I went to a Yoga class for the first time in college at the University of South Dakota in 2008. Since then, I have been doing yoga with varying degrees of discipline. I attempted yoga teacher training TWICE-once through Body Temple Yoga School and once through Avalon Yoga both times I had to drop out due to work and personal life chaos. They are both great schools. My only disappointment was that some programs that advertise as "trauma informed" turned out to have much less information and training about trauma and yoga.  As a trauma therapist, I'm very sensitive to that contradiction. Last year, during Covid-19, I finally got my teaching certificate when trainings moved online through Yoga Renew. I had low expectations for online courses, but I was pleasantly surprised and loved the active and quirky online community. After the training, again, I got caught up in work and in all the things and stopped practicing regularly.

    Getting cancer was a wakeup call in about 100,000 ways for me. I realized my health needed to be my main priority. I am trying to figure out what that looks like and am definitely open to suggestions (omg plz)! In a desire to have some self-paced support around figuring out how to care for myself I joined My Vinyasa Practice’s 300-hour teacher training online. Along with acupuncture, this has been the most helpful thing I’ve done for my health. During chemotherapy it is hard to know how I am going to be feeling day to day so I am grateful that I can pace myself with the material. When I do want to talk to someone, there are live office hours, lectures and classes. The material is sourced well so I can go down rabbit holes of reading on one subject or another.  It has ACTUAL training about mental health and walks the trauma informed walk. The online community is accessible and active which really helps with accountability and engagement.

    I became a therapist because I have my own complex trauma history with a lot of related anxiety. When I moved to California, I started seeing a therapist and was diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These diagnoses can be overwhelming for many people but to me it was a validating godsend. These symptoms had been impacting my life for as long as I could remember and these diagnoses gave me hope and understanding. When I first started in college, yoga was my gateway drug into meditation because as a young adult I could not imagine being able to be still and sit in silence. After getting mental health care this all finally made sense. I started to harness Yoga to try to help my mental health symptoms. Yoga made mindfulness much more accessible to me and helped me work my way to being able to tolerate longer and longer meditations.

    So even before cancer, I had experienced the benefits of meditation and yoga. After I got cancer, I started to look into the benefits of yoga for folks going through this treatment. Two of my biggest difficult symptoms during chemotherapy so far have been cancer fatigue and sleep. Luckily these two symptoms have been treated fairly successfully with yoga practice. As the adjunct professor and nerd that I am, I started reading into some of the academic research on yoga and cancer. In this study, 410 cancer survivors went through the YOCAS©® program and showed significant decrease in fatigue and sleep disturbance. This study is a meta-analysis of studies on 2,183 patients with breast cancer who completed a yoga program and shows significant symptom reduction. This study also shows significant decrease in fatigue for patients who use yoga. This article studied 507 women who did yoga during or after their breast cancer treatment and found 89.4% of these women reported some symptomatic benefit from yoga.

    While the benefits of yoga are clear, there is still a need for further, more specific research in the United States. There is a great history of research coming from India and elsewhere in the world but much of the yoga research in this area in the United States is varied by intervention and population. Study participants noted above completed many differently structured yoga programs or interventions. Some participants had a self-led practice, some participants had extensive yoga therapy. This article points out some of the gaps in the body of research in the US so far. Part of my interest in the yoga research is that I know US hospitals and medical systems will require a large foundation of US-centered research before making some of these interventions more accessible for people going through cancer treatment, despite the history of success in other geographic areas.

    I am so grateful that I have been able to start to develop a more regular yoga practice while I am going through chemotherapy. As I continue to study the Yamas and the Niyamas, two limbs of the eight limb path of yoga, I deepen my commitment to my own health and recognize that consistency has already benefited me in many ways. The physical practice of asana has been helpful and at the same time I recognize that the meditation and philosophy has been vital for the unavoidable existential crisis that accompanies (a lot of things in my life let's be honest) my cancer diagnosis.