Phyllis Clark Nichols ​

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Breath for the Soul, Introduction

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As a former executive for a national cable television network featuring programming on health and disability, I developed a growing interest in wellness and self-care, and I had the opportunity to meet many influential people who shared my interest. During those thirteen years in the health television field, I witnessed firsthand some shifts in health and medicine.

I grew up in a small southern town at a time in our nation’s history when most people’s views of health, medicine, and wellness were limited. If I became sick, I went to the doctor for a prescription and went home to follow the doctor’s orders without question and without any sense of giving self-care. I believed it was the doctor’s responsibility to cure me, and the prescription was the magic potion to make me well again. My only role was to follow the doctor’s orders.

There was little sense of personal responsibility in caring for myself or for working toward wellness. The only mention of wellness I recall was the old adage, “An apple a day will keep the doctor away.” All I learned of good nutrition was the food chart from health class in elementary school—which now turns out wasn’t necessarily so healthy. And we were not told how important exercise was to our general health. Exercise was generally undertaken by athletes or someone trying to lose weight.

This was what I knew and experienced in my early life, but there were four factors that greatly influenced the change in my mindset: (1) personal illness, (2) relationships with many medical professionals who had a much larger view of health and medicine, (3) the explosion into the age of information and personal access via the internet to quality health-care data never before available to me, and (4) my belief that we humans are so much more than flesh and that there must be ways we can better care for our total selves.

Although I’d had much exposure to what was going on in the medical field through my job, when my husband, Bill, was diagnosed with his first life-threatening cancer in 2012, my need to learn became very personal and serious. That cancer was treated successfully with surgery. Then again, in 2018, Bill was diagnosed with another unrelated but life-threatening cancer. He was given weeks of chemotherapy followed by extensive surgery. We were determined to keep our lives as normal as possible. Cancer did not change who we were, it just changed what we did for a time.

During those months after his second surgery, we were grateful for excellent medical care, and I began reading and researching to learn what we could do to participate in his ongoing care. Our goal was to get him healthy and for both of us to stay healthy. We had always been disciplined with our eating and exercise, but with gratitude for Dr. Jan, I was learning more about food as medicine and fuel, exercise as healing, the effective use of essential oils, and the importance of proper breathing. We experienced the value of mindfulness and the use of guided imagery during Bill’s treatment and recovery.

At that same time, Dr. Jan was gaining knowledge and working toward establishing an integrative medicine practice. She introduced me to the use of essential oils, gave me books to read and study, and taught me how to make everything from aroma sticks to soothing balms and creams. I began to use them and see amazing results. My husband’s digestive issues and allergies improved. I began to rid our house of anything toxic—cleaning supplies, garden chemicals, skin-care products, and shampoos that had harmful ingredients. Dr. Jan taught us breathing techniques and suggested other forms of exercise and the importance of movement even in the healing and recovery process after treatment and surgery.

I fear I flooded Dr. Jan’s phone and email in-box at times with my excitement when we experienced good results from using these modalities. Since I wasn’t a medical professional, I was somewhat reluctant to share my experiences with others. But I wanted to. I longed for my family and friends to step onto the path to wellness and to realize that these practices do work. I wanted them to enjoy the benefits of these modalities. I didn’t want their children to grow up as I had, thinking that a prescription was magic and they had no responsibility in the care and health of their bodies. I wanted them to grow up to be healthier and to see that self-care is of great value.

Finally, within these pages, I have the opportunity to say these things and to share some of our experiences. That’s the reason I am so excited about this project. Breath for the Soul is the book I wish I could have pulled from my bookshelf years ago. I had the great blessing of having Dr. Jan, who taught me so much about wellness and self-care at a time when I was in desperate need of that information. I had access to many books informing me about ways to give care to my body through diet and exercise. Our bookshelves were filled devotional books, Bible commentaries, and self-help books in psychology that spoke to the needs of my spirit. But I found no one book that addressed the needs of my soul—the total person that I am. Breath for the Soul speaks to the needs of the total person—mind, body, and spirit, and it addresses specific ways that we can give care to our bodies and our spirits on our paths toward wholeness and wellness.

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You can read more about Phyllis Clark Nichols on her website.