In 2005, I was diagnosed with leukemia. It’s a slow-growing form that mostly strikes older men. When I was first diagnosed, I rode the usual wave of shock and fear and buying of luxury items (what the heck – live for today!). My sweet husband cried and cried.
Since that time, I’ve had to check my labs every six month, following my hematocrit, watching for anemia and rising white blood cells. Last week, for the first time since my diagnosis, my labs were normal. They’d been heading in that direction slowly for several years and bing, normal. Woo-hoot.
I have a brilliant doc; an MD PhD specialist in my particular type, CLL, at Dana Farber in Boston. I asked her what it means; I am a nutritionist with a diet that in some ways is obsessively clean and in others decidedly not and sporadically indulgent. I try with moderate success to get or stay fit, and have a regular meditation practice. I am definitely a seeker and aspire to know my life, occupy and express it fully. I hold my share of resentment, Louise Hay, and am working on it! My doc said that yes, I still have it and sometimes spontaneous remissions happen. Random. She would like to see those labs, though!
At this same time, I have a good friend, a beloved sister, and a woman I’ve known and admired at a distance who are deep in the throws of horrible experiences with cancer. Women who also take great care of themselves, but who got dealt a tougher hand of cards than I, and are going through what no one should need to.
Did my lifestyle cure my cancer? I think so. If there is a lifestyle that reduces risk, I’m living it. I know it made a difference, even though there are just a few trials for my type of cancer; but cherries, vegetables, and beans for me! But there are hints that it might. Epigenetics research is telling us that our thoughts and choices become etched in the very structures of our bodies.
So, if you have cancer – any type of cancer – or have a lot of cancer in your family, find out what groups like the American Institute for Cancer Research have to say about lifestyle. Check out the recipes on this blog…they are clean and vegetable-laden.
But remember too that many do ‘all the right things’ and depending upon the ironic nature of the universe, still get nasty cancers. That’s the fickle finger of risk reduction.
The gifts of this randomness are, I’d say, to remember to:
- enjoy your lifestyle. If you like bread, have some. If you like burgers, have one. AND be aware of how bread and burgers feel in your body and learn the biologic cost to you. Then look for the tastiest and highest quality versions of those foods you can find and afford, and aim to never feel bad about what you eat; and
- do that yogic dance of effort and surrender – of accepting that life has a pattern that we don’t fully understand. So finally,
- feel the mystery. The longer I’m around the more I get that it’s not just the ecstatic experiences in life that fill me with wonder, but it’s the challenging too. It the degree to which you simply take what shows up and do yoga with it.
Namaste. Happy Sunday.
So much more to say about cancer, and so many wonderful teachers of food and yoga in this area. So, more to come.
For those of you with or in close proximity to someone with cancer, how are you feeling about this issue of it’s seemingly random nature? How do you deal with it?
We live in a culture dominated by our heads. That’s made our lives pretty stressful. It doesn’t need to be that way.
A number of writers and teachers are working with concepts of energy coherence. While the science is early and evolving, the concept and practice is profound and it resonates with students. I have learned about coming into syncronicity on an energetic level as a means of tapping into my own internal wisdom, and to connect deeply with plants and nature. It’s fun and it works.
Head thinking and heart thinking are different. The head is a master at figuring out the best way to get from point A to point B, of calculating linear questions But please don’t give the head a question that doesn’t have limits, like “what should I do with my life?” The head is all about safety and risk aversion. Rather, use your heart for those questions of whom to marry, how to follow your bliss, or to connect more deeply with people and things around you. Learning how to use and balance these 2 amazing organs in our bodies and lives is one of the primary practices of leading a skillful integrated life.
The folks at the Heart Math Institute have been working on the science of honoring our hearts as a primary organ of perception for decades. Our human bodies contain a powerful oscillator – an organ that creates electronic frequency or a wave. You guessed it, it’s our heart. When waves come into coherence, waves amplify each other. Guess which emotions tend to bring our hearts and therefore our human bodies into coherence with nature? You guessed it again – gratitude and appreciation. When we create coherence with nature, we can hear it, feel it, and experience it more deeply. To me it feels like experiencing nature from the inside. It feels like I am connecting with a tree the way I connect to my grandmother – like a friend from way back. It feels wonderful and as it turns out, is big medicine for my body.
