Dear Friend
Cancer is stressful. Cancer is often piled on top of other stresses in your life. Cancer makes some life stresses worse. It helps you let go of others.
Reducing stress is vital to healing. So is finding skillful ways to cope with stresses you can’t remove.
There are many ways to reduce stress with cancer. Meditation, yoga, tai chi, qigong, exercise, time in nature, time with people you love, and time doing what you love to do are examples.
So is getting good sleep, taking medicine for anxiety or depression, using herbs if they work for you, visualization and imagery, art and music.
Almost anything that you enjoy and that lightens your burden reduces stress. All the 7 Lifestyle Practices reduce stress.
One of the greatest sources of stress is fear and loss. I’ve worked with fear and loss for many years—for myself and with others. I haven’t found a single path. Learning to stay present with fear and loss is a deep teaching.
Having something to believe in can make a profound difference in coping with stress. It doesn’t matter if your belief is religious, spiritual, family focused, nature focused, or some kind of purely personal belief.
So there is no single way to manage stress with cancer. But there are many ways that people find work for them. Finding what works for you is profoundly important.
Love is the greatest healer of all.
Wishing you well,
Michael
Learn more
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.
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