Nia Community

Nia is written about often in articles for all sorts of publications. We found this article to be particularly engaging, and wanted to share excerpts of it with you. The candor with which that the author shares her story about dealing with breast cancer is moving, and how she uses Nia to get in touch with her body and aid in healing is inspiring. We hope this article will educate, motivate, and inspire you in your life. Enjoy!

Woman with Breast Cancer Uses Nia As Part of Healing

Article by Kara Briggs, excerpted from April issue of Indian Country Today online and print newspaper.

When I was diagnosed last January with locally advanced breast cancer, I had visions of lying in bed, wasting away physically and mentally like one of those feeble women who die so melodramatically in old-time black and white movies.

“The frightening place for someone dealing with cancer is that I am alone here with my body,” said Debbie Rosas, an internationally known fitness expert, author of “The Nia Technique” and a resident of Portland, OR.

I felt, as Rosas had described, in the weeks after my diagnosis that my right breast had rebelled against me. At a bookstore, where I’d gone to escape my house, I found a book that changed my perceptions of what it means to be a cancer patient. In “Cancer Fitness,” Anna L. Schwartz, as associate professor at Arizona State University, asserts that exercise – not rest – is critical to cancer patients’ ability to heal.

A host of medical studies in the last decade have linked excessive rest by cancer patients to increase fatigue, loss of strength, even prolonged hospitalization, she wrote. Some studies have found that osteoporosis is a long-term side effect in some cancer survivors, as a result of treatments.

“People think they’re going to get really skinny and really sick from chemotherapy,” Schwartz told in a phone interview from her Phoenix-area home. “If you exercise you are going to get fitter and faster. A lot of doctors will tell you to exercise, but they won’t know what you should do. I wrote this book to get the information out to patients.” ……

Exercise during my cancer treatment has given me the energy to function almost normally. But when I stopped exercising, out of laziness usually, I’d wind up sluggish and buried in all the side effects of my treatment. While this principle is generally true for healthy people, the difference between exercising or not has been night and day for me since I began cancer treatment.

As I rebuilt my fitness, I wanted to move my body in different ways than just walking. A friend invited me to an exercise class called Nia. I had visions of aerobics classes with instructors shouting directions, overly complicated routines, and aching joints. But, I found a room full of women, all barefoot, led in dance by a black drummer with dreadlocks.

Our movements were organic, meaning my body moved in directions that felt good to my bones and didn’t push me too hard. My back arched like a cat’s. My hips wiggled like when I was a child at play. My muscles didn’t strain, but I worked up a sweat. I left feeling beautiful and strong, two rare sensations in the early days of cancer treatment.

Knowing not everyone lives where workout class like this are available, I called Rosas, who with her ex-husband developed Nia based on such varied traditions as jazz dance, martial arts, and yoga, and asked her what principle people could learn from Nia to use at home.….

She told me that we spend too much time thinking that our body should be like an aerobics instructor’s or a runner’s. Instead, we should get to know the architecture of our own bodies and we should focus on moving our bodies in the ways they were designed to move.

Put your favorite music on the stereo and start moving your ankles, knees, hips, spine, shoulder, elbows, wrists, and fingers in the radius that comes naturally to them. Draw circle in the air with your hands and feet. Flick your fingers in time with the music. If you can’t do that, make sounds. Sing, or even make what Rosas called “pre-verbal sounds”. Sound vibrates our chest wall and helps with healing. The goal of exercise doesn’t need to be a perfect “10” body. Instead, the aim ought to be life-sustaining flexibility, agility, strength, mobility, and STABILITY. The rule is to repeat movements that feel good. Avoid pain.

“Having cancer in one part of the body can become an all consuming experience,” she said. “The stress is so intense, and the voice: “I’m sick. I’m sick.’ The reality is that the rest of your body is there to heal that part.”

Rosas believes that cancer patients can develop dialogues through movement with their own bodies, something that may have been missing when the cancer invaded.

I experienced this dialogue in the most literal way during a Nia class last June. That day I was hurting from chronic back pain and decided to work it out through dance. Instinctively I bent at my waist, letting my head and arms feel gravity pull then and my back downward. I swung gently like an elephant might swing her trunk. Then I stood up, reaching my neck and head upward like a giraffe might. I continued for 20 minutes, elephant to giraffe and back again.

Sometime during that dance I heard these words deep inside myself: “A back can’t carry the weight of the whole world; can’t carry the weight.”

Call me crazy, but I started a conversation that day with my body, my old friend who I’ve taken for granted. I ignored her to the point that one breast had to sacrifice herself to cancer to save the rest of me. Now I’m going to add my body to the list of my most intimate counselors…my life depends on it.”

Excerpts from article in Indian Country Today, April Issue “Fighting Breast Cancer: A Native Woman’s Journal” Written by Kara Briggs

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