Compassion meditation for breast cancer survivors focus of new UA study

As if a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment weren’t enough, the often-uncertain aftermath can leave patients and their loved ones grappling with anxiety and depression.

There wasn’t as much attention paid to cancer’s psychological toll just a couple decades ago, but that’s been changing.

In search of the best ways to help, researchers with the University of Arizona’s College of Nursing have been exploring whether a certain type of meditation signficantly reduces stress among breast cancer survivors — and if it improves even more when their primary supporter also participates.

Now they will take their work to a national level, aiming to fully prove its merits.

Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, or CBCT, was originally developed at Emory University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics. The two institutions are working together on this study, using a $1.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute.

These guided meditations help people gain deeper insights toward self-compassion and resiliency, as well as a more accurate and compassionate understanding of others.

CBCT will be offered to 226 randomly selected survivors and a supporter they live with — a spouse, a friend or any close loved one — through online classes. The participants’ saliva will be checked regularly for levels of cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, to measure how compassion mediation reduces stress and improves overall well-being.

The study groups will include an even number of survivors with partners, as well as survivors only, and the last 20% will be a health education group not meditating.

“Meditation is not woo-woo,” said Sally Dodds, a retired UA professor with a doctorate in social work. “One of the things we know is that there’s a biology to stress and, when we are under stress, there’s a lot that goes on in the body.”

Stress suppresses the immune system, and that can be an impairment to healing well, said Dodds, who will co-lead the meditation classes for the study, along with an instructor from Emory University.

Coast to coast

It was about 20 years ago when it became commonplace to screen cancer patients for anxiety and distress, said Terry Badger, a professor in the UA College of Nursing, and a UA Cancer Center member who is one of the lead researchers on the study.

“We know that when you have elevated anxiety and depression and stress, it’s harder to manage your illness, and you have a slower recovery,” said Badger, a clinical nurse specialist in adult psychiatric-mental health nursing.

Once the new study gets underway, selected participants will attend weekly sessions for eight weeks. While previous classes have been done in person, the pandemic inspired Thaddeus Pace, an associate professor in the UA’s College of Nursing, and collaborator with Badger, to look at a new model to increase access.

During the pandemic, people became much more comfortable with online systems like Zoom, he said, and this is permitting them to take the project to a larger, “coast to coast” audience.

Pace said he is excited to bring his work to more people and show them that, over time, meditation can improve the ways their brains work. The practice uses the core tenants of Tibetan Buddhism compassion meditation: Everyone wants to be free of suffering, and everyone is seeking happiness.

By meditating, or contemplating these ideas over time, he said, compassion for others and for oneself can become ingrained.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Rocky road in the beginning

Dodds tried meditation for the first time about 25 years ago.

“Like most other people who start meditating, it was a rocky road in the beginning,” she said, explaining that while she enjoyed it, she was not consistent.

When she met Pace, she was trying to meditate several times a week and, as she did, other things started to shift — she was eating better, sleeping better, exercising more.

“Once I started seeing all these little changes and little improvements, it motivated me to meditate more frequently,” she said.

Registered nurse Shawn Mulligan had a similar experience. Mulligan had breast cancer about 14 years ago and is currently cancer-free. She now works as a clinical nurse navigator with the UA Cancer Center, where she helps patients with stress reduction.

“A cancer diagnosis can bring people to their knees,” she said. Helping people process what they’re going through, and expressing their needs and feelings fully, is critical, she said.

“We benefit from exploring these modalities,” she said, “and there’s now a lot of science behind it.”

Mulligan had heard about the CBCT classes and was thrilled when they asked her to participate in one of their initial offerings, in 2014.

“I grabbed one of my friends, who is a social worker, and we did the program together,” she said. “I thought it was excellent.”

She had tried meditation before, she said, but it was not a daily practice.

Dodds said people often “blast through life” without taking the time to notice how they are feeling, and why.

“Meditation,” she said, “is a way to go inside, and look at your own mind.”

Compassion meditation, to take it a step further, is about finding those internal things that are stressing you out and making you unhappy, and then bringing great kindness to yourself, and to others, she said.

“We’re pretty critical of ourselves, and of other people,” she said. “This helps us be a lot kinder to ourselves, and to other people.”