Facing Cancer with Courage

Although it's not a cure, yoga can help you survive cancer with strength, hope, and vitality.

By Carol Krucoff

MICHELLE PARODI, a survivor of breast cancer.

When Michelle Parodi was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, a miraculous thing happened: Her life was transformed for the better. "Before my diagnosis, I wasn't happy," she says. "I wasn't centered on what mattered most to me: dance, music, my family, working with children." Instead, the 37-year-old San Francisco native was immersed in the corporate world and frantically racing toward what looked like a better future just over the horizon.

Cancer changed everything. The illness and treatments—surgery followed by three months of chemotherapy and three more of radiation—forced her to slow down and steered her toward calming activities like yoga, acupuncture, and massage.

She began asana practice two months after surgery. "It helped me reconnect with my body and deal with all the achiness and joint pain that accompanied chemo," Parodi says. "But yoga's breathing and meditation and spiritual teachings were even more important. Swami Satchidananda's teaching about nonattachment—the idea that I'm not my body, my feelings, or my thoughts—was a huge relief and freedom. And breathing and meditation helped me to be present, over and over."

Parodi, who demonstrates the poses shown here, says she's thankful—not for cancer but for what it has given her: the gift of yoga and the seeds of a more meaningful life.

Connie Hawley followed a different path but ended in a space similar to Parodi's after learning that she had an aggressive and advanced form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Her first reaction was to put up a fight. "I developed a war mentality," says Hawley, who was a 31-year-old speech pathologist in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at the time of her 1993 diagnosis. "I steeled myself for a battle to beat this cancer."

But after six months of aggressive chemotherapy, which left her headachy, weak, and nauseous, a weary Hawley declared a truce. "I was totally exhausted, from both the treatments and the fighting," she says. "The cancer was getting worse. I felt awful and depressed." One morning when she had barely enough energy to brush her teeth, Hawley lay on the floor and started doing some breathing and gentle stretches she remembered from a yoga class she'd taken several years earlier.

"Little by little, a voice came through encouraging me to make peace with my body and appreciate the things that were OK," says Hawley, who continued her gentle yoga practice during the following year and a half of chemotherapy. "Yoga helped me come into a nurturing energy, to befriend my body, listen to it, and treat myself with gentleness and compassion."

During long hours in doctors' offices and treatment rooms, Hawley would place a hand on her belly, close her eyes, and do pranayama (breathwork), such as breathing deeply into her diaphragm or extending her exhalations. She also incorporated visualization into her visits: When a CAT scan technician asked her to take a deep breath, she'd inhale slowly through her nose and visualize all the sacs in her lungs opening to accept prana (vital energy). In August 1995, her doctors informed her that she was in total remission.

"Yoga is an incredible tool for accessing the body's amazing capacity to heal itself," says Hawley, who still undergoes annual tests to monitor for relapse or recurrence. Drawn to share yoga's gifts, she has completed a teacher training program at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health and attended teacher training programs at the Himalayan Institute and Integrative Yoga Therapy. Now living in Houghton, Michigan, she offers yoga classes as a wellness tool and has worked with people who have serious illnesses. Her oncologist also has become interested in using yoga to help his patients. "Yoga may not cure people with cancer," Hawley says, "but it can certainly help them heal."

Two of America's nearly 10 million cancer survivors, Hawley and Parodi are part of a growing movement that harnesses the healing power of yoga's breathing practices, meditation techniques, and physical poses. Although cancer was once considered a death sentence, many types of it are increasingly being viewed as chronic conditions not unlike heart disease or diabetes. Advances in diagnosis and treatment mean that even when a cure isn't possible, long-term survival often is, notes Julia Rowland, director of the National Cancer Institute's Office of Cancer Survivorship.

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