"Cancer is no simple disease, and effective treatment is not just about killing rogue cells with radiation and chemotherapy. It is about healing the human being."
-Cancer Care for the Whole Patient: Meeting Psychosocial Health Needs by The National Academies' Institute of Medicine
Along with a focus on curing cancer, healing is another process people affected by cancer pursue to support their body, mind, and spirit with and beyond cancer. Healing the human body and being is a dynamic process for people with or without cancer. Life is a healing journey and cancer can be viewed as an opportunity to potentially discover new depths of being alive. Definitions of healing can help people affected by cancer identify personal insights into their healing process of body, mind, and spirit by exploring different perspectives. The ways in which you engage and relate to your healing through cancer are for you to define.
Heal
-to make or restore to wholeness
-to restore to health
-to cause an undesirable condition to be overcome
-to patch up a breach or division
-to restore to original purity or integrity
Differences between Healing and Curing
Curing addresses the disease.
Healing is not about absence of disease.
Even when curing is not possible, there is opportunity for healing.
Healing comes from an individual's core and can be accessed regardless of internal or external circumstances.
As disease may contain disconnect, disharmony, and dismemberment, healing involves connection, harmony, and remembering.
Anyone can engage healing.
Healing is possible with or without a cancer diagnosis.
Healing is available to each and every one of us.
More Perspectives on Healing Through Cancer
What does healing mean to you? Define it for yourself. Healing is highly individual. Your process for healing is unique and a reflection of your journey. EmbodiWorks recognizes that we cannot define what healing means for you or anyone else. The following quotes offer a range of perspectives, experiences, and thoughts about healing. If would like to share your definition of healing, please email us at info@embodiworks.org.
"Healing is a dynamic process of recovery, repair, restoration, renewal, and transformation that increases resilience, coherence, and wholeness."
-Wayne Jonas,MD, Samueli Institute for Information Biology
"Healing literally means wholeness (holy and heal). It implies bringing the rejected and discarded parts of ourselves into the circle, and listening with the inward ear for those parts that have been silenced, seeking a deeper, more accurate creative engagement with ourselves and the world. Healing implies a restoration of communication with ourselves—we have become deaf to hearing the language of our own hearts as they speak to us."
-Lora Matz, MS, LICSW
"Healing isn't something that you do and put away on a shelf, it's a dynamic equilibrium that has to be maintained daily, in every decision and every conversation, and it can be jeopardized by every choice you make. Sometimes I'm no longer challenged by bodily symptoms, but I'm constantly challenged by the body of my life."
-Marc Ian Barasch, The Healing Path
"A state of mind and being with a commitment to self-inquiry and openness to transformation, healing involves exploring the profound depths of self and all of life. Sometimes necessitating major life changes, healing demands thinking and feeling outside one's box and awakening hidden vitality through freeing buried aspects of self. Embracing innate wholeness, engaging an expansive connection to Self, and experiencing life as a spiritual journey invigorates healing."
-Jeannine Walston
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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