Penny Brohn Centre 5-day Retreat

Having some difficulty swallowing at present - mainly juice and water today - but tomorrow I’ll try to get some Ensures down as I am travelling to Bristol for a five-day retreat at Penny Brohn Cancer Care. I’ll keep a record of what happens and enter it either there (if I have access to the net) or when I get back, in which case I’ll go quiet probably until next Saturday. I expect some therapies, some dietary advice, some healing and meditation, consultation and maybe some dialogue with other patients. Sadly it looks as if I’m not ready for their wonderful food yet, but we’ll see…

The Nature of Penny Brohn Cancer Care

(The following are my words, not an official description, so apologies to Penny Brohn Cancer Care if I have misinterpreted anything) For the website visit www.pennybrohncancercare.org
The centre exists to assist sufferers via a holistic approach to their condition, not as a replacement for “mainstream” medicine but as a complete provider of complementary therapy for individuals and groups in a relaxing and caring environment. The staff and therapists are highly trained, the atmosphere is bright, clean and tasteful, the cuisine is very sophisticated nutritionally yet delicious (I so wish I could have eaten the food!!!), the spiritual element secular yet very clear and satisfying, the attitude deeply caring.

Here you can come for a “CancerPoint” day for planned activities (i.e. massage, healing, advice); you can spend in-depth time on a two- or five-day residentialcourse; you can even offer your services as a carer.

My Experience

OK - so where do I start? The Penny Brohn Cancer Care is a beautiful Georgian building, extended with many wings on the very edge of Bristol, close to the Clifton suspension bridge not far from the estuary between England and Wales. It is set in extensive gardens, these peppered with wild flowers and protected by mature cedars and evergreens, close to the river in a delightfully secluded setting dominated by an imposing water feature, the sound of which reverberates throughout the grounds. The building has been wonderfully and effectively modernised with a bright, elegant atmosphere, favouring shades of blue and grey and oatmeal, with comfortable modern furnishings and spotlessly clean flooring in carpet and light timber.

I first went there on my daughter’s recommendation for a day’s visit and determined I would return for an extended five-day stay, to experience a combination of group therapy, reflexology, healing (very similar to Reiki), massage, art and music therapies, plus holistic medical advice, help with nutritional issues. One of my most important quests would be to try to work with the nutritionist to get rid of “Ensure” supplements once and for all, bearing in mind that the radiotherapy has yet to shrink my tumour to the extent where I can eat anything but liquid food.

When I arrived at Bristol, knowing I was about to spend several days in the company of fellow cancer subjects, I frankly did not relish the prospect, expecting the atmosphere to be dull and despondent. How wrong I was! Throughout my stay I would say the overriding feeling was of good humour (often laughter creasing us up), warmth and comeraderie - not of a stilted or manufactured type but spontaneous and incredibly bonding.

What I intend to do here is to describe the different parts of my experience and invite comment so that you can perhaps remark on similar places where you have experienced comparative activities, or offer views about alternative or complementary therapies undertaken as individuals or in groups. This may spark further discussion along these lines and also maybe provoke new connections between ourselves whereby we look deeper into the way we sufferers interact - especially the ways we use our energy to provide help, prayer, advice and friendship to each other so very swiftly and effectively.

On arrival (Sunday evening) we were shown to our beatifully appointed rooms, given supper in the delightful restaurant area (for me they made some soup - a little too thick, but got it right after a bit of straining) and we had a kind of briefing session with simple introductions (names, places of residence).

Each bedroom (mine looked out over the gardens, with cedar and evergreens and a water feature (like a huge illuminated black cauldron bubbling water continuously) was simply yet tastefully furnished; bathroom ensuite, fresh towels and environmentally friendly shampoo and shower gel; big double bed with extraordinarily comfortable mattress, bureau, wardrobe, radio/cd player, kettle and various exotic herb teas, etc.

