[philsParticipant]

Thanks for your kind words Rebecca. Yoga and mediation are excellent coping strategies, but at least for me, they are much more than that too. I really liked and can totally relate to how you described your exercise and relationship with your body – punishing it perhaps for failing you. That is so easy to do – I do it too in different ways. We really don’t like to feel the painful negative emotions that come with a diagnosis like myeloma, so we deny and blame (ourselves or others) and get busy and do just about everything we can think of to not feel what we are actually feeling! It’s a kind of madness really if we can stand back and see it. That’s one of the great benefits of meditation – it gives time and space to slowly open to how you are actually feeling. And the really interesting thing is that if we do open to how we are feeling we start to feel better – the feelings we fear pass and we are no longer stuck.

I am a few months away from my second SCT but will drop in to let you know what its like – probably pretty similar to the first one – oh joy!

Phil

 

 

[philsParticipant]

I have been reading though the blog posts and hope this fits. It’s my first posting. It is a little different in approach to the previous posts in this section but is partially related to exercise…

In brief: I was diagnosed with MGUS three years ago. After a year MGUS turned into MM, led to treatment, eventual remission after six cycles and SCT about a year ago. Unfortunately MM returned and I am back in treatment again with a view to a second SCT…. so it goes.

I have found two things really helpful during this time; yoga and insight meditation. Yoga – by which I mean the gentle old-school stretching postures, is wonderful for releasing tension in the body and calming the mind. A daily practice of gentle yoga postures helps me be well and feel better no matter what the impact of the illness or medication.

Insight meditation has been helpful in many ways; it helped me to see my cancer differently – as something to learn from rather than something to battle or fight. Rather it is a process of acceptance – accepting the diagnosis, accepting the impact of medication, accepting the impact of the stem cell transplant and now accepting that the period of remission I experienced was rather short and that more treatment is needed. From a position of acceptance it is possible to ask questions like; ‘What is helpful right now?’ and in the longer term; ‘Given that this has happened, what would I like to do now?’

Off course, yoga and insight meditation are not going to cure myeloma but they do provide a practical way of engaging with the impact of diagnosis and treatment that I have found helpful and which may perhaps prove helpful to others.

Best wishes and good luck to us all!

 

 

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