I've mentioned mindfulness over on the anal cancer forum a few times, and thought it was about time I said something about it in my blog.
I was advised late last summer to try mindfulness by the doctor at Penny Brohn Cancer Care, to help me cope with having a cancer that could no longer be cured. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't really know at that point what she was talking about, but I got hold of a couple of books, and did a bit of googling to get myself up to speed. I started by looking at the research into how mindfulness has been used with cancer patients and whether it has helped. Most of the research is about how mindfulness can enhanc quality of life, improve mood and decrease reaction to stress (by reducing the levels of the stress hormone, cortisol), which is enough of an endorsement in itself. But there is also evidence that mindfulness can have beneficial effects on the immune system, eg more rapid recovery of functional T cells after cancer treatment, enhanced natural killer cell activity, and lots more besides. Well, that was enough to convince me.
One of the books I chose to read was 'Full Catastrophe Living' by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is the mindfulness guru par excellence. He it was who brought mindfulness, which springs from Buddhist meditation, into the Western mainstream by secularising it and making it accessible to ordinary Westerners. He founded a stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School for people suffering from stress and mental illness, and has been teaching mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) since 1979. He has standardised his teaching into an 8 week course, and 'Full Catastrophe Living' explains what goes on during the course, so you could do it on your own. But I wanted the full monty, so I did some googling and discovered that the 8-week course is taught all over the UK, except of course where I live in the middle of Wales, although funnily enough in this country it all stems from the University of Bangor in North Wales, and everyone who is anyone in the mindfulness world has been trained there or at Oxford. The other book I read was 'Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World' by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. Mark Williams is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Oxford and developed mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT). It looks pretty much the same as MBSR to me. Both books have accompanying CDs so you can practise meditation using them. Lastly, I read 'Living Well with Pain & Illness' by Vidyamala Burch, a lady who has lived with chronic pain for 30 years. This is along the same lines as the other two books, but very gentle and very practical. And of course the author really knows what she is talking about. I thoroughly recommend all three books, and I love J K-Z's voice on his CD's.
Anyway, I found a course in a town a good hour's drive from where I live, and I started it in October. There were about 15 people in the group. The teacher discouraged us from giving too many biographical details about ourselves, so I never really found out why people were there, whether they were physically or mentally ill. One or two people said they were bipolar or suffered from depression, but that was all. It was very freeing in a way, not knowing what baggage everyone had, and not being obliged to share my own. We became a very close group. At one point I was having radiotherapy at the Christie up in Manchester and staying up there for the week but I was so committed to the course that I travelled 3 hours each way to attend one of the sessions.
Mindfulness is all about living in the moment, about not stressing about the past or the future, about being as opposed to doing, and if you are doing something, doing one thing at a time and concentrating on it. That's it in a nutshell. It's both very simple and quite complex at the same time. It consists of both formal meditation and informally being mindful throughout your day, whatever you are doing. I have found it enormously helpful, but you get out of it what you put in, and meditating for up to an hour a day is sometimes quite difficult. But if I do manage it, I feel so much better, calmer, able to face the day whatever it might bring.
Mindfulness seems all of a sudden to have become achingly fashionable, with people like Ruby Wax and Goldie Hawn writing books about it. You can't open a Sunday paper without reading an article by some celebrity or other promoting mindfulness. I've recently shared with the anal cancer group about Headspace (which I read about in last Saturday's Times). It's a very funky website dedicated to mindfulness and would appeal to people younger than me (I'm in my 60's). It has a 10 minutes for 10 days free download and a paid-for app. This might be of interest to people here. Check out www.getsomeheadspace.com. The founder of Headspace was a Buddhist monk so he knows what he's talking about.
As for me, because I need encouragement to keep at it, I've investigated various groups around where I live and found one which follows the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who runs a Buddhist centre in France - he's very old now. Jon Kabat Zinn, it turns out, was heavily influenced by him. What they do in this group is very similar to what we did on the mindfulness course, with a delicious vegetarian lunch thrown in (eaten mindfully of course!) There is also a Buddhist retreat in Shropshire for women which I'm investigating. So mindfulness can lead you in unexpected directions. The reason I wanted to talk about it here is because it has helped me a lot and could help other cancer patients. I apologise for going on at such length, but I just wanted to share this wonderful resource and I can't stop talking about it!
