Deep Rest to Support Integrative Cancer Treatment
The following is an excerpt from the fifth chapter of The Platinum in the Poison: Spiritual and Material Resources from a Year of Chemotherapy by Hannah Kate Warner (Hannah Ford).
RESTORATION
I arrived at Duke Cancer Center for my first inpatient infusion two nights after being released from the hospital. I walked through the electronic, sliding doors and checked in for my labs on the first floor. They drew blood; I chitchatted with the nurse. The cancer center is a friendly place. There are big windows and a lot of light, and the facility feels newer and more open than the hospital.
They sent me upstairs to the clinic by way of the elevator. We waited for the lab results and for the drugs to be ordered. I sat nervously in the big waiting room with all of the other cancer patients. I was one of them now.
A clinic nurse brought me back to an infusion room, and I was immediately given some good news: my hCG level had dropped miraculously from 655,000 (this number is in IU/L, but I am not going to specify going forward) all the way down to 1061 after my first chemotherapy treatment. This was a huge and unexpected drop. Whew, how I had needed some good news. The goal for hCG—my cancer marker—was 1.2. After I reached 1.2, there would be a bonus round or two of chemotherapy. I was really on my way. I felt such a relief and chalked it up to the wellness living resources that I was utilizing with vigor.
With this information, the second induction round of chemotherapy was made a little bit easier. I received it and went on my merry way back home to the farmhouse.
But when I arrived home, the high of the good news began to wear off. My body was feeling very weak, which I did not like to admit. I went out for a barefoot walk on our land. I didn’t make it far before I had to stop and catch my breath. On the ground I sat, gazing at the clouds, trying to understand what was happening. I sank hard from my hopeful state, feeling disoriented by how different my life was now, suddenly. I became angry, and the anger of the whole situation stayed with me for a long time. I now had to live in this alternate medical system prison universe that no one else around me had to live in, and I felt disempowered and stuck. Why was my body sick? I felt like I had been at war with my body for decades: through medical trauma, struggling with my appearance, or anxiety and panic. The experience of powerlessness over my own body was not new. I was also angry that I had been living the healthiest life I knew to live, and it wasn’t enough. I was 35, and I had cancer. This truth was unfathomable to me. Coming to terms with it would take a long time.
It was March now, and warm spring air was arriving. I continued to sit there on the earth for a long time, just kind of…stunned. I touched my hair, knowing my long locks would be gone in a week or two. I wanted to be a person who didn’t care about whether she had hair or not. But I did care. I knew I would not look like myself without hair.
The isolation of this medical experience was peculiar: on one hand, there were often many people around me. I was lucky enough to have a loving family there who would rub my feet and cook for me. They would care for my children; they would listen to my stress. But on the other hand, no one else near me had this poison in their body. It was simply true that for the next year I would live in a world that was not the same one my caregivers lived in. My physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences were drastically different. Communication and real understanding were challenging.
Parenting during this illness was another layer to confront. My relationship with motherhood was complicated. My cancer had come directly from my pregnancy—my body was filled with tumors made up of the pregnancy hormone. I had been struggling so much with parenting young children, so I couldn’t help but see this illness as tied in some way to my experience of smotherhood. My mind turned often to that question: Would motherhood kill me, too?
I truly wanted to be a better mother. I wanted to experience that joy of parenting that it seemed like others experienced. I wanted to feel strong and to feel connected to my children, to be a solid role model for my daughters, to help them learn and grow. Elsie and Beatrice deserved this. Yet, I always felt like I was coming up short.
I lay on the ground—smashed down and broken to pieces, desperately in need of restoration.
**?*
Back in 2005, I took an undergraduate class called Comparing Contemplative Traditions. I was a math major, so it wasn’t an ordinary choice for me. But I found myself drawn to these practices of contemplation and meditation, of finding slowness in a life of overwhelming stimuli. And God. I thought much about God. My church upbringing planted a seed of interest in the Divine, but it would take a long time for me to find a form of spirituality that felt authentic to me. It is still a work in progress, and will likely always ebb and flow as life continues.
