Surely, everyone can benefit in some way from yoga. Women with breast cancer that has spread beyond the breast, however, may benefit greatly from a tailored program featuring gentle yoga postures, breathing exercises, and meditation.

The great benefits: less pain and fatigue and more vigor, relaxation, and acceptance," says Dr. James W. Carson from Duke University Medical Center and lead of a study published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

Carson says women with advanced breast cancer need effective methods for curbing cancer-related symptoms.

The pilot study included 13 women who attended yoga classes once per week for eight weeks. The women, with an average age of 59 and with diagnoses occurring an average of seven years earlier, were helped significantly. They felt more invigorated and gained a greater sense of acceptance. They also found they felt better not only on the day they practiced yoga but the next day too.

This study offers the first, small-scale evidence for yoga's potential benefits for women with limited life expectancy.

I just heard someone say that time doesn't heal all wounds -- it just makes them worse. I guess it depends on the wound. I imagine losing a child is one wound that never really heals. But I've found that my cancer wounds -- both physical and emotional -- have healed with time. And a trip down memory lane proves it.

Two years ago I wrote about my wounds, fresh and raw and painful, on my Breast Cancer blog.

Confession
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005

Journalist Lynn Sherr is grieving the husband she lost to lymphoma in 1992. It's taken her many years to fully appreciate how his death affects her and while she once felt pressure from well-intentioned, clueless friends who urged her to move on, Sherr is now completely peaceful about her on-going, long-term grieving process. In fact, she fully plans on grieving -- for the man whose ashes still sit in her lingerie drawer -- for the rest of her life.

Sherr writes in her new memoir, Outside the Box, that it was during an interview with a pioneering psychiatrist about the agony of loss when she made her stunning revelation about grief. It's when she realized she would never fully recover from grief, that it is just fine to never fully recover.

Grieving individuals do not always follow the standard stages of denial, anger, and acceptance. Yet they often feel forced into these boxes by medical professionals, family, and friends who try to move them along and consider them abnormal if they don't get on with life in a set amount of time. But each person's pattern of grief is as unique as each person's pattern of love -- and stages and boxes just don't work. Sherr's breakthrough moment came at the exact moment she learned this.

"Bingo! I didn't have to follow anyone's pattern," she writes. "I didn't have to stop being sad. Not only was sadness okay, it was necessary. Nobody can tell you how to mourn. And it's not self-indulgent; it's not wallowing; it's hanging on to something important. We should not avoid bereavement. We should embrace it, welcoming our moments of sorrow as a time to reconnect with the person we've lost."

Sherr reconnects with her husband every chance she gets. He was her best friend, her deepest love, her soul mate, her pal. And she doesn't plan to move on -- ever -- from the sadness that keeps them connected.

When Someone You Love Is Being Treated for Cancer is a book of tips and insight from caregivers for caregivers when it comes to the needs and issues of being a caregiver for a loved one diagnosed with cancer. Published online by The National Cancer Institute, the introduction states, "The purpose of this book is to focus on you and your needs."

In reviewing it, I found it to be a valuable and realistic resource for family members who find themselves in the role of caregiver because a loved one has been diagnosed with cancer.

"It's said that chemotherapy is like skiing in front of an avalanche. You do one thing wrong, and the avalanche is going to get you." -- Harvey Rushfeldt

Using the principles he learned in Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, helped Harvey Rushfeldt, 72, diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma last October, create a strategy for successfully living through the often grueling ordeal of chemotherapy. Rushfeldt sees both cancer and alcoholism as mortal threats and he approached his cancer treatments with the same 12 step attitude and perspectives alcoholics adopt on the one-day-at-a-time road to recovery.

weSPARK - an acronym for support, prevention, acceptance, recovery, knowledge -- was the cancer support center Wendie Jo Sperber wished she could have visited when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. A place more like home than a hospital. Sperber, a single mother, felt that the emotional challenges of cancer were more difficult than the physical ones. Four years after her breast cancer diagnosis, she opened the doors to a community-based recovery center that offered free holistic services designed to heal the mind, body and soul.

Sperber, an actress who starred in the television series Bosom Buddies, lost her life to breast cancer in 2004. In July, a second weSPARK center will open offering support groups for patient, family and friends, grief workshops, art classes, yoga, drum circles, teen drama groups and meditation. The dream of Wendie Jo Sperber in creating a place of warmth and comfort for others struggling to survive cancer continues.