Healing
From AOL.com
By Lisa Johnson Mandell, Posted Oct 20th 2010 @ 11:21AM
Life is just too short to spend in a stressful job that drains you, Peggy Nolan decided as she was battling breast cancer. She'd been working in corporate IT for 15 years, and was finding the daily grind almost unbearable. Could the stress have contributed to her cancer? It certainly wasn't helping her recovery.
What did help her recovery was yoga. While she was going through the pain and challenges of a mastectomy and chemotherapy, yoga kept her balanced. "As far as I'm concerned, yoga saved my inner life while my doctors saved my physical life," she says. "My oncologist declared me 'cured' in May 2010."
Moving toward a new life
Her experience made her realize, however, that high-stress corporate life was dragging her down, rather than lifting her up. "While most of my life is true, authentic, and filled with happiness, I still had one foot stuck in corporate America, doing the daily grind because of the paycheck" (and the health insurance), she says. She began moving toward building a life and business that better reflected her true values.
On the side, she launched a new business, Infinite Yoga and Reiki, which provides workshops, online education, self-care coaching, yoga instruction and reiki, a form of alternative medicine. As you can imagine, her new line of work is very hands-on and personal, and couldn't be more different than corporate information technology supervision.
Peggy admits that because of the recession, it's taking longer to make the full-time switch than she'd hoped. She still hasn't quit her day job in IT in Merrimack, N.H., but she comes home each evening to a newly built a yoga studio in her basement, where she gives classes and seminars at night, on weekends and online.
By Lisa Johnson Mandell, Posted Oct 20th 2010 @ 11:21AM
Life is just too short to spend in a stressful job that drains you, Peggy Nolan decided as she was battling breast cancer. She'd been working in corporate IT for 15 years, and was finding the daily grind almost unbearable. Could the stress have contributed to her cancer? It certainly wasn't helping her recovery.
What did help her recovery was yoga. While she was going through the pain and challenges of a mastectomy and chemotherapy, yoga kept her balanced. "As far as I'm concerned, yoga saved my inner life while my doctors saved my physical life," she says. "My oncologist declared me 'cured' in May 2010."
Moving toward a new life
Her experience made her realize, however, that high-stress corporate life was dragging her down, rather than lifting her up. "While most of my life is true, authentic, and filled with happiness, I still had one foot stuck in corporate America, doing the daily grind because of the paycheck" (and the health insurance), she says. She began moving toward building a life and business that better reflected her true values.
On the side, she launched a new business, Infinite Yoga and Reiki, which provides workshops, online education, self-care coaching, yoga instruction and reiki, a form of alternative medicine. As you can imagine, her new line of work is very hands-on and personal, and couldn't be more different than corporate information technology supervision.
Peggy admits that because of the recession, it's taking longer to make the full-time switch than she'd hoped. She still hasn't quit her day job in IT in Merrimack, N.H., but she comes home each evening to a newly built a yoga studio in her basement, where she gives classes and seminars at night, on weekends and online.