Live Laugh Learn Calgary

Hi everyone,

I want to share this amazing update from Shannon Valente, a young breast cancer survivor from Rethink Breast Cancer’s Calgary committee.  Sounds like the Live Laugh Learn session in Calgary on Eastern medicine was as interesting and well-received as the session on exercise in Toronto.

And, thank you so much Shannon for sharing this information through the Rethink Blog. We are always looking for great speakers and topics for our Live Laugh Learn sessions. Please send us your  ideas and comments; It really helps Rethink help others.

Best,
-MJ

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On Sunday the Calgary team hosted our monthly Live Laugh Learn event at lululemon and wow what an amazing night!  This month’s speaker was Dr. Jagdeep Johal from Johal Health.  His calm demeanor and positive attitude created such a wonderful, tranquil atmosphere for the evening’s discussions.  Dr. Johal provided great insight into some less traditional therapies and how they pertain to breast cancer, including Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), acupuncture, massage, homeopathy, Qi Gong and most importantly dealing with emotional stagnation – also known as stress.

Live Laugh Learn Calgary Committee

Dr. Johal began the session by having all the women share their connection to breast cancer - his point was not only for us to tell our stories but to realize that everyone has one and not to get ‘stuck’ in our stories but to get our emotions moving around them – or nothing will every change.  Dr. Johal has developed a technique to relieve emotional stagnation and get your emotions moving – and it only takes a few minutes!  He gave us a sneak peak of how to do this based on his theories using the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal and water) by forcing yourself to feel the different emotions surrounding a specific event.  In our case we used breast cancer as our event and reflected on a series of emotions including, yawning, crying, shaking (fear), yelling (anger) and laughing – we only started with yawning for demonstrative purposes - no one was in tears, yelling or shaking that night!  Dr. Johal will be teaching workshops in the next few months on how to use his methods on a regular basis to get emotions moving.  With over 400 people in Calgary currently using his tools and seeing amazing results, his theories are certainly intriguing and all the women were excited to test the techniques.

It was a jam-packed night!  In addition to teaching us about acupuncture to help energy flow and relieve stagnation, nutrition, balancing ph levels, and the importance of not eating or drinking too many cold food and drinks, Dr. Johal went over several Qi Gong exercises specific to breast cancer that focused on the chest, kidneys, stomach and spleen, to name a few.  These exercises can be found on Dr. Johal’s website (Johal Health).  In addition to the Qi Gong exercises, we also learned several trigger points that when massaged daily can improve overall health with a focus on the areas that relate to breast cancer specifically.  Dr Johal showed us several points on our feet, hands, shoulders and stomach. These will also be posted on his website later this week.

It was a truly empowering and inspirational evening.  Thank you to Dr. Johal and all of the women who came out to enjoy the event!

-Shannon