Besides using my personal mantra, I used other mantras to quiet my mind, repeating them silently, chanting, or listening to recorded music. During the nine months of treatment, when listening to Sanskrit chants I slipped into a “yogic sleep,” a pleasurable meditative state when my body seemed to disappear, leaving only an awareness of surging energy.

   I even asked my surgeon to play a healing mantra during my surgery and was grateful for her openness in agreeing to do so. Walking through the door, I hardly noticed what the operating room looked like. The music caught my attention and the soothing sounds of the chanting created a peaceful, comforting, and welcoming atmosphere. For weeks afterwards, I played the same chant very quietly at bedtime to transport me back to that state of peace.

    Many of my guru’s teachings helped me when my life crumbled. One of the foremost for me was essentially this: everything that comes to us in life, good and bad, is a gift to us from God. Don’t try to hold onto the good or the bad because life is always bringing the next experience to us. When I lived with this attitude, it helped me to be accepting and grateful. I didn’t avoid the fear, grief, anger, and loss - the layers of powerful emotions that came like tidal waves. But during the times when they pulled me like a boat from its moorings, I remembered this concept and said to myself, “If this is so, then this too comes from God and it must mean that everything is all right.”

    In addition to the lessons of my spiritual teacher, the philosophical principles of yoga carried me through the recovery.  From early on in my yoga practice, I learned that our happiness comes not from externals but from the Divine dwelling within us. Contrast this to the American dream, claiming that our happiness comes from having a big house, perfect body, etc. Upon losing financial security, good credit, home, health, hair, and one breast, I kept reminding myself that these were lessons in letting go, and I could still be happy.

    Was the universe saying to me, “Well, Ms. Yogini, can you practice what you’ve been preaching?” For years, I had exercised the muscle of concentration, learning to still my mind. How steady could I be with these challenges? Many times, my fears ran rampant like wild animals and I needed friends to hold my hand. But persistently, I stepped back from the traumas to find peace, and even joy, in the moment. And after four years, one of the biggest lessons I have learned is choosing to be happy, even when the events in my life are not the way I want them to be.

     A further aspect of yoga philosophy that sustained me through the treatment was that the body is a temple that houses the inner Self (the Divinity within all); it is temporary clothing for this life, and as such my body is not me. Remembering this, I nurtured, loved and cared for my body, as for a sacred temple or church. Many women struggle with a profound loss of self when they lose a breast and their hair. When I was hit with those losses, emotions flooded me and I asked many questions.  At the same time, because of the teachings of yoga,  I felt truly connected to that Self deep inside. 

     After the mastectomy and lymph node removal, my history of yoga practice was the foundation for recovering the use of my arm. At first, I despaired to see how little I could move my left arm and how tight the scar tissue was. This change in my body was worse than losing a breast, especially because I’d been so limber all my life. But after doing my exercises for one week, I saw much improvement. After ten days, I bent over and touched my toes with both hands! The range of motion returned to my shoulder, but my left side still wouldn’t stretch as much as the right. I realized that would be a long-term project and I would have to talk to myself the way I spoke to my yoga students: “Be gentle, don’t force it, relax into the stretch.”

     Surely one of the main teachings of yoga is surrender, and we practice this every time we breathe deeply and melt into the asanas on our mat. Surrender is not giving up. Rather, it is about acceptance; accepting and BEing with what is. Being human, I struggled with that. For many, many months after the surgery I resisted doing yoga regularly–it was like rejecting part of myself. How could that be? I’d done yoga for so many years and I loved the way it turned my muscles into silk and my interior landscape into smooth flowing streams.

     The answer came one day as I was stretching my arms up and opening to the sky. As usual in those days, my left hand lagged a few inches behind the right. My whole left side from the hand to the armpit to the hip felt as if restrained by a steel rod. Focusing on the inner sensations, I felt a mixture of tenderness and numbness around the left armpit, and numbness in the back of that arm. Realization hit me like a sickening punch to the stomach. I didn’t want my body to change.

     But it had changed. It didn’t feel as good as it used to. My arm didn’t move as freely as before. Before. Before the cancer. Before losing so much. My throat thickened and tears fought their way out of my eyes. No wonder I had been resisting doing my yoga, the yoga that I loved so much. I wanted to avoid being aware of my body and my feelings. It was too much to be reminded of my losses when I already had more stress than I could handle. 

     At the same time, I recognized that yoga was a path to healing. I can gently breathe my poor body into the postures without judging what I can or cannot do. Let myself be present with the tightness, the numbness, the sadness, with what is instead of trying to change it. Love my body and myself the way I am now. And remember that I am not my body. 

     That teaching of non-identification with the body helped me keep a positive attitude when I opened my veins to caustic chemicals, when I lay under a radiation machine every day for six weeks, and when one of my breasts was dissected off my chest. Even during those times, there were the moments when I felt a little spark of joy arising anyway from inside.

     But now that I dig deeper, I admit that when faced with the fear that I would leave this body soon, I wanted to do everything I could to hang on to it. It was a pure animal instinct. Yet, the cancer also gave me a reminder that sooner or later my body will lose its abilities and then its spark. When that happens, I hope that my yoga practice will have taught me to flow with change, to accept, to surrender, to love myself anyway, and to know that I am the Self and not the body. 

© 2006  Alison Hammer Winans

Alison Hammer Winans is a Jin Shin Jyutsu practitioner and former yoga teacher. This article is excerpted from a book she has written about her journey of healing from breast cancer. For more information or to contact her, go to www.BeTheFlow.com.