When facing cancer, most patients are rendered helpless, at the mercy of the many debilitating treatments, and unable to play a role in their own healing. But Cancer Dojo is changing this.
Part colouring-in art, part meditation, entirely unique.
Harnessing Cancer Dojo’s proactive and mindful patient ideology, we have created an interactive series of posters for patients that for the first time enable them to interact positively with parts of their body affected by cancer. Merging the ancient Buddhist practice of Sand Mandalas and the science of Psychoneuroimmunology – each poster is designed to enable patients to interact with something that was until now, invisible to them. Letting them play a role in their own healing.
The mandalas’ intricate designs allow patients to fully immerse their minds and bodies into their own healing, together with the medicine, to augment its efficacy to build resiliency and strengthen their own immune system over time.
Mandalas were first used in therapy by Carl Jung, who found that the act of drawing mandalas had a calming effect on patients while at the same time facilitating psychic integration. There is a scarcity of controlled empirical studies of the healing impact of mandalas on mental health. Based on the efficacy of James Pennebaker’s written disclosure paradigm in promoting mental well-being (Pennebaker, 1997a, 1997b), the purpose of our study was to examine the benefits for those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of processing traumatic events through the creation of mandalas. Benefits to participants were measured in terms of changes in the variables of PTSD symptoms, depressive symptoms, anxiety, spiritual meaning, and the frequency of physical symptoms and illness. Relative to those in the control condition, individuals assigned to the experimental mandala-creation group reported greater decreases in symptoms of trauma at the 1-month follow up. There were no other statistically significant outcome differences. Alternative modes of processing traumatic events (e.g., visually symbolically) may serve individuals who are either reluctant or unable to write about their experiences.
Empirical study on the healing nature of mandalas | ResearchGate
The Mandala packs are delivered to patients across South Africa, and available for purchase. Helping people everywhere take on the world’s deadliest disease, and become Harder to Kill.