I’m so happy, I actually relaxed!

Teaching people with cancer is incredible rewarding and each week I find there is usually someone who wants to speak to me after class to share their experience.

A new lady joined my class several weeks ago who is recovering from surgery and chemotherapy. She is warm and friendly but also serious and focused. At our first meeting she explained her cancer journey so far and how her body has been affected, wanting to address her overall loss of fitness and weight gain. She wasn’t feeling herself and was keen to ‘get back to normal’.

Of course, in life there is no going back, only forwards. We cannot return to the being same person we were before an event as though it had never happened, but yoga is a great tool to help us find a way though, to reconnect to our sense of who we are and grow from our experiences.

I see it often, and really understand the desire to get one’s body back, to feel like it belongs to us again and looks and functions in a way that is recognisable. This does take time however and there needs to be a careful balance between striving and acceptance.

For this lady she was great at striving, but less so at the acceptance! I feel this is a common factor in modern life where we are raised to believe you can be or do anything you want as long as you try hard enough. Taking this mentality into cancer recovery can create tension and actually slow down recovery. Acceptance is really hard when reality is painful, but it is essential in order to be able to move on. We need to acknowledge an experience and the feelings it brings up in order to release them. We need to find the delicate balance of taking positive action and accepting what we can’t control or change.

I could see how she tried really hard at all the practises I was leading in class, despite my best efforts to encourage slowing down and being mindful and exploratory. She often asked me if she was doing a practise correctly and was worried about not getting the breathing right. I responded by giving her safe goals to focus on such as having the breath feel easy in a posture rather than pushing to the limit.

The part of class she found most challenging was final relaxation. She confessed she could not switch off and didn’t know how to relax. She lay there somewhat tense and alert, self-criticising for not being good a relaxation. I reassured her that it is in fact a skill we need to learn and that most people take a while to be able to really drop deep into relaxation, the trick is to stop trying to relax!

Gradually my messages to stop trying so hard and respond to the body’s messages about what feels good started to filter in. I could see a change in quality in how she approached each practise and even coming out of a posture and resting before other people. There was a less competitive edge and more self-compassion coming in.

Last week there was a little giggle as I brought everyone back out of relaxation into the class. “Oh my god, I’m so happy I actually relaxed!” The delight and release was palpable and gave me such a ‘yay moment’ as a teacher. Being able to relax has such a profound effect on all of us, especially so when we are going through serious health issues, that I feel it could perhaps be the most important thing we teach our students.