Reclaim Your Strength and Hope

Introduction Hello, beautiful. Welcome to the journey. Know that you are not alone. We are in this together. I’m so excited you picked up this survival guide—nope, actually, it’s a thrival guide. It is so much more than just a book of exercises. In the beginning, I designed this book for women like me with ovarian cancer, but then I noticed that there were many others that could benefit as well. Your caretaker can even do this recovery program with you! Fun, right? Everything in here is easy to do. For those times when nothing feels easy (which happened a lot for me), I offer you modifications that will match your energy level. Although these exercises are inspired by yoga and Pilates, you don't need to have prior experience with either. I'll teach you my methods from start to finish. I know you want your energetic, active life back and your body back, but please, please hear me out. Healing is a process, and if you rush it, you will have a setback. Believe me, that's the last thing you want. If you start to move and think of your body in a new way, you will surprise yourself at how easily you can learn to love and appreciate your body even more than before you had cancer. I will be with you 100 percent of the way. In this book, I will teach you exercises for core recovery, so you can discover and use your deep core muscles that will make you strong from the inside out. These muscles are vital to learning how to rehabilitate after surgery. They will help you with side effects from surgery and radiation (including incontinence, lower limb lymphedema and just straight-out back pain). Trust me, I would never teach you something that I hadn't done myself. The last thing I want is for you to be in more pain. Positive Mindset Practices to Heal From The Inside Out When you are recovering from cancer you have only one job. Your job now is to do whatever it takes to create a more happy and joyful state of being. Period. I know that this is going to be a challenge because I went through the same process! Don’t forget that healing is a process. It’s not linear. Every day of my recovery I reminded myself that I was ALIVE! That led me to feel grateful for everything, including my lower back pain, which was excruciating nearly every day. You can improve your well-being through the power of your mind and spirit. You can’t control the outside world and outer circumstances of your life. You absolutely can control your mind and your reactions to those circumstances. I wrote this book so you could heal both your mind and your body––you can’t have one without the other. When your mind and body are connected, powerful healing occurs. I saw this for myself in my own recovery. What would it be like if you looked at your recovery as a game? What if you could be playful and curious about your body while healing from cancer? What if you took this opportunity to learn something new about yourself and your body? Recovering from cancer can teach us a lot about ourselves, emotionally and physically. You never know how strong you are until you have to be. Everyone deals with cancer differently. It was my second go at it and I told myself that this time I wasn’t going to let cancer take my power away, like it did when I was a child. This time I wanted to be in control. During my recovery, I played a mind game that helped me to shift the negative thoughts and feelings to more positive ones. Whenever a negative thought would flash through my mind, such as “I’m going to die,” I would take a deep breath in and create a statement that was the opposite: “I will survive.” I wouldn’t let myself get too far into the future. I would focus on the present. I reminded myself that, “Today is all I have.” That is something that helped me go the distance. I didn’t concentrate on the “what if,” I focused on living for today and now. It helped me stay positive in a dark and uncertain situation. What negative statement keeps coming up for you? Now, try to create a more positive statement out of that negative thought. Use it as a mantra that you can repeat all day. I tried to find the positive in the negative every day. That doesn’t mean that I was 100% percent happy every day. I am human. I had some really hard days, but I got through them and you will too. Trust the universe. Trust your faith. Trust that things will work out for the best. Trust in you. The journey can be as sad or as uplifting as you want to make it. Try to see the silver lining throughout your cancer journey. Take this time for yourself. Love yourself, respect yourself and heal those old wounds.