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Katherine Puckett, Ph.D.
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VIDEO: Katherine Puckett, Ph.D. - Guided Imagery And Meditation, Do They Help Women Fight Cancer?

Katherine Puckett, Ph.D. explains what guided imagery and meditation are and if they can help a woman fight cancer.

Katherine Puckett, Ph.D.:
There are some mind-body medicine tools or techniques that we teach our patients at Cancer Treatment Centers of America, things like guided imagery and meditation, for instance. These are tools that people may or may not be familiar with, and if people haven’t heard about them, it’s possible they may be afraid, "Well, I don’t know how to do that or I am not an expert, so that’s not going to work for me."

These are practices that are easy to demonstrate to people and easy to help people learn so they can start using these tools themselves, and one of the most wonderful things about tools like this, any mind-body medicine tools really, whether it's guided imagery, meditation, focused breathing, yoga, mindfulness, is that they’re very empowering because each one of us can do these things ourselves.

So, you don’t need anything but yourself to do these practices. You don’t have to take a medication, you don’t have to have a doctor prescribe these things for you, we can do them at home, even in a few minutes a day.

Guided imagery, for instance, is a way of using the mind to image or imagine or visualize something healing. A person could imagine something getting rid of or reducing the cancer in their body. That’s one way in which people use guided imagery, and I’ve seen people use a variety of images.

Another way to use guided imagery, which really helps in the whole process of healing, is to use it to create a special place in your mind where you can go, and using all of the senses to imagine, for instance, what it looks like in this place. What does she see in terms of color; the more detailed the better, the colors, the shapes? Who is there with her, what season is it, what time of day is it, what would you feel?

If you’re outside, maybe it’s the breeze on your face or the warmth of the sun or the touch of a loved one’s hand. What would you hear? And again, you could go on filling in all the details, the more details the better. What would you taste, what would you smell? A person can feel as if she has really been to this place even though she only “went in her mind” – very, very powerful.

Cancer patients use this if they’re having trouble sleeping sometimes, or if they’re having some physical discomfort or pain, or if they’re stressed out or worried or sometimes just because it feels good to go there.

I can give you another example of a woman I worked with who used imagery to help her through her radiation treatment. She had discovered after the first time she went when they were preparing her body and marking it and getting her ready to go through the treatment. She was lying still on a table. She had a piece of equipment over her. She felt as if she was going to panic.

So we met and talked about it, and I asked her if she’d like to consider using guided imagery to help her through her treatment. She didn’t know what it was but she said, “Sure.” So I said, “Can you remember a time in your life where you ever felt just really peaceful, really calm and relaxed?” She thought about it and she said, “Yeah, actually a few decades ago when I was in college, I was on a rafting trip with some friends of mine. We were lying back on the raft, floating down this river,” and she said, “I felt so peaceful.”

I said, “Well, what about using that image going through radiation?” So that’s what she did. She imagined when she was lying on that table that she was lying on a raft, going down the river. She came back after the first treatment and she said, “It worked; I didn’t panic; I felt fine.” So she used that to help her through treatment. So that’s a specific example how a person can use that.

In terms of meditation, there are many, many kinds of meditation. Meditation can be done sitting quietly. That’s probably the most stereotypical image of mediation, but it can also be done walking. It can be done practicing something like yoga or a Qigong, a quiet, mindful practice.

One kind of meditation that we really find so helpful, whether or not we’re dealing with cancer actually, is mindfulness meditation and again, that can be done all through the day. We can use mindfulness as a tool to help us on a particular moment when we’re feeling stressed, but we also hopefully can learn to use mindfulness as a way of life, going through the life so that we start to pay attention to what we’re doing in every moment.

Now, I don’t think any one of us is really going to be mindful every moment of every day, but it helps us start to notice what we’re doing, how we’re feeling. It can help us take our mind off worrying about what happened before. "How did I get cancer? What’s going to happen tomorrow or next year? Am I going to be alive? Am I going to get through my treatment tomorrow?"

Sometimes when we put so much of our attention on the past and the future, we miss the pleasures of the moment, the joys that could bring us, not that it’s always a joy, but the opportunity to really get to know ourselves in that moment, it’s very calming, it’s very peaceful, and it helps us experience a lot of life that we might have missed before.

So, one can do that seated in a meditative pose, but one can also do it washing the dishes, driving, walking down the hallway, eating. Eating is a great time to be mindful, noticing you know, first of all that we have this food in front of us, thinking about where it came from, instead of just putting it in our mouths and never noticing how it got there, thinking about you know, “How did this food grow and where did it come from, and who brought it to me, and what’s it going to taste like when I eat it?” is another example of practicing mindfulness.

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