FAQs
What is Healing?
Healing has many meanings for different people. Healing can simply refer to not having a physical illness. Healing can also mean coming to a deeper wisdom that helps to manage illnesses or difficulties in life.
For some, healing means an ability to access their inner self, becoming more aware and more whole in body, mind and spirit.
Healing is a movement toward the natural balance that our body wisdom holds as we grow on our life journey. The intention to heal is a powerful force that one can direct using one’s own natural wisdom of consciousness as a guide to greater health.
What is Mindfulness?
“Mindfulness is present moment awareness. it means paying attention to your thoughts, emotions and feelings in the body as they are happening”. --Dr. Been
Mindfulness allows us to relearn to listen to our body’s awareness so that we can support our own well-being.
Normally 95% of our consciousness is unconscious. Our bodies have an inherent wisdom that constantly strives for balance and adjusts to conditions. Mindfulness teaches us to reduce our body's reactivity to stress in a healthy way using a variety of evidence supported practices.
How can Mindfulness help me?
Cancer is multifactorial. Nutrition plays a central role as well as stress, inflammation, our physical and emotional environment, and even our sense of purpose.
Our bodies aren’t designed for the constant stress of today. Stress reduces the body’s ability to heal and maintain good health. Mindfulness practices allow you to regain balance, giving you enhanced inner awareness to support your healing process and manage stress in your life.
What are these techniques?
Guided meditation- these personalized narratives restore your natural balance by increasing your intuitive awareness.
Heart-rate variability (HRV)- HRV is a reliable predictor of stress and its effects. When our mind, body and emotions are balanced we are in a state of heart coherence. Among the many benefits of coherence are increased emotional self-control, increased resilience to the effects of stress, calmer and clearer thinking, and overall relaxation. We learn this through exercises and shifting the balance of your nervous system using biofeedback.
Biofeedback- Biofeedback is a technique you can use to learn to control some of your body's functions. This feedback helps you make subtle changes in your body, such as relaxing certain muscles, to achieve the results you want, such as reducing pain. In essence, biofeedback gives you the ability to practice new ways to control your body, often to improve a health condition or physical performance.
Emotional Balancing-- Your body's nervous system continuously generates an energy field which interconnects your emotions, body and mind in a dynamic balance. How we age, our vitality, and how we heal, are all related to that balance.
Emotional Balancing can help to release blocked energy. It is a pathway to greater self-awareness, using imagery and gentle movement of energy through the body to restore our natural mind-body-spirit balance.
REFERENCES / SOURCES
Mindfulness and stress reduction
"Mindfulness based interventions hold a great deal of promise for helping people with cancer cope across a broad range of symptoms and issues, both during and after the completion of active treatment."
Carlson, L. E. (2013). Mindfulness-based cancer recovery: The development of an evidence-based psychosocial oncology intervention. Oncology exchange, 12(2).
Bower, J. E., Crosswell, A. D., Stanton, A. L., Crespi, C. M., Winston, D., Arevalo, J., … & Ganz, P. A. (2015). Mindfulness meditation for younger breast cancer survivors: a randomized controlled trial. Cancer, 121(8), 1231-1240.
Matchim, Y., Armer, J. M., & Stewart, B. R. (2011). Effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on health among breast cancer survivors. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 33(8), 996-1016.
Stress and Cancer
“Stress has a profound impact on how your body’s systems function,” says Lorenzo Cohen, Ph.D., professor of General Oncology and Behavioral Science, and director of the Integrative Medicine Program at MD Anderson. Health experts are still sorting out whether stress actually causes cancer. Yet there’s little doubt that it promotes the growth and spread of some forms of the disease. Put simply, “stress makes your body more hospitable to cancer,” Cohen says.
"The role of stress in cancer is unclear. What is important for patients is that the reduction of stress may very well improve chances for recovery, improve quality of life, and provide an opportunity for greater participation in total treatment."
http://med.stanford.edu/survivingcancer/cancer-and-stress/stress-and-cancer.html
"there is evidence that patients with chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, cancer, immune disorders, chronic pain, sleep disorders, back pain, clinical depression, stress and anxiety may benefit from MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction). An advantage of MBSR is that these interventions have little risk and can increase the capability of patients to have control over their pain, mood swings and lives, as well as enhance quality of their life."
Stress and Inflammation
"Psychological stress is a potent trigger of inflammation (Welk et al., 2008; Steptoe et al., 2007; Pace et al., 2009) and as such, individuals suffering from chronic inflammatory conditions frequently turn to stress reduction methods in search of relief. Recent statistics from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (Barnes et al., 2007) show that conditions associated with inflammatory processes motivate nearly 40% of the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) services. Among those using CAM services, most are pursuing approaches such as meditation, biofeedback, and relaxation, which influence the body via the brain."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3518553/
Mindfulness and pain management
"Mindfulness meditation may be effective for managing pain because it can moderate the patient's emotional appraisal of pain and other stressful events by withdrawing the attention away from the unpleasant symptom.[61] When patients practice mindfulness meditation, they become less cognitively focused on their pain; thus, pain tolerance is enhanced."