Cancer as a Gateway
Multi-Dimensional Approach To Healing
Healing Beyond Cancer Workshop next session May 15th, 6 week workshop, (skipping May 29). click here to register
COUNSELING FOR CANCER
"It's Cancer. . ."
Help for those with life threatening illness and their loved ones.
How Can I Heal in the Midst of Illness?
When faced with those words, "it's cancer", life, as you have known it, is forever changed. Overwhelming feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, grief, and helplessness may make you feel incapacitated. Decisions need to be made regarding medical treatment, insurance, finances, family concerns. It can seem as if you are standing in the center of a very powerful storm, dizzied by the chaos whirling around you. Sometimes, even when you have the best support from loved ones, it helps to talk with someone outside the storm. Too often, in our effort to love and care for others, we neglect ourselves and hide our true feelings for fear they will bring harm. We disguise our experience in an effort to appear "strong". Sometimes, the strength comes in sharing what we fear. Maybe it is time for you to offer yourself some time for your own healing.
THERAPEUTIC ELEMENTS OF COUNSELING FOR CATASTROPHIC MEDICAL ISSUES INCLUDES:
6-week Workshops: Healing Beyond Cancer. Nationwide weekend format. Local Denver/Boulder 6-week Workshops facilitated throughout the year.
Reconnecting to your body as ally. Explore Mindful support and learn new coping skills for discovering the wisdom in your personal experience.
CYCLES OF CHANGE
As the leaves fall each year, dying and giving back to the earth, allowing for the birthing of new trees, so too must we shed, change, move, and express, in order to be well and to grow our new selves.
Staying in touch with the cycles of life within us, (our many feelings and sensations), keeps us connected to the pulsation of life all around us.
Stagnation creates disease, movement offers healing. Meeting what is brought to us, by giving expression for this experience, provides the movement, which brings us into connection with our full living.
Staying awake and present to our experience, as it is, is the most couragous act, expecially for those of us challenged with our own illness or of those we love. dmr copyright 2004 present-centered psychotherapy, L.L.C.
ARTICLES
Cancer Patients Can Be Well Just as They Are
Jon Kabat-Zinn Shares Mindful Meditation at Cancer Center 
People can be well even when they have cancer – “well” in the sense of having connectedness with themselves through meditation.
So says renowned author Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
The bestselling author of Wherever You Go, There You Are and Full Catastrophe Living, shared his thoughts Feb. 15 at the first community event in M. D. Anderson’s new Cancer Prevention Building. The presentation, which concluded with the signing of his new book, Coming to Our Senses, was the first in a Journey to Wellness series sponsored by M. D. Anderson’s Public Education Office.
“You can be unbelievably healthy no matter what is wrong with you,” Kabat-Zinn told the crowd of 350 people. “It’s not like you have cancer and have to be done with that before you can be well. And one way of being well is through meditation.”
Demystifying the meditative practice
A leading expert in meditation, Kabat-Zinn set about to demystify the practice by guiding the crowd through a short exercise. He asked people to be aware of their thoughts and their breath as it rose and fell. It did not matter if their eyes were open. It did not matter what they were thinking. Meditation does not require that people “empty” their minds. It does not require a Gandhi-like trance.
“Meditation is about knowing what’s on your mind,” he told the group. “The real meditation is how you live your life, not how you sit in a chair. It is about how intimate you are with yourself in the moment.”
The practice of meditation also can help a cancer patient be in tune with his or her body. “No matter how many people are working on your body, you know your body better than anybody, or you could know your body better than anybody (through meditation),” said Kabat-Zinn, who holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Mindfulness makes a difference
Kabat-Zinn was invited to M. D. Anderson because his work relates to ongoing research conducted at the institution and at The University of Texas School of Nursing, the event co-host.
The School of Nursing has received a National Institutes of Health grant to study mindfulness meditation as a treatment in addictions. M. D. Anderson’s Department of Behavioral Sciences received a grant involving similar therapy for smoking cessation. Kabat-Zinn also has strongly influenced an M. D. Anderson study involving a mindfulness-based relaxation program with chemotherapy. 
Lorenzo Cohen Ph.D., director of M. D. Anderson’s Integrative Medicine Program, explains the connection between the author’s work and the institution’s growing Integrative Medicine Program.
“Dr. Kabat-Zinn’s research is pioneering work that shows the mind can influence physiology and can have an impact on clinical outcomes of chronic illnesses,” Cohen says.
Research includes complementary therapies
Kabat-Zinn’s early research strongly influenced Cohen’s own research focus. Today, under Cohen’s leadership, the Integrative Medicine Program is organized into three major areas that reflect some of that influence:
Studying the biobehavioral effects of mind/body-based interventions on cancer patients, including stress management, yoga, support groups, music therapy, meditation (including Tibetan meditation), expressive writing and other behavioral approaches.
Examining the anti-cancer potential of natural compounds such as dietary supplements, vitamins and herbal remedies. Products being studied include green tea, turmeric, oleander, melatonin, shark cartilage, fish oil and mushrooms.
Using acupuncture to treat common cancer treatment-related side effects including nausea, postoperative ileus (partial or complete blockage of the small or large intestine) and mucositis (inflammation of the lining of the mouth, throat and gastrointestinal tract).
Cancer center wellness programs
In addition, M. D. Anderson’s Place…of wellness offers more than 40 complementary therapy programs to patients, family members and caregivers. The Integrative Medicine Program’s Complementary/Integrative Medicine Education Resources website also provides current information about dietary supplements.
The growth of such complementary therapies in mainstream medicine throughout the country is a trend that has continued to advance since Kabat-Zinn started the Stress Reduction Clinic. Today, there are satellite clinics all over the world.
Despite the growth, the core philosophy the clinic staff shares with patients remains the same: “No matter what it is, when patients meet with us, we tell them, ‘there is more right with you than wrong with you,’ “ he says. At last month’s event, Kabat-Zinn encouraged the audience to explore a more mindful existence, leaving them with this thought: “Live your life as if it really mattered