And THAT’s how you connect with plants and nature. By learning how to communicate with you heart. THAT’s what I learned from my wise and gracious teacher Pam Montgomery, and that’s what we’ll be teaching you over the 4th of July weekend at Kripalu!
Time to sign up, lovelies. Enrich your life, feel your integral place in the amazing and gorgeous web of life. Good food, good people, good work. See you there.
Here’s another practice for Deepening your connection to Gaia (mama earth).
Enjoy the season!
Research describing just how the ancient Indian practice of yoga eases behavior change continues to grow. That’s great news for the millions of people with type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases who want to practice lifestyle medicine: to be physically active, to rest in constructive ways, to eat a healthier diet and to be socially connected. In practice, however, many people struggle to maintain (or shall I say juggle) healthful lifestyles in today’s toxic and obesogenic food environment where opportunities for movement seem limited.
It turns out that yoga really does change you from the inside out. Clinical evidence is mounting.
Yoga, a system of practice originating in ancient India, provides the modern practitioner accessible tools to ease behavior change for those who desire to follow healthy lifestyles yet struggle to sustain change within today’s toxic and obesogenic food environment. New understanding of the neuroscience of lifestyle and the emotional nervous system, and advances in genomics provide insight into likely mechanisms underlying observed benefits of yoga for nutrition-related chronic disease (including type-2 diabetes).
I’ve been thinking about just how and why this works for decades. In 2007, when my first book, Every Bite Is Divine came out, I had been teaching yoga for nearly ten years, and had experienced the tremendous internal shift that so many practitioners describe. I just felt very different – better. At that time, I was a Registered Dietitian with over a decade of experience working with individuals whose very lives depended upon making lifestyle change yet who just couldn’t do it. At the same time, I myself struggled with weight and eating.
Back then there really weren’t a lot of studies exploring what I was describing. We were all aware of Herb Benson’s work at Harvard, and Jon Kabit Zin’s work at U MA, and there were some interesting studies out of India. Now, nearly ten years later, yoga for weight is seemingly everywhere, and there are even calls for an integrated research initiative on yoga for diabetes. It turns out that while I was teaching yoga and talking about how great it was (and my clinical friends nodded lovingly as they backed away as you might with a potentially crazy sister), neurobiologists and geneticists were hard at work figuring out just what I was experiencing. That yoga changes you.
Over the next months, in preparation for my second book (written with my colleague Dr. Lisa Nelson), Yoga and Diabetes: Your Guide to a Safe and Effective Practice, published by the American Diabetes Association this summer, I’ll be describing the data on just how yoga does what it does. I’ll be talking about how to find a qualified yoga teacher who can help you, and how to go about developing a practice that works. Join me for this hot discussion!
In the meantime, here’s some help with beginning a yoga practice.
And here’s a guide for getting started with healthy eating.
This year there are a smattering of studies suggesting that meditation, yoga and mindfulness practices improve gene expression. Gene expression relates not only to family traits like hair color, but to the smooth operation of every cell and tissue in your body for the rest of your life.
Gene expression and epigenetics
Epigenetics is the big news in genetics that no one seems to be talking about. Me and my colleagues at Kripalu, however, are very excited. The concept is that we each have an internal environment, and we have much more control over that internal “soup” in which our genes unfold that we’d thought, is good news for those of us in the yoga lifestyle world. Everything you do in life – the food you choose (and choose not to) eat, the way you work relationships, how you feel about yourself and everything around you – influences your internal environment. Epigenetics is the environment – the internal environment – you create through lifestyle.
There’s a shamanic teaching that you become the result of all the vibration you surround yourself with. So, love that car. Love that apartment, and really love all the foibles of your spouse. Life (and your health) will be better for it. This ancient teaching sounds modern and true in the age of epigenetics.
