The Goal: Change your Body Chemistry

 

I am a skeptic.  However, as someone who is supposed to be ‘beneath the grass,” I can write this:  Along with prescribed medications, Diet and Lifestyle changes, Meditation has played a transformative role in extending my life.

 

Given a two-year prognosis, I knew I could go “down the rabbit hole” of suffering mentally over the prospects of a debilitating and painful end.  Or, I could keep my act together and while not shying away from cancer, rather “lean into it” and keep myself as objective as possible — still feeling emotions like vulnerability and reaction to discomfort and pain — and yet not drown in those emotions.  That’s one of the benefits of meditation.  Then I found this bonus: your thoughts affect your brain which in turn affects your health.

 

KEY POINT:  You can not underestimate the impact your mind has on your health.  Your body responds on a cellular level to both negative and positive thoughts.

 

One of the founding doctors of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center once said he was convinced that of all the thousands of cancer patients he treated, every one of those cancers had an emotional component to it; negative thoughts and feelings brought on by a significant loss, like the death of a loved one; a business/financial failure; a horrible divorce; or a life goal that didn't come to fruition.  When those grave things happen, negative emotions can play a key role in changing your body chemistry -- think epigenetics -- and make it an attractive environment for cancer cells to possibly thrive and multiply.

 

It is my firm belief that negative thinking -- the feeling of loss and despair -- led in part to my cancer.  This concept was introduced to me through my PCP who upon hearing of my diagnosis spoke to me about the dangers of negative thinking.  Meditation has given me a way to break the habit of ruminating over past events, enabling me to alter my body’s chemistry for the better.

 

OWNING CANCER KEY POINT:  Anyone can meditate.  I’m good at it.  And I also suck at it.  My experience changes every time — and so will your’s.  The important thing is to to do it nearly everyday.  As little as 10 minutes a day can change your life for the better.  (Even people who don’t have cancer — people like Jerry Seinfeld — swear by it.)  If you miss a couple of days, don’t beat yourself up.  Jump back in.  

 

Actively practicing meditation has profound effects and is quite different from not doing it.  As someone put it, we have 1,440 minutes in our day.  Meditating for just 10 minutes makes all the other minutes so much better.  In terms of your personal outlook and contentment, it is truly a revolutionary thing to do.  You’ll find in doing it, that you don’t always have to be “taken in” by moments, situations and/or events that used to upset you; events that as a cancer patient, can be bad for your health.  

 

MY PROCESS: There are two types of meditation I’ve used to help extend my life.

 

(1) Positive Imagery Meditation can help you create an internal chemistry that will make your body inhospitable to cancer.  Remember, I’m a skeptic and I was especially so about the effects of positive imagery meditation until me PCP told me that imagery meditation is like giving your body a positive internal enzyme bath.  That made sense to me.  Your body has an innate ability to restore and rebalance itself — within reason, of course — but you may help supplement the work your medications are doing with meditation.

 

I’ve used this type of meditation — along with prescribed medications — to stop the physical spread of my cancer.  It's locking your mind into an imagery of positive physical change.   You start as most meditations do by concentrating on your breath.  Most often — while following an online teacher or on my own, listening to chants or ambient music or sounds of nature — what I do next is imagine white light moving into my body with my breath and then traveling to the area where my cancer originated and spread.  This is not new.  Eastern cultures refer to the healing powers of the air we breath as prana.  You can call it what you like — it’s worked for me.

 

(2) Guided Meditation, aka mindfulness meditation, enables you to gradually gain control of emotions by helping you recognize negative thought patterns and the emotional states they put you in.  We develop mental response habits over time, telling ourselves narratives that help frame our reactions (or overreactions) to everyday occurrences.  And sometimes we burrow down a “rabbit hole” by taking one negative thought and linking it to another, taking us lower and lower, imagining the worst, reliving emotions while amping up depression or anxiety in the process.  After a while, we don’t even think about these thoughts and yet our negative and/or defensive reactions to people, events and even ourselves can cause damage on a cellular level.  (Kind of the opposite of a positive enzyme bath.)