In this class, we taste-tested a variety of contemplative practices from various spiritual and philosophical systems. There was one practice that really drew me in: yoga nidra—the practice of deep rest or yogic sleep. It is an ancient resource that has been developed over time, and used with great success to rest the physical body and restore the spirit. It is a guided meditation, but it is not your average guided meditation. It does something truly different than any other kind of guided meditation I have encountered—and I have encountered many. It occupies the mind through verbal instruction, leads you into your body, and encourages the release of tension and the restoration of the spiritual self. In yoga nidra, you lie down and go through a rotation of consciousness, awareness of breath, experience of sensation, and visualization through the body that triggers a deeply restful state. In this state, we can work through unconscious patterns and spiritual blockages. The folklore says that an hour of yoga nidra is equal to the rest of a three-hour nap. It is truly an experience of physical, mental, and spiritual restoration when practiced regularly.
***
I believe that our physical bodies are linked to our emotions and our spiritual existence. Humans are multi-faceted beings. So I knew that the cancer in my body was not an isolated physical experience; it was related to my mind and to my spirit, too. This is not meant to say that we cause our cancer, or that if we have incurable cancer, it is somehow our fault— but that we must work with each and every layer of the experience when going through a challenging situation. My relationship with motherhood was something I had to work with while going through this illness. There were also other layers that I had to engage—my environment, my relationships, my ancestral history, and my sense of self and of communal belonging.
The year of treatment forced me to face myself. I had to dig in and accept what was happening in me on these deeper levels. This was one of the gifts of the experience, and one of the most laborious parts. I committed to journaling, to noticing what was going on within all of the parts of my being. I examined my own life, raised questions, and came to terms with aspects of myself that had been hidden or shoved away. It was often lonely, yet this cocoon was the space of transformation.
I already knew that one of the challenging patterns I needed to break was the inability to rest. This was tied to motherhood as well as the pressure that I had put on myself since I was a child. Even when people gave me the space to rest, I was not able. I did not feel allowed on a deeper, spiritual level. I slept terribly and was constantly buzzing with ideas and information. I know that I am not the only one in our society who feels that rest is not permissible. We are going, moving, working, taking in information all the time. We are told we must be constantly productive and that this is where our value lies. The average person does not have time for restoration.
Cancer forced rest on me in a way that I did not care for. I found myself alone, being told to go rest, but not really wanting to do this. Allowing rest felt like succumbing to the illness, and when I rested too much, I felt myself snowball into an incapacitated childlike state. Balance is always key.
When going through chemotherapy, movement, purpose and productivity are quite important. Being with people and tending to regular activities as much as possible can help tremendously. And so does deep, restorative rest. I knew that I would need to rest in a different way—to go to that cocoon of yogic sleep in order to heal.
Restoration is different from lounging. Lounging—scrolling, watching TV, eating snacks on the couch—is its own (sometimes enjoyable) thing. But real rest in the body and the spirit doesn’t happen in that place. I needed the kind of rest that would give my body the space and capacity to heal. To do this, I re-committed to my yoga nidra practice, and it was truly one of my most potent resources through my year of chemotherapy. The recordings I found on the internet weren’t cutting it anymore, so I began writing and recording my own yoga nidra sessions. These proved incredibly useful for my year in treatment.
Almost every day, I practiced for 30–45 minutes by listening to the audio that guided me into a liminal state of consciousness—not asleep, not awake. I crawled into the safe space of rest and healing and allowed my body and spirit to find stillness. In this state, energy shifted and re-patterened, my mind would become quiet as the busyness fell away. Subtle transformations would occur each time I practiced.
I always felt rejuvenated after these sessions, able to think more clearly, sleep better, and have a more peaceful and hopeful outlook. I cannot overstate how powerful this resource is for anyone going through chemotherapy— or any challenging life experience, for that matter. Regular practice brings restoration. I highly recommend this as a simple yet profound method for coming into a state of complete rest, awareness of self, and spiritual transformation.
You can purchase a Deep Rest audio session written and recorded by Hannah Ford for $7 here.
