Dear Friend
Creating a healing environment can be powerful for your healing. A healing environment includes both creating healing spaces and minimizing that which may impede your healing from your environment.
Dear Friend
Creating a healing environment is a powerful path toward healing. Most simply, it can mean creating a healing space in your home. A room of your own if that is possible. A corner of a room if you can’t have a room of your own.
Creating a sense of healing or sacred space depends deeply on what you find healing.
We may have an image of a sacred space as bright, sunlit, clean, and beautiful. But someplace you can go to be alone when you need to be alone, is a powerful healing space in itself.
A church or temple or mosque can be a healing place. A museum or a concert hall. What are the places where your breath deepens, you relax, and you allow the flow of life energy to move through you? Being in nature can be profoundly healing.
We might better think of a healing environment not as a single place but as a flow of places that are healing and precious to you. Even if it’s a few square feet of space between the bed and the wall.
In addition to making a peaceful and healing space, making your home and surrounding environment a healthy space can be a conscious and healing act. This can include minimizing environmental stressors such as toxic chemicals and reducing excessive sun exposure, strong electromagnetic fields and more. Not everyone can—or wishes to—address environmental stressors of this kind. For those who are drawn to doing so, conscious acts of minimizing these types of stressors can be very powerful.
Wishing you well,
Michael
Michael Lerner
Michael Lerner is co-founder of Commonweal and co-founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, Healing Circles, The New School at Commonweal, and CancerChoices. He has led more than 200 Commonweal Cancer Help Program retreats to date. His book Choices In Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer was the first book on integrative cancer care to be well received by prominent medical journals as well as by the patient and integrative cancer care community.
Michael Lerner
Michael Lerner is co-founder of Commonweal and co-founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, Healing Circles, The New School at Commonweal, and CancerChoices. He has led more than 200 Commonweal Cancer Help Program retreats to date. His book Choices In Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer was the first book on integrative cancer care to be well received by prominent medical journals as well as by the patient and integrative cancer care community.
Creating a Healing Environment at a glance
Our physical environments bring us in contact with many exposures every day. What we eat and drink, touch, or breathe in can affect our bodies and our health. There are both positive and harmful connections between are environment and cancer.
Nature includes beneficial exposures such as many plants and animals, air, water, and daytime light, but also harmful exposures such as some natural chemicals, viruses, smoke, and radiation.
Human-manufactured chemicals, bright light at night, and additional sources of radiation have brought further harmful exposures into our lives, sometimes polluting the food, air, and water we depend on.
In brief:
- Exposures to nature can be helpful with both your body terrainthe internal conditions of your body, including nutritional status, fitness, blood sugar balance, hormone balance, inflammation and more and some symptoms common among people with cancer.
- Light—both the timing and the quality of light—may impact your hormone balance, especially sleep-regulating hormones.
- Ionizing radiation—from the sun and tanning beds, from medical imaging or radiation therapy, and from radioactive materials—is strongly linked to higher risk of many cancer types.
- Many chemicals and a few other substances are also linked to higher risk of some cancer types.
- Nighttime work shows mixed links to cancer, with higher risk of some cancers but lower risk of others.
- Pleasant sounds can be calming and promote healing, while noise shows limited evidence of a link to anxiety.
- A few microorganisms—viruses and bacteria, some of which are common among people—cause several types of cancer.
Evidence related to each of these exposures is in How can Creating a Healing Environment help me? What the research says ›
You can take steps to increase beneficial exposures and minimize harmful ones. Receiving a cancer diagnosis doesn’t mean it’s too late to remove harmful substances and exposures from your surroundings. In fact, your body’s natural abilities to heal will be enhanced by removing exposures that have these negative effects:
- Harm your immune system
- Disrupt your hormone balance
- Increase your stress response
- Disrupt your sleep
- Contribute to symptoms and side effects of cancer and treatments
Increasing health-promoting exposures will further enable your body’s optimal functioning. Creating a (more) healing environment for yourself is a step you can take to promote your healing and wellness. See Making changes in your environment ›