On Healthy Living

It seems that no matter who you are, if you throw a stone, it will hit someone whose been affected by breast cancer. In the last two months, two of my friends have been diagnosed. Joan, who now wears an adorable auburn wig, had a massive mastectomy. Her doctor’s thought the cancer had already spread underneath her arms to her lymphatic system. Fortunately, it didn’t. She’s undergoing chemo, and though she’s actually gained weight, she’s never looked better. She’s concentrating on her health, her self and her new attitude. Life in the now is a blessing; all other worries past or future fall away. I’ve never seen her so committed, so strong.
Sam, a triathlon athlete in her late 50s, starts radiation next week. She is tickled they’ll be no surgery, no chemo. She plans to be back on the tennis court as soon as her five weeks are up. Neither of these women have time for the pain, or the depression. No wonder they own pink yoga mats.
In her book Yoga for Depression, Amy Weintraub tells how practicing yoga daily can deepen your sense of who you are and strengthen the connection to your spiritual source. Christiane Northrup, M.D., calls this book “a godsend: beautifully written, medically accurate, and very practical.�
Yoga not only helps beat the blues, research has shown it improves the health of patients with heart disease, diabetes, asthma, chronic pain, migraines and anxiety. But what about breast cancer in particular?
According to Yoga Journal, yoga practice can help in three major ways: regulating the endocrine system and thus the balance of hormones to which you’re exposed; strengthening the immune system, especially by stimulating the flow of lymph; and providing both a philosophy and practice for creating a healthy relationship with our bodies and with the world around us.

jane kennedy wrote this on March 31st, 2005 and filed it under Women's Health |