 

Meditation, Visualization and Relaxation

Apart from linking meditation with the Beatles and hippy life in the 60s and 70s, together with Maharishi Yoga, pop concerts, levitation and other mysterious and (to me) highly suspicious activities, I have never experienced such things until now. So to be thrown right into it at PBCC (Penny Brohn  Cancer Care) was a mind-numbing rather freaky milestone for me. The Centre waltzed me straight into a different spiritual wavelength, and I was able to derive huge benefits from digging deep into bits of my psyche that I had never visited before, although I had gotten a clue from the healing experience when I attended my CancerPoint day last month. Apart from the healing, there were basically three different forms of mental exercising that take place routinely at PBCC - meditation, visualization and relaxation, all using variations of their original themes and all stimulating different and very personal reactions at different times.

Meditation I found quite difficult, although possible the most profound experience. The intention is not to relax - rather to focus intently (sometimes using a phrase or “mantra”) so that you find a place inside you where you are absolutely still and, having reached that place, the benefit is most likely in the fact that you’ve got there at all. When you’re there you’ve attained the improbable situation of knowing bits of you that you didn’t know before and then being able to revisit them anytime to awaken the astonishing thoughts associated with personal discovery, a new kind of intimacy with yourself and, above all, a platform from which you can EXPLORE a world that’s unique, revealing and connective. What meditation did for me was partly to confirm that I need to dig much deeper into the inner self and I feel rather ashamed that it has taken me so long to make this discovery.

Visualization is different. Here, in groups, we were encouraged to drift into a dreamy, musing state of mind and thence to create visions of peace and tranquility. “OK, very nice,” you say, but the point is that the way we did it, under such expert guidance, made everything spring to life in such amazing detail, such clarity, in technicolor with brass knobs on. I am a visualizer by profession. My job is to see images in my mind and then translate them into, maybe, corporate branding, so my skills in this direction are normally quite well developed. But this was different. I found myself in a room with eight others, lying relaxed and silent save for the therapist’s voice, actually BEING THERE in the place to which we were transported!!! Every detail of what I imagined was so incredibly clear, and I am not sure whether to attribute this to the skill of the therapist or simply to the new role now accepted by my mind. Puzzling. It’s as if I’ve opened yet another door, and being at PBCC is just like being in a corridor with many different doors to open, each one showing me something new, learning another lesson, introducing another “me”.

Relaxation is paramount all the time at PBCC. When we met in a group we’d recline on very comfortable adjustable chairs with a footstool. We’d have with us our chilled water (available everywhere you look in the Centre) and a little notebook provided for thoughts as we progressed through the five days. We’d often be asked to close our eyes, relax and consider, relax and imagine, relax and listen… We became so relaxed in this way that the “chill out” emphasis became second nature. We had left behind us our families, our work, our friends, the TV and newspapers and, although we had radios in our rooms, I can’t recollect anyone saying that they had listened to the news, which we were also glad to have left alone, perhaps to the anguish of those dedicated to scare, tantalize, threaten or otherwise titillate us in our normal existences.

Consequently, each of those in my group of nine were treated to a combined experience of deep and novel personal revelation, and this performed intimately in the company of others serves to magnify the immense profundity and sheer exhilaration of the occasion, almost a rebirth - certainly an Epiphany of sorts.

 

Healing, Reflexology and Psychotherapy

I’ve recently entered a completely new world, begun as it was when I came to PBCC for my CancerPoint Day and received healing. Since then I have had Reiki treatment from a holistic therapist at Stoke Mandeville’s Cancer Care centre (I am now seeing him regularly) and two new (to me) healers at PBCC.

What is “healing”? To the uninitiated like myself, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of difference between the Penny Brohn healing and Reiki. In both cases one is introduced to the healer and the magic takes place in a slightly darkened room after a brief chat. Usually there are candles burning, and soft music is an option (I personally preferred silence). In all the experiences I have had - and I’m no expert - it has been obvious that voice training is a part of the overall tuition received by the therapists, as a soft well-modulated voice does assist to create the ambience required, an atmosphere where it would otherwise be very easy to drop off to sleep.

The initial chat includes an explanation - that the healer is not doing anything other than being a conduit or channel via which the recipient is given “unconditional love” from the Universe (could be translatable as God or another deity), and the one being healed is being assisted to open themselves up to this divine force. It is agreed that the healing power is admitted through the top of the head and reaches the necessary parts using various “chakras” which are positioned through the body. These chakras have different colours which are themselves significant in the process.

