just as she was celebrating her
daughter Stella’s first birthday.
A strange electric spark when her husband kissed her sent her to specialists, who uncovered a tumour hidden in her face.
The diagnosis: adenoid cystic carcinoma, a head and neck cancer both rare and notoriously aggressive.
Sarah, who had already endured eight rounds of IVF to bring her daughter into the world, suddenly found
herself facing a battle no mother, wife or professional imagines.
The prognosis was stark. Surgery. Radiation. And a future measured in years, if she was fortunate.
Standing on the Edge
What followed was a 19-hour operation that redefined Sarah’s understanding of resilience.
Surgeons removed half her upper mouth and teeth, rebuilt her jaw using her fibula bone, and transplanted veins from her feet.
The risk of losing an eye or hearing was real.
Sarah gave her doctors one instruction only: “Do whatever it takes. Just let me survive.”
Nine days in intensive care pushed her to the edge.
There were moments of silence, psychosis and pain so consuming that her identity as a high-powered lawyer felt like a memory.
Yet within the uncertainty, something essential clarified.
If she could not control the diagnosis, she could still control how she met it.
The Path Back to Healing
After surgery and the highest dose of radiation possible, Sarah began an insatiable search for ways to heal.
Books, guided meditations, conversations with teachers across the world, she absorbed it all.
That quest led her to Vedic meditation, an ancient practice that became her lifeline.
When I later sat with Sarah to talk about her new book, YOURU, she told me that meditation was the moment
she realised the power she had been searching for was already within her.
“The Vedas showed me the boss lady of all this chaos was me,” she reflects.
“I was, in fact, already everything I had been searching for out there.”
Meditation did not erase fear. It gave her a place to move through it.
Over time, it became the foundation of her recovery and the beginning of a new way of being.
Remembering Her Inner Guide
By 2023, Sarah had trained as a Vedic meditation teacher and launched Medi Steady Go, a business
dedicated to sharing the practices that helped her reclaim her health.
She teaches from lived experience, not theory.
Her voice carries the weight of someone who has stared down her own mortality and chosen joy again and again.
In her debut book, YOURU, she introduces the concept of finding the guru within you.
The word is her own invention, playful yet profound.
A Youru, she explains, is one who refuses to give their power to circumstance and instead leads their life from within.
“There is no person, phenomena or experience outside of you that can bring the light eternally.
It is already within you,” she writes.
Another Chapter of Courage
Just as she seemed to have emerged from the worst, Sarah’s story shifted again.
In 2024, after nearly seven years in remission, doctors discovered a metastasis in her lung.
The lesion was removed successfully, but complications followed.
She developed Guillain Barre Syndrome, a rare autoimmune condition that paralysed her from the neck down.
Life support and a grim prognosis came next.
Against all medical expectations of a twelve-month stay, Sarah was out of hospital in just over two months,
learning again to walk and swallow.
“Holistic health practices and daily meditation made another recovery possible,” she says.
“I was not willing to hand my story over to despair.”
A Life Built from Light
Today, Sarah balances her role as a commercial lawyer with her work as a meditation teacher, author and mother.
Through YOURU and Medi Steady Go, she offers others the tools she used to transform illness into a catalyst for awakening.
Her story is not one of denial.
It is one of fierce acknowledgement.
Life can fracture.
Bodies can falter.
Yet the mind, when steadied and supported by conscious practice, can become the most potent medicine of all.
Sarah Susak
YOURU