AN area where mindfulness has proven to be of immense value is among people suffering from major illnesses, and their families. Not that mindfulness can in any way cure physical conditions, but it can help with the way we react to having such ailments, or with handling our emotions about people we love who have serious or life-long illnesses.
Cancer is the biggie. It creates such momentous fear that we hesitate to even use the word in conversation, especially when we’re with someone who suffers from it. My mother died of it. My sister has had cancer for eight years now, saved and supported by what were at first unproven experimental drugs. She was too unwell to go to Mum’s funeral. How ironic a situation, to be unable to attend the funeral of the person you loved so much, who died of the same disease that prevents you from attending.
As Maya Angelou put it so eloquently, so powerfully, Still I Rise. Or rather, still they rise, those people who suffer cancer. It is astonishing to see the resilience, the ability to face the fears, the pain, the sense of drift and dissolution.
But not everyone handles cancer equally well, and often the loved ones and carers for those suffering find themselves confused and lost under the weight of emotions and fatigue that go with caring and loving and fearing and anger at the world and at life itself.
I was asked to speak on mindfulness and cancer at the annual Kidney Cancer Information Day recently. How can someone who has never had cancer talk to those who have had or still have it? I can’t share my experience of it.
However I can share a few things. The most important is compassion. Along with love. It’s strange to put it in writing like this, but we can nurture love and compassion in ourselves, deliberately, slowly, continually, patiently. Love for all life. Love for all people. Love even for those we don’t like. Love even for those we feel are ruining the world or putting it in danger, such as some major political leaders.
We can develop love, empathy, compassion and other emotions essential to good relationships purely by repetitively and creatively bringing them to our attention. As a great contemporary psychologist wrote, happiness is allocation of attention. In other words where we place our minds most, will influence what will grow inside us. So be careful about what you think about or do. This is the neuroplastic nature of the mind. It is shaped and reshaped time and again by experiences we have.
Positive qualities such a love, compassion, and kindness are not only appreciated by those around us when we show these emotions. They also nurture our own physical and mental health. A fascinating series of studies has shown that negative emotions and states of mind appear to accelerate ageing and physical deterioration. At the same time each expression of a negative emotion shapes the mind in the exact same way as the positive ones do, as explained earlier. So whenever we are angry, sad, depressed, anxious – all common experiences of people suffering from cancer, or indeed their families – we are strengthening’s the mind’s tendency to experience those traits again in the future.
As an antidote of sorts we can therefore train and develop helpful qualities of mind and skilled techniques for people who suffer from cancer, or whose loved ones struggle with the reality of this disease. Handling anxiety is one such skill. Letting go of unhelpful worries is another. Nurturing the awareness required to sense the beauty and joy of being alive and of life outside our window is yet another.
If we can strengthen these qualities of mind we can still enjoy and love the moments in our day even as we know deep inside that we are seriously unwell. The two are not incompatible. As the wonderful Thich Nhat Nanh put it, happiness is too important to wait until we are happy in order to experience it. Shape your mind. Don’t let cancer or any other major condition in your life dictate how you feel about being alive. You can be in charge.
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