By Natalie Giocondo
One of the benefits of regular yoga and meditation practice is the cultivation of tolerance. We become more tolerant of ourselves, more tolerant of others, and more tolerant of the way things are.
A dear friend and mentor, Ken Rosen, once told me that suffering is the place that exists between what is and what we want it to be. Ken was an MPN patient, a Zen Buddhist teacher, and a therapist who passed away not long after he presented on Mindfulness at an MPNA&EI conference in 2018. His yoga and meditation practice helped him to manage his yearslong experience with essential thrombocythemia, gave him peace during a major thrombotic episode that resulted in a month-long hospital stay, and I believe it gave him peace during the last months of his life.
Sitting with uncomfortable feelings is not just a useful skill when we are faced with illness or mortality, it also comes in handy when we are in a hurry and stuck behind a chatty Cathy in the supermarket checkout, or when someone cuts us off in traffic, or when we are waiting for important news. In many of these scenarios, our sympathetic nervous system is triggered and the body tells the mind to respond. This process, while useful in survival situations, is not so good for us when it happens multiple times a day or week and can produce.
In a recent Conversation with an MPN Specialist, Dr. Ellen Richie touched on some things we can do to reduce the body’s inflammatory response in addition to a low-inflammation diet, such as reducing stress by disconnecting from technology for periods of the day, finding quiet time, or listening to good music.
Another way to lower stress is to learn how to better tolerate it by practicing yoga and meditation. Now, this is not a no pain, no gain philosophy so when we talk about tolerating stress here, we do not mean how to grin and bear it. Instead, we learn to better observe the way our mind behaves when stress arises and then we train it to behave in a way that better supports us. The result? Stress reduction.
Join us online Thursday, April 18th from 12:00-12:40 pm EST for a Yin-Yoga practice. Yin-Yoga requires longer holds in each pose to encourage the fascia (webbing around the muscles) to release. Longer holds also allow us to sit and observe our body and mind. This is a great practice to create flexibility in the body and mind.