A cancer diagnosis is undoubtedly devastating for anyone at any age. From the moment you hear the words “you have cancer” you enter a world of one hospital appointment after another: attending for scans, surgeries, treatments, consultations with oncologists and surgeons. Cancer takes over your life for many months and you enter survival mode and do what you need to do to get through it all.
When the treatment stops and the wounds have healed, you’re discharged and told to get on with your life. This is the moment you’ve been craving, after ticking off all the rounds of treatment, but that sense of elation that you imagined might elude you.
Whilst there may be a huge sense of relief to have reached the other side of treatment, we can sometimes feel the magnitude of everything that we’ve been through catch up with us and this can really through us off balance.
I know this was the case for me after my breast cancer diagnosis in 1998; I distinctly remember feeling tearful and emotional for weeks afterwards. I was anxious about recurrence and highly tuned into any new lump, bump or twinge I felt in my body. The number of times I would phone my breast care nurse and ask to see the consultant to have another lump aspirated or checked, was insane. Thankfully none of my worries were serious – just scar tissue or a slightly inflamed lymph node, but I had to be sure. It’s only natural to feel this way, especially in the early months of recovery. I’ve learnt that time helps ease these feelings and, for me, starting a yoga practice gave me back control over my mind and body. Yoga helped me to get out of my busy head and into my body.
I didn’t really think of it as a ritual at the time, but this was the biggest change I made in my life after cancer. This became my ritual – one that continues to support me 26 years later.
What is a ritual? A ritual allows us to be physically and mentally present in whatever we decide to dedicate ourselves to doing, allowing us to be fully engaged in the process.
A ritual usually involves three elements: setting an intention; doing something with attention and repeating it regularly.
You can apply this to things you already do in your daily life, or you can choose to introduce a new ritual to support your well-being. Examples of rituals could be taking time each day to walk in nature, to have a mindful cup of tea, a regular exercise routine or simply taking time out to sit in stillness and focus on your breath – something that brings you a sense of equilibrium by you just focusing on you and being fully present in the moment.
Here are 3 ways that a yoga can help you find your new normal after cancer:
It helps balance the nervous system. During challenging times, keeping our nervous system on an even keel is important. A cancer diagnosis puts us into fight, fight and freeze response as we hold ourselves in check for the next test result or procedure. This elevated state can linger for some time after treatment without us realising it and not just in our minds but can permeate our whole being. A regular yoga practice can reduce the stress hormones and reduce inflammation in the body. There is evidence that a 75-minute yoga practice twice a week can reduce risk of primary breast cancer recurrence[1].
It reconnects you with your body. After surgery and treatment, we can often dissociate from the parts of our body that have been affected by cancer. Or we might feel very protective towards that area or scared to move or touch it. Yoga can help to build back confidence in your body as it encourages self-awareness as you move through the postures to strengthen and mobilise these areas.
It allows you to just focus on you. Whether we’re moving through the postures with awareness of the breath, or sitting in stillness, yoga becomes a somatic experience benefitting us from the inside out, building a sense of interoception (a felt sense of our body deep inside). At the start and end of each of my yoga for breast cancer classes I encourage you to check in with how you’re feeling physically, energetically and mentally so that you can identify what your body needs from the practice that day.
If you would like to create a new ritual of a regular yoga practice that is tailored to breast cancer recovery join me every Thursday at 1pm via the Get Me Back LIVE membership or watch back on-demand.
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References:
[1] Lin, P.-J., Sun, H., Gada, U., Richard Francis Dunne, Kleckner, I., Arana, E., Chakrabarti, A., Stephen Rajan Samuel, Charles Stewart Kamen, Molnar, J., John Scott Maul, Hopkins, J.O. and Karen Michelle Mustian (2023). Effects of yoga vs placebo on inflammation among cancer survivors: A nationwide multicenter phase III randomized controlled trial (RCT). Journal of Clinical Oncology, 41(16_suppl), pp.12111
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