Living With Cancer: Patient Yoga
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Although I sob during sappy movies, I did not cry as I staggered through the numerous surgeries, radiological procedures and chemotherapies that followed a cancer diagnosis four years ago. That is why I am grateful to yoga.
A member of my support group had encouraged me to sign up for a series of sessions for cancer patients. Judy explained that each class - sponsored by the hospital, though conducted at the YMCA - costs a grand total of $8. All I had to do was e-mail the instructor, obtain written consent from my oncologist and show up at 3:15 the following Wednesday, all of which I managed to do.
Inside a building that had doubled in size since I had last seen it, I found my way to a dimly lit, bare room where the teacher, Laurie, welcomed me. While I filled in a sketchy medical history, Judy arranged a mat for me, next to which she placed a long strap, an oddly lightweight brick and a blanket. No one objected to my keeping on my socks.
There is something soothing about a room with nothing in it but six or seven people. I sat with my legs crossed on the mat, slowed my breathing and listened first to a passage read aloud from Stephen Levine, the author of several books of guided meditations and healings, and then to some new age music. Skeptical about anything marketed as a spiritual cure, I lowered my eyes, deepened my breaths and determined to use this session as physical therapy.
A number of wall exercises served that purpose well. Standing tall, straightening upward as well as downward, I could feel myself extended. Then, with my left side to the wall, keeping the left hand on it, I slid my right foot up the calf of my left leg and balanced, reversed to repeat on the other side, and turned to face the wall with my palms on it. Walking my feet away from the wall, leaning into it, I could feel muscles that had been dormant the past four years.
Returning to the mat, stretching one body part while inhaling, relaxing with a longer exhale, I wondered: Why is this sort of gentle rehab not recommended during chemotherapy? Yoga need not be grueling headstands or strenuous backbends. I pressed first against the light brick I placed between my thighs and then against the strap I placed around the sole of one foot, acknowledging that I had not asked my oncologist about yoga (or any exercise) because I was so depleted back then.
As we became warriors, children, cats, cows and pigeons, I realized that concentrating on position and breath takes even the most cerebral of us out of our nattering, hectoring brains, reminding us that we have feet, ankles, knees, a spinal column, arms, shoulders, neck, mouth, all of which can stretch and relax, stretch and relax to release tension.
When Laurie asked everyone to lie on their stomachs, I knew that would be disabling for me, so I remained on my back, flattening it against the floor and then arching. How sad that my body has been inalterably changed for the worse. While the others worked on variations of the cobra, I chose to concentrate on each breath rather than consider my diminishment.
For haven't I managed to get here, into this bare, dimly lit room during a somehow lengthening hour, without any discomfort and instead with a sense of inhabiting myself? Body awareness - the mind aware of the body, the body of the mind - provides physical but also psychological therapy.
Finally, Laurie got all of us comfortable on our backs, asking if anyone wanted a blanket. She was reading again, words that may have appeared in the Stephen Levine book but that I recognized as a Buddhist meditation and knew by heart. Decades ago my friend Jo had asked if we could put it in our Haggadah, the ecumenical booklet we produced for the Seder attended by my gentile and Jewish intimates.
May we dwell in the heart, May we be free from suffering, May we be healed wherever healing is called for, May we be at peace.
Perhaps because I knew the phrases, perhaps because Laurie repeated them - who knows exactly why? - tears seeped from my eyes. Not a sound could be heard, no tremor could be seen, no one else knew, but they flowed down each side of my face, pooling in my ears.
A four-year-long zombie stoicism had been broken. With relief, I realized that yoga was teaching me to be patient with my frailties. I swung in a hammock of delicate filaments connecting me to each and every being seated around my Seder table.