Personally, I challenge the notion that the healer plays such a small part in the healing, and I say this because, having had several different healers in a short space of time, I was acutely aware that each experience is utterly different. Whilst the overall pattern of action may be similar,  the range of responses within my psyche varies wildly and I personally believe that there is much more of an enmeshing process going on between the minds of the two parties. One individual has given me Reiki on three different occasions and each time the feeling was sufficiently similar for me to have identified him from the nature of the experience, even had I not known who was doing it. (Room for debate here?)

Whatever. The similarities between all the healers are nevertheless also profound. The period of healing (usually half-an-hour to an hour) begins with lying on a couch in a comfortable position, either prone or semi-reclining, while the healer talks gently about the process, asking you to relax progressively until you actually feel yourself “dropping off”. The dreamy quality that now prevails never leaves you throughout the session, although your level of consciousness changes depth from time to time. Occasionally I think I have been guilty of actually falling asleep, but only for seconds as another vision soon occupies the attention. Visions? Well, during these extraordinary periods of dreamlike relaxation, you look at whatever you normally see when your eyes are closed - a blackish, purplish backdrop. Except that this now acts as a “stage” for a most remarkable lightshow (for me, at least), where anything may appear in the limelight. I have seen swirling amorphous shapes in a myriad of colours; hard, crystalline structures; detailed veinous objects in stark relief to pale, watery drifts of cloud; billowing bursts of liquid gold; silvery white whisps of silk. And sometimes, much more detailed objects - manuscripts in oriental text; faces and bodies of ethereal creatures; sandstone friezes with ancient carvings; flora and fauna in a detail akin to high-definition television images.

Where does all of this come from? Beats me, I have to say. But when it appears in my mind it is, believe me, as real as what I can see now. 

All the time this is going on in my head, the healer is working round me - perhaps touching me lightly, or sometimes when I ‘ve taken a peek to see what’s going on, standing feet away although I was convinced they were in contact. However long the healing takes, it’s invariably much longer in reality. Half an hour goes by in what seems to be ten minutes. And when it’s all over I’m always disappointed and wish it could have gone on. Furthermore, when I stand up (slowly) after a session I feel I need to connect with the ground because I’m so light-headed. So I imagine I’m growing roots into the earth through the floor before I can walk away.

And, when I do, I feel refreshed, elevated, energised.

Reflexology is a simpler procedure in that there seems to be a direct connection between the various parts of the feet and the rest of the body. Massaging the feet induces (or so I understand) release of tension and healing in the specified area, and this is a very exact science. My therapist asked me where my problem (cancer) was in my body and I explained that it was at the junction between my stomach and oesophagus. “You will feel some warmth there”, he told me, and sure enough when he applied pressure to a certain part of my foot, the area around my tumour began to heat up. Could have been auto-suggestion, I suppose, but I certainly felt it! Reflexology is very interesting and I’m going to explore further in time. It is actually one of those things about which I have up to now felt a bit doubtful, but no longer.

Psychotherapy is at PBCC a strong feature, and it’s the hardest to describe, largely because by definition it’s different for everyone, and you don’t see any tangible result, other than maybe a shift in your emphases, and that’s more likely to be detected by others. The psychotherapist I saw is an extraordinarily perceptive individual, and, much as I imagined (never having seen a psychotherapist before) did much more listening than talking. I felt we really “hit it off”, a feeling ably assisted by the fact that she is remarkably like my own mother in some ways, or maybe that’s how she comes across to everyone! Certainly, in our conversation, there were many areas whereby our spiritual views coincided. There was nothing judgmental in her attitude and she got me to offload a lot of baggage to make way for further clarity. (Here’s a thing! A thought obtrudes that everything that happened to me at PBCC was to do with making things clearer!)

I feel as though I have benefited immensely from all the therapeutic work as well as from the mental stuff, indeed, the combination is continuing to prove the importance of the body-mind link. Our physical being and psyche are intricately and inextricably conjoined; the more we appreciate this the easier it is to increase the advantages of helping them to work in harmony.