These are early, small studies but are fascinating enough to point the way for larger trials. There is geek drama here. In one study, in the journal Psychoneruoendocrinology, a group of 19 people with a regular ongoing meditation practice were tested before and after a day of intensive mindfulness meditation practice. A control group of 21 people who did not meditate were tested before and after a day of leisure activities. At the beginning of the study, people in each group had similar test results for genetic markers. After the intervention the meditation group had significantly improved levels of epigenetic regulatory enzymes, lower expression of pro-inflammatory and other chronic disease promoting genetic markers.
After one day.
The take home
Everything that you do matters. You create much of who you are by what you do and how you feel. Eating a whole-foods plant-based diet, learning how to deal with the ever-increasing levels of stress in our worlds, and doing what you can to enjoy your life matters. There are a growing number of quality resources to help you – find an author or teacher of yoga, meditation or mindfulness that resonates with you, and practice.
Here are just a few:
- Kripalu is filled with wonderful teachers, many of whom now have CD practices and books available in addition to offering workshops.
- I love Sally Kempton. She has been practicing and teaching for decades, and has a rare combination of wisdom, kindness and clarity. She’s in the zone.
- Then there’s me. My book, Every Bite is Divine uses yoga and mindfulness in combination with nutrition awareness to help find peace in the war on weight.
- Yoga and Diabetes: Your Guide to a Safe and Effective Practice, my second book, with co-author Lisa Nelson, MD comes out this summer. More on that later.
- I put time and energy into my almost-montly newsletter that aims to inspire and guide a mindful and botanical integrative whole-foods lifestyle. Yoga, Botanicals, Nutritional Science, Fun and Creativity. That’s me. Check out the newsletter here.
- You might also enjoy:
- Begin a yoga practice: tips for a happy introduction.
I love this woman! Writer, teacher, longtime meditator, woman who has traveled far and lived to tell her tale to lucky us.
I’ve been reading Sally Kempton’s latest book, Awakening Shakti, for the past couple months on and off (it’s a great book to dip into now and then), and I have to say it’s really helped me to cultivate goddess energies that I know are in there (within myself) but that I don’t often work with.
In my early dippings, I focused on the happy sunny goddesses – Saraswati, then Parvati, and of course Lakshmi. I skipped over Kali and Durga not to mention the headless crone whose name I don’t (ha ha!) even know yet. Then, I was so fortunate as to do a plant initiation with Maha Devi herself, Tulsi, who told me that there’s really no need to fear nor steer clear of the spicy intense seemingly messier goddesses (birth family training on my part). Instead, get to know them – they are aspects of yourself that you can learn about, understand more fully and rely on when needed. Durga has come in very handy for me now that I’ve gotten to know her. I hadn’t been aware of how much I needed her strength, grace under pressure and wisdom.
Last weekend my good buddy Bonita and I dipped into Sally’s workshop at Kripalu. It was delicious, and what can I say – I love this woman! Every sentence of her book Awakening Shakti is packed with turns and meaning.
Brava!
I also recommend Meditation for the Love of It – a great book for starting or deepening your meditation practice.
As I pull the down comforter out of storage, give it a fluff and feather our nest, I’m reminded of Robert Herrick’s beautiful poem…
My favorite stanza
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
– Robert Herrick
Here’s the whole poem…it’s worth a read.
To the Virgins, to make much of Time
Flower are still out yet there’s a chill in the evening air. Not too late to gather and dry a few herbs and flowers to add to your bath thorough the cold winter months.
Last year I dried English mint and flowers, and this year I’m doubling my efforts – for those of you familiar with my spring explosion when my face peeled off (a cautionary tale to those with sensitive skin…I had a case of phytophotoreactive dermatitis…pretty disconcerting), dried flowers seem a very very safe bet. I am staying away from making oils and tinctures this year. Sticking with dried flowers and flower essences.
So, – gather, gather, gather. I find it a very relaxing and reconnect-with-Gaia experience, and hope you do too.
You might also enjoy:
Deepen Your Connection to Gaia
Morning Rituals
Herbal Waters
What are you gathering from nature now?