 

The best way I can put it is this:  Guided meditation is a process whereby you retrain your mind.  And once you retrain it, you’ll recognize negative thought patterns and habits — like ruminating — and then it’s simply a matter of dismissing them.  But — and this is important — you do so without being critical of yourself for repeating old patterns.  What I think you may see through a meditation practice is that you can recognize these moments and change you reaction to them.  And sometimes the things that used to annoy you — and even “piss you off” — become things you can tolerate and actually observe objectively.  When you make mediation a habit, it’s possible you’ll find these non-judgmental actions will improve your outlook, your happiness and very possibly your health.

 

Creating a mediation practice that will impact your thinking may take a few days or a few weeks.  Everyone is different.  The important thing is that you start and give yourself a daily gift of ten minutes or more that may possibly change the view of your internal world and extend your life. 

 

Mindfulness meditation is the art of paying attention with a healthy intention.  And a habit of mindfulness can change your life for the better. 

 

HOW YOU CAN MEDITATE: There are many ways to develop a Meditation practice but probably the most convenient way is thru a smartphone/tablet app.  Most apps offer a period of free usage so you get a feel for their approach before you commit to a subscription.  (The fees are not horrible.)

Listed below are just a few but they are ones I’m familiar with:

Calm

Ten Percent Happier

Headspace

Insight Timer

Waking Up

 

Ten Percent Happier is the most popular in the U.S. while Insight Timer has many teachers and the most followers world-wide.

Personally, I've used Headspace to help with positive imagery and Waking Up for Mindfulness.  I can't say enough about Waking Up and the work or its creator, neuroscientist and philosopher, Sam Harris.  

What’s important is that you find a style, a teacher (or teachers) whose approach “clicks” with you.

 

QUICK HELP:  When you find yourself in circumstances that are raising your level of anxiety, in addition to meditation, breath work will help calm your nerves.  Just breathing slower lowers your heart rate, causing a chemical change in your body. 

Here’s a breath exercise led by Dr Richard Brown from Columbia University that I find great when dealing with anxiety:  https://youtu.be/ZyPHWARoa1A

 

DISTANCE STRESS REDUCTION:  Not only cancer patients suffer from stress, their caregivers do too!  Duke University’s Integrative Medicine program offers Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Learning.  It costs more than an app but you might find this kind of program more attractive:  https://dukeintegrativemedicine.org/programs-training/public/mindfulness-based-stressed-reduction-distance-learning/

​

The silver lining of having cancer:  You can allow yourself — and others will give you the freedom to do so — time to think about your existence.  Not about down the road and not about how long do I have to live, but what you are experiencing right now in this moment. You can allow yourself the gift of giving up the folly of multitasking while lowering the pressure of too many items on your 2-Do list.  Yes, you can plan.  But you can think about what’s that like; that planning.  And then you can live in this moment.  Cause this is your life. 

​

SUGGESTED RESOURCES

 

BOOKS

Joy On Demand by Chade-Meng Tan.  Given its title, one would hope this bestseller would be fun to read -- and It doesn't disappoint!  Free of common trappings, Meng's pragmatic and light-hearted approach explains how you can find the equanimity, calm and joy that a meditation practice can bring.  If you have cancer -- and especially if you are facing a terminal prognosis -- this book provides an intellectual and emotional nourishment that helps you reduce stress and enable your body's ability to heal.

​

VIDEOS (BELOW)

If you're still skeptical: Science has proven — and continues to prove — the mental and physical benefits of meditation.  The First video below quickly covers the science and benefits of meditation through simple line drawing and voice over. It goes by so fast, you may want to watch it twice. (N/A: I have No Affiliation with ASAPscience.)

​

The Second video, Should You Meditate, features one of my favorite influencers, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, creator of the Waking Up app.  This brief (5:36min) video is an illuminating conversation with Harris and Joseph Goldstein, co-founder of Insight Meditation Society (https://www.dharma.org/teacher/joseph-goldstein/). 

​

Don’t Try to be Mindful - Presented by Daron Larson) at TEDx Columbus — The meaning of the word mindful (or mindfulness) is a tricky one but here’s the thought that this video brought up for me: As you deal with having cancer, that awareness — that mindfulness — is how you learn to live with your circumstances; that you should try to do everything you can to extend your life but you do it from moment to moment.  Don’t think 3 months or 6 months down the road or worry about how you got here.  Be aware of the now.  Larson says, “Noticing that you’re alive is a taste that adults have to reacquire.” I think that when you're sick -- especially if you have cancer -- noticing alive you're alive is more important than ever.

​