Yoga for Cancer

By YogaWoman
Posted on 15-Feb-2011

Yogawoman experts that are offering YOGA FOR CANCER programs across the United States.

Kate Halcombe
After many years studying yoga in India at the KYM institute, Kate Halcombe returned to California to set up the Healing Yoga Foundation a non-profit service, support, education, and research organization dedicated to health, healing, and personal development through Yoga. Kate is committed to the benefits for yoga for all people across the community and particularly those living with cancer.
Healing Yoga Foundation, California.
http://www.healingyoga.org/
The Healing Yoga Foundation offers daylong retreats for people with cancer. The retreat’s aim is to provide, resources, support, and tools for living with a cancer diagnosis in a safe and supportive environment.

What yoga can give for people facing a cancer diagnosis is really the same as any of us. But yoga is particularly designed and I find particularly helpful for somebody facing a cancer diagnosis or any life threatening illness because yoga is designed to work at every level of the human system. It can help people physically feel better, help with nausea, help with physical aches and pains, as we know. But yoga does something even more because it works at every level of the system, it supports the mind, when the mind starts racing. Am I going to live, am I going to die? What am I going to do with my family? It can help reduce those anxieties, reduce the depression, reduce the worry. Yoga is an incredible support at the mental and emotional level.

Kate Halcombe

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Jnani Chapman is a clinical specialist at UCSF's Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, trains instructors to adapt yoga for students with chronic illness, cancer, and heart disease. She is a senior staff member at Commonweal and former executive director of the International Association of Yoga.

The Commonweal Cancer Health program, is a week-long residential retreat for people dealing with cancer, any stage, any age. And the yoga in those programs is an important and profound aspect of healing –helping people with their frame of mind, with their emotions, with their attitudes, with their beliefs and ideas, with their feelings and with the ability to project out to the future.

Jnani Chapman

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Commonweal Cancer Help Program
Kate Halcombe and Jnani Chapman are both on staff for these programs. The Commonweal Cancer Help Program (CCHP) is a week-long retreat for people with cancer. Our goal is to help participants live better and, where possible, longer lives. The Cancer Help Program addresses the unmet needs of people with cancer. These include finding balanced information on choices in healing, mainstream and complementary therapies; exploring emotional and spiritual dimensions of cancer; discovering that illness can sometimes lead to a richer and fuller life; and experiencing genuine community with others facing a cancer diagnosis

More: http://www.commonweal.org/programs/cancer-help.html

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Tari Prinster is a breast cancer survivor and a yogini. Having started yoga at age 50, Tari considers herself an example that it is never too late to start change.

I would say to everyone, pick your yoga carefully by style but mostly by teacher, pick a teacher, find someone that can make you feel comfortable and safe and is not afraid to walk up to you when you first walk into the class and say what is happening with you, where are you in your treatments, how long have you been a survivor and then you know it’s someone who understands and can go the journey with you.

Tari Prinster

More:
http://sanghayogashala.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/bio-tari-prinster/
http://www.yogabear.org/profile/TarPrinster

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Libby Ross Foundation Cancer Retreats
http://www.thelibbyrossfoundation.com/
Join us for this unique healing opportunity that will include gentle and restorative yoga classes taught by Tari Prinster, Yoga Program Director and Principal LRF Yoga Teacher. We will also offer panel discussions with well informed and knowledgable speakers as well as relaxation and pampering in a lovely nature filled oasis.

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Colleen Saidman Yee serves as Co-Director, of the Integrative Yoga Therapy Program Urban Zen Foundation's Health and Wellness Initiative, which plans to bring yoga, meditation and massage to hospital patients around the country.

We hope that this service will mean patient hospital stays are shorter and medication less and overall experience better and actually provide an opportunity to be able to take one’s wellness into one’s hand.

Colleen Saidman Yee

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Donna Karan and Urban Zen Foundation partnered with Beth Israel Medical Center (BIMC) to create opportunities for research on integrative therapies and to develop a pilot program that enhances the care of cancer patients. The goal of this program is to create an Optimal Healing Environment that is built around a menu of complementary healing therapies.

More:
http://www.urbanzen.org/news-well-being/partnership-beth-israel-medical-center/
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/20920/

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