 

Food and Nutrition

A minefield. Everywhere one looks, the conjunction of cancer and food raises bitter controversy. Cancer (it is said) gobbles up sugar and sweet things; dairy products are bad and so is all flesh (including fish) because they are too acid in the body. Even fruit is often cast in the role of evil acid-producing agent. So boil it down to wheatgrass, some vegetables, pulses, alkaline-producing fruit (not many), some nuts, all eaten raw and you have a recipe for healthy living, detrimental to the growth of the cancer. OK. My problem makes it even simpler, as all I can ingest is liquid, so read as above but juiced or liquidized.

However, until I went to PBCC I was virtually living on “Ensures”, which are cartons or plastic bottles containing a mixture of corn oil and whey powder with added vitamins, sugars, minerals and artificial flavourings, which all taste more or less the same despite the addition of words like “Fruits of the Forest”, “Coffee” or “Strawberry”. The consistency is that of an unctuous gum which coats the mouth, teeth and throat and which sticks to everything on the way down, so you feel you want to wash your mouth out after each “meal. 6 of these a day yields around 2000 calories, 6% of which is pure added sugar. They were OK at first but after 4 months the very smell of them was enough to make me gag. What’s more, try to combine these with vegetable or fruit juice and they curdle, which for me meant literally hours of discomfort whilst the Ensures and the juice fought to find their way back up into my throat, leaving me speechless and undernourished.

At PBCC I spent some time with nutritionalists. First, we had a long lecture about eating and drinking which left many members of our group aghast. It appears that finding healthy foods for cancer sufferers is a hell of a task if you eat “normally”, including bread, cakes, meat, milk, processed foods in your diet, and anything that in the Western world is advertised at least hundreds of times a day on TV. This presented no problem for me, of course as anything worthy of eating is fine as far as I am concerned, so I passed on that hurdle.

What I did do was to spent lots of time with another nutritionalist in order to collaborate and replace the “Ensures” with drinkable stuff of an equivalent nature in terms of calorific value and mineral/vitamin content. The minerals and vitamins were easily taken care of by the addition of a daily spoonful of “Natures Answer” Multiple Liquid Vitamin and Mineral in a bottle. This contains all the “Ensure” additives plus lots more. The calories were provided by (and it does involve a bit of work with juicers/liquidisers) “Build-up drinks, which ml for ml provide at least twice the energy of an Ensure. Typical Recipe:

High Energy Strawberry & Banana Build-up Drink

Ingredients:

Cashew pieces                      25g 

Silken tofu                            25g

Banana                                 One

Strawberries                           20

Vanilla extract                    1/2 tsp

Slippery Elm Powder              2 tsp

Set Honey                             1 tbsp

Coconut oil                           75ml

Rice Milk                                125ml

This makes approx. 500ml.

Preparation: Grind the cashew nuts to a fine powder in a blender or seed grinder, then combine with the other ingredients and blend until smooth.

Total calorie content of a 200 ml glass: 447.6kcal

That’s just one of a limitless number of combinations that, with the mineral/vitamin additive, kick Ensures into touch (sorry, Rugger expression! Means “beat them entirely”).

That was the official nutrion quest for me and it’s solved.

The PBCC attitude to nutrition is most ably demonstrated in their kitchen and superb restaurant, where, although I could not partake of it, I mentally imagined eating the delights they had to offer, whole food dishes prepared by their amazing team of chefs and planners to grace the most exotic table. There was always a vast array of natural condiments, sauces and spreads to whet the appetite, delicious hors d’ouvres made from unbelievably well-chosen ingredients, and exciting main dishes. I cannot begin to describe the wonderful way that they make and present their food; I can say that my group tucked in with great gusto and I would have done the same. Whatever I may have thought previously about a vegetarian cuisine was quickly unlearned here, where the accent is on brilliant cookery, finest ingredients and imaginative presentation.

Additionally, what their chefs did for me was astonishing, preparing tatsy exotic soups, build-up drinks and fresh juice combinations to make me feel at home, and keep me “eating” well…

 

Working and Living as a Group

Throw 9 cancer patients together and what do you get? Well, before I joined such a group I would have thought ‘ a fairly miserable bunch of people’! I would have expected lots of gripes about aches and pains, maltreatment at the hands of the NHS and the medics in general, dissatisfacion with one’s lot, in short, all the “why me?” gripes one could imagine, only ninefold.

