The Best Thing I Did

I went back to work 4 months after diagnosis and surgery. (That wasn't the best thing I did). I wasn't coping well; spending time crying in the stairwell or the toilets every day gave that much away, so I decided to seek out additional help. This was after I had tried counselling at work and the counsellor had been made redundant (!). At one of our last sessions I got the feeling his mind was probably on something else (to give him his due, he said he would have been upset if I thought that, but I probably wasn't in the mood for talking much anyway).
 I looked on the internet at home and found a small local cancer support centre(www.paulscancersupportcentre.org.uk).  I booked an inital appointment for a chat.  There I found some very caring and lovely people, who suggested that I may wish to come along to a new course that had been set up - The Healing Journey.  I was a bit sceptical as I'm usually quite a reserved sort of person and was also loathe to be defined by my illness. I couldn't think of anything worse than being amongst "ill people". Anyway, I was beginning to run out of ideas and options for how I could move on with my life, so I decided to go along to the start of the course, which was September 2010, approximately a year after my surgery.
The Healing Journey was to become an important turning point for me. It is a course which was initially developed by Dr. Alastair Cunningham, based on more than 25 years of clinical experience and research at the Ontario Cancer Institute, Canada’s largest cancer treatment centre.  Dr Cunningham, a psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, designed a structured educational programme consisting of psychological and spiritual (not necessarily religious) exercises and techniques which are designed to make significant positive changes in the quality of life of people with cancer, at any stage after diagnosis.
These exercises and techniques include:

• meditation
• relaxation
• mental imagery
• setting goals
• planning lifestyle changes
• identifying supportive and unsupportive relationships
• managing distressing thoughts
• making a spiritual connection in whatever way is appropriate.

For more information about this research and about the Healing Journey in general, visit www.healingjourney.ca.
Paul's Cancer Support Centre now also offers this course and others online, and I highly recommend it to anyone struggling with emotions relating to a cancer diagnosis. (Please note, I am not paid to say this and do not work at the centre, I am just going by my own personal experience of the Healing Journey).  I'll visit some of the techniques and exercises that we did in the course of this blog and as they crop up day-to-day.