 Feelings, thoughts, and beliefs define your internal environmental that impacts your health. With or without a directly measurable influence on your physical body, the ways in which you feel, think, and believe help shape your quality of life. Are you aware of your feelings, thoughts, and beliefs? Are you aware how your thoughts defined by your beliefs deeply impact your emotions as well as distinctions between your personal and cultural beliefs?
Defining and Redefining Beliefs
Beliefs define each person's perceived strengths and weaknesses. Your beliefs about what you can and cannot do define what you think and feel. These mental constructs are very important to explore when you are dealing with cancer. How do you define your strengths and weaknesses? Are you defining your strengths and weaknesses, or is how you think and feel about yourself defined by other people, specific life experiences, and your culture? You have the power to choose what you believe, think, and feel through your cancer journey and life in general.
Exploring Cancer-Related Thoughts and Feelings
Investigating your thoughts and feelings related to cancer can provide rich insights. Cancer can precipitate deep tenacity and vulnerability. Exploring the scope of cancer associated thoughts and feelings helps to increase self-understanding and ultimately self-empowerment. Developing awareness for the challenging cancer-related feelings takes courage. For example, some people with cancer can experience dissociation physically, mentally, and emotionally. The physical body housing cancer cells can feel foreign and create a sense of alienation with self and those around them. The mental and emotional body can experience disconnect due to the overwhelm from intense feelings associated with the cancer journey. Without the capacity to identify, stay with, move into, and express the mental and emotional reactions, people can reject themselves and others. Learning about your mental and emotional terrain in the midst of cancer reveals important insights to help you cope with those challenges.
Embracing Inquiry and Investigation
This section invites you to consider what you believe as well as how you think and feel about yourself. This exploration can involve your thoughts and feeling about cancer, including your beliefs about healing and curing cancer. Approach these areas with curiosity to potentially discover new perspectives about yourself and ways to support your health with strategies for your healing. Learn more about how feelings are defined by thoughts, and how the content of thoughts are defined by beliefs. This requires exploring how the foundation of what you feel and think is rooted in your beliefs. Our cancer resources about the dimensions of these important components of the mind-body connection provide empowering information for inquiry and investigation.
Influence of Foods and Movement
To support healthy thoughts and feelings, as well as your physical body, as a start we emphasize two areas to include in your integrative cancer care plan. The first is what you put in your mouth. The foods you eat are essential to your mind-body balance. The reality is that if you eat junk food, you will feel like junk on some level. Healthy foods support stronger equilibrium to your body, mind, and spirit. The second is moving your body. You can transform your thoughts and feelings by getting out of your head and into your body. The best strategy is to find the movement practice that works for you such as yoga, stretching, walking, hiking, swimming, or dancing moving faster than you can think or feel. Movement can catalyze your stuck mental patterns, release your physical tension, and provide many other benefits. Body postures also exert strong influences on how you think and feel perhaps without self-awareness.
Next Steps
Explore our information in this section about feelings, thoughts, and beliefs to support your vitality. Other integrative cancer care information throughout the EmbodiWorks website offers support to your feelings, thoughts, and even beliefs. Educate yourself about these potential areas of focus such as nutrition, other types of support for your physical body, movement, meaning and purpose, spirituality, and additional topics.
Imagery and Cancer
Imagery is one of the most powerful ways the mind communicates with the body. Mental images are associated with our core identity. Explore our imagery and cancer resources.
Cancer As a Turning Point
How can people with cancer find increased joy and mobilize their immune system? Read this empowering information.
Creating Healthier Beliefs
Habits of mind are powerful constructs. Our beliefs are the blueprint of who we are. Read about what beliefs are, the role they play in our lives, and how to cultivate healthier ones to impact the mind-body connection.
Emotions and Cancer
Learn about certain emotions in some cancer patients according to research and referred as Type C coping styles that can change to improve the mind-body.
Stress and Cancer
Do you feel stress? Learn about the relationship between stress and cancer. Explore our cancer resources with empowering information about how to reduce and regulate stress.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Posttraumatic Growth
The highs and lows of cancer are intense. Patterns of stress can be really debilitating and the challenge also holds the opportunity.
Stages of the Cancer Journey
The ways in which people move through each distinct stage of cancer supports their journey and empowers them with resources. Learn more about body, mind, and spirit through the stages of cancer.
Our most popular resources for mind and cancer
 Calming All of You
There is calm in chaos. Learn about supportive perspectives and strategies to help you reduce stress, relax, and create a healing environment inside of yourself.
 Feelings, Thoughts, and Beliefs
The stuff of what you feel, think, and believe impacts your health. Our empowering information helps create better emotional and mental vitality. Explore core strategies to mind-body healing.
 Healing Environment
What qualities create an ideal environment for healing internally and externally to support your optimal health and healing? Explore how to create a vital healing environment.
 Movement
Movement helps create physical health in the body and whole person transformation. Learn about movement practices that support body, mind, and spirit integration.
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