Not so. Either my particular group was really unusual or else getting together is all about really different things - comeraderie, sharing, mutual amusement, learning, and a whole stack of joint experiences to treasure forever. We were all “thrown in the deep end” with quick and smart introductions and then spent five long days together, mostly in each others’ company except when we were undergoing individual therapies. Day by day we got to know each other well, and I can truly say that every individual in the group -who we called the “Mayeights” because we were together in May 2008 - proved to fit in easily into a remarkable “family”. We see ourselves to be unique, and I suppose we are. Even the staff at Penny Brohn Cancer Care thought we had “gelled” much more than is the norm, and we now keep in contact with our own weblog on which we give to each other our news, recipes, hints, phiolosophies, photos, jokes, and other valuable information. We hope to have some kind of a reunion one day, probably at the Centre.

Laughter was, as I have said, the main activity for the Mayeights. We shared in our quest for knowledge about what is happening to us, and marvelled at the incredibly strengthening effects of the therapies we were receiving. We loved the food (yes, even the concoctions the kitchen produced especially for me!), we exposed our innermost thoughts via the creativity of the art and music therapies (more about these later), and we thoroughly enjoyed the environment, with its extensive grounds, trees and wild flowers.

We also shared more serious emotions at times when a few tears were shed, but the overall effect of this was cathartic and soon gave way to more fun and laughter. No names or pack drill here, but the Mayeights consisted of two chaps and seven ladies, aged between 30s and 80s, from all parts of the UK (Scotland and Ireland included). A more disparate bunch could not have been created on purpose, and yet we were SO close, and, when it was time to part, the sense of loss was almost palpable. We all realised that we had become far more welded together than it was right to expect after such a short time, and we were also careful to note that this process was largely due to the atmosphere of care and indeed love that we all received as part of the Penny Brohn scene. We will stay in touch and we will hopefully share our thoughts and hopes and fears for a long time to come. Since we left, at least one of us has received fantastic news about their diagnosis. I hope there will be more to follow.

Art and Music Therapy

What has art and music got to do with  cancer therapy? Fact is, getting to grips with oneself is a major part of healing, and being creative, as I well know, having lived a life of visualizing every day, is a great way to start knowing the real “you” more intimately. Picture this: divided into small groups of four or five, we are introduced to the “art room”, a small studio, where we are seated around four connected tables - ourselves and the therapist. We are surrounded by art materials - paints, crayons, pastels, pens and ink, plus paper in all sizes, some very large and affixed to the wall, ready for use. The therapist talks to us a little about what he wants us to do, largely to express our thoughts spontaneously, and we set to work.

Everyone produces something quite different, two of us choosing to decorate the large pieces of paper with open, sweeping strokes. Others are less demonstrative, using poster paints on smaller sheets; I choose a thick watercolour paper upon which I begin to create an image of my tumour in black pen-and-ink, depicting the “creature” as (or so I thought) an evil monster, but he turned out to be more sad than dangerous-looking. A diverse selection of images were soon brought to life, and it is interesting to note that, regardless of artistic skills and training, everyone was totally engrossed in their creative work, rather like being in the Art Class at school. When time was up, we compared notes and each of us in turn explained what we had been trying to achieve. Later, in the music room, we all displayed our work to the entire group and shared some more laughter and positive critical appraisal.

The music therapy was both surprising and amusing. We were all ushered into the music room, but on this occasion the floor had been cleared of chairs and instead was literally covered with percussion instruments of all kinds and sizes - xylophones, drums, bells, clackers, castanets, tambourines, marakas, and even a rain stick!  We played around with these at random for a while, and then our therapist told us we were going to make music, firstly with a “trial run” (here we made an awful noise banging and bashing away) and then with a more controlled effort whereby some of us set up a regular rhythm and the rest joined in, carefully keeping in time. We were overwhelmed by the success of this latter exercise. I think the trial run had been a deliberate attempt to make us want to do SO MUCH better next time, and it worked. What followed was incredibly harmonious and rhythmic. We were all grinning from ear to ear by the end and seriously regretted we had not had the presence of mind to record it in some way. Even the music therapist said what so many others seemed to be saying - that our group was remarkably “together” and I must agree that communication on this occasion was almost telepathic.

 

 

 

 

I’ll add to this experience day by day …