24 Tips to Create Comfort During Cancer

The unexpected can emerge very quickly. As a brain tumor survivor, I know this well. I’ve had my brain cut open three times with awake brain surgeries, as well as radiation and chemotherapy. Additionally, I had immunotherapy with a dendritic cell vaccine called DCVax-L in a clinical trial. I also used hundreds (or thousands) of integrative cancer care therapies and self-care strategies.

There's no doubt that dealing with cancer can be overwhelming. From navigating through my own journey, knowing many cancer patients and studying extensive modalities for optimal health and healing, specific strategies bring forth meaningful results. Here are 24 tips to find levels of comfort during cancer and support healing in the process.

1. Breathe. Some comfort comes from simple breaths.

2. Relax, rest and restore. It helps you navigate through challenges, strengthen your body, mind and spirit, as well as other aspects of who you really are.

3. Meditate. If you cannot do it daily, then meditate several times per week. Meditation improves the mind-body connection, perspectives on self and life as a whole.

4. Ensure that you have adequate sleep to support many of your bodily functions.

5. Eat healthy foods, herbs, spices with countless benefits to your body, mind, spirit, as well as various aspects of your life. Vital healthy foods improve personal strength and power.

6. Exercise and use movement practices. Keep your body in motion to the best of your ability. That will help you support your health and even shift into enhanced well-being.

7. Focus on what you enjoy. Feel your passions. Give yourself time and space with those activities.

8. Feel your emotions. Do not let challenging emotions get blocked in your body and life. If it continues on an ongoing basis, learn to understand and work through your emotions, feelings, thoughts and beliefs. Specifically focusing on ways to heal the funks will create essential comfort.

9. Express yourself. Do not hold onto things. Use journaling, art, conversations, dancing, connections and other strategies to move through and release what you undesirably carry.

10. Know that you can influence, but cannot control. These can be challenging experiences, yet when moved through and released, wonderful opportunities surface.

11. Spend time in nature. Take walks. Feel the Earth. Place your feet on the ground.

12. Listen. Connect with your center. Indeed, your center at your core has profound wisdom, comfort and ease.

13. Increase your relationships with your religion and/or soul, spirit, plus spirituality. This will provide more levels of support, community, connections and love.

14. Give yourself quiet time. Silence combined with stillness is very powerful for healing, including with offering new insights.

15. Connect with your intuition and instincts. They will aid and guide you.

16. Receive support. If you are not getting enough support, create it. Identify your needs. Ask for help. Find new resources in new directions.

17. Be aware that you are not alone. Cancer can make people feel different or separate. This can become transformed through personal evolution, including acceptance, major shifts from disconnect to embodiment, self-integration and ongoing connections with individuality.

18. Strive to be in the present. No past. No future. Only the now. Along with other benefits, it certainly transforms the chaos into the calm.

19. Relax with an open heart. This is a mighty force into the source of glory.

20. Reflect on levels of trust. The journey of life may involve uncomfortable, undesired, unexpected edges that can shatter levels of trust. Instead, some supportive comfort strategies help to restore trust into improved communication, decision-making and even wholeness.

21. Give yourself tender touch and receive supportive touch from others with care. Hand holding, caressing, hugging and massage are some forms of touch.

22. Explore meaning and purpose that strongly transcends the human potential. Cancer is a catalyst that can be utilized to investigate and manifest meaning and purpose. Each persons’ unique calling invigorates their innate capacity to heal.

23. Choose to be proactive and engage in actions.

24. Commit with confidence to further activate and advance your healing focus.

Cancer is certainly a journey. Guide yourself to make wise choices and self-care strategies into comfort.

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