Every so often a review of Yoga for Cancer arrives that reminds us why Tari Prinster wrote it in the first place. This one, from yoga teacher Erika McDougall-Westman of Transition Yoga, is one of those.
Erika picked up Yoga for Cancer as part of a stack of yoga therapy books from her local library — research, at the time, for her own teaching. She didn’t know that a breast cancer diagnosis of her own was only weeks away. By the time she sat down to write about the book, she was reading it not as a teacher studying a method, but as a patient looking for a way to cope.
That shift shows in the review. She credits Prinster’s early chapters for making the physiology of cancer approachable without oversimplifying it — walking through how the disease affects the lymphatic, endocrine, respiratory, and nervous systems, among others, and where yoga can support the body’s ability to recover. She’s also careful to note what the evidence does and doesn’t show: yoga hasn’t been shown to stop cancer, but it has a real, documented role in helping people manage fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, and quality of life during and after treatment.
From there, the review moves into the yoga4cancer method itself — the dynamic sitting, prānāyāma, meditation, and restorative practices that make up the approach — and the modifications built in for the realities of cancer treatment. Erika writes that she renewed the library copy so many times she finally bought her own, and that she now teaches from a different place because of it: not just as someone trained in the method, but as someone who has needed it.
She closes with one of Tari’s own lines from the book: “Live in the Now… Create space in life to take in the simple small things like sitting quietly before a window in winter, watching the gentle snow fall.”
Read Erika’s full review at Transition Yoga.
Yoga for Cancer: A Guide to Managing Side Effects, Boosting Immunity, and Improving Recovery for Cancer Survivors by Tari Prinster is available here.
