Yoga for Cancer

The notion that cancer is negotiable, offers great possibilities for a patient struggling to survive.



From this perspective, life-threatening illnesses can become not just conditions to be endured and prayed about until it either goes away or kills us. They become challenges to take control of our lives.

Health practitioners who work with cancer patients can help you deal with, rather than run away from your cancer. However, to live with it, Yoga will only teach you to strengthen the immune system so you can soften the worst effects of both the illness and the treatments.

Yoga Treatment for Cancer

Relax and heal

Traditionally, Yoga's power to bring deliverance from pain and sorrow comes as you learn to work with your senses and intellect. While Yoga practices classically start with ethics and self-purification, the cancer patient benefits initially from the asanas themselves. These poses are specially designed to exercise every nerve, muscle, and gland in your body.



Refined over centuries, they address precisely the tension, holding, and sometimes blockage of energy in particular joints or organs. When the tension is released, energy flows more easily in the body and allows the patient to experience a sense of well-being and strength – a balance of body, mind, and spirit.

Healing calls for a slowing down, a relaxation of tension – both the tightness and holding of the body and the mind's incessant worrying and thinking ahead to dreadful possibilities. While acute stress has the effect of stimulating the cells that protect your system, chronic stress markedly depresses the function of the natural "killer cells" that protect. It thus leaves you even more vulnerable to your disease. The growth of tumors and other cancer indicators have all been shown to be exacerbated by stress.

Dissolve the tension

Another important dimension for cancer patients is breathing exercises, or pranayama. A lot of people going through the distress of cancer don't breathe very efficiently.



This science of the breath involves attention to inhaling, exhaling, and retaining or holding. Through pranayama, you learn to breathe more slowly and deeply and in rhythmic patterns. These patterns strengthen your respiratory system, calm your nervous system, and can reduce your craving for something more to fill our needs.

Whenever you’re scared, you hold your breath or breathe shallowly or raggedly. To open up your chest again, you can practice breathing techniques based on pranayama, such as abdominal breathing, deep breathing, bellows breathing (with forceful abdominal exhalations), and alternate-nostril breathing. Since pranayama can have powerful effects on the body, it should be learned from a qualified yoga instructor, for safety's sake. Done properly, it can effectively dissolve stress and emotional excitation, freeing your mind from anxiety.

Breathing practices can have another benefit. Prana not just sustains life, it even acts as a cleanser. With cancer and chemotherapy, the body gets quite polluted. They're putting industrial-strength toxins into it. A very simple way to help the body's natural cleansing system is by putting more oxygen into it. Oxygen goes into the bloodstream and helps eliminate toxins, so if someone can't do asanas, give them breathing exercises. They feel better just opening the chest and inhaling."

Look within yourself

Meditation is a crucial dimension of Yoga. For people dealing with life-threatening conditions, meditation can offer a method to quiet the terrified voices that jabber in their heads. The simplest form of meditation requires us to be physically still and direct our attention towards an object. We may be led to imagining a particular scene or visual image. Alternatively, we may pay attention to body sensations, traveling through it from top to bottom. One very common object of attention in meditation is breathing. The in and out motion takes place automatically several times a minute and yet we are seldom aware of.

Often cancer patients find themselves in distracted states of mind – bombarded as they are by scary, sometimes contradictory, information. They are further subjected to invasive, painful procedures, and not-always-compassionate medical care. When their minds are so grievously disturbed, they may find it impossible to make crucial decisions or relate satisfactorily to our family and friends. With the practices of concentration, (Dharana) and meditation (Dhyana) which Yoga affords, patients can focus and let go of nagging preoccupations.

Doing the same yogasanas, pranayamas and meditation technique everyday, never challenging yourself, you will to develop precision, build strength and experience the farthest reaches of your body's possibilities. This, along with diet, will help prevent a recurrence of my cancer.