Surviving cancer and living well: Elana Rosenbaum

On Sunday, communities around the world celebrated National Cancer Survivors Day, a symbolic event celebrating the meaningful, productive lives that people can live after a cancer diagnosis.

One such survivor is Elana Rosenbaum, a psychotherapist and teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1995. Rosenbaum used her experiences as a teacher and a cancer patient to write Here for Now: Living Well with Cancer through Mindfulness, and to lead workshops on using mindfulness to cope with the physical and emotional stresses of cancer.

The Shambhala Sun's Barry Boyce interviewed Rosenbaum for a Mindful Society column, in which Rosenbaum shared her personal story and some of the mindfulness teachings she uses. As Rosenbaum told Boyce:

"When I was diagnosed with cancer, it was a great shock, because the thought was that if you meditated and ate right, you wouldn't get sick, and in my crowd I was the first one to get a serious illness. We used to often say, 'This too shall pass' around the stress-reduction clinic, but we weren't usually talking about human life itself. I made up my mind then to live what I had been teaching. I already was to a certain extent, but the diagnosis really tested my ability to follow through on that."

Read the rest of Rosenbaum's story here. And in this Shambhala Sun audio piece, Boyce shares the backstory that led him to interview her.

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Tsoknyi Rinpoche speaks about Mingyur Rinpoche's Retreat

www.tergar.org ~ During a retreat at the Garrison Institute in July 2011, Sogyal Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche both spoke in moving terms about Mingyur Rinpoche's current retreat and how rare it is for someone to do this style of retreat in the modern world, even amongst Tibetan lamas.

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