Discovering the true love within to heal her life

Can you heal yourself through love? Joy Lee at the Fremont, CA Dahn Yoga Center, is a breast cancer survivor who has made physical, emotional, and spiritual breakthroughs to become healthier than ever. Through love, she can now heal and take care of her own body and life.

With a persistent belief that love was something she just hadn’t been born with, Joy realized that she had been actually generating the hurt inside.

An engineer at Oracle Corporation and mother of two, Joy says, “I was always living in my own box of what I thought was right and never knew what it was to really do something for myself.” Divorced in 2003 and diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, she lay in bed one night after a chemotherapy treatment and suddenly thought, ‘if I were to die now, the world wouldn’t really care.’ “That’s when it hit me -- this wasn’t the life I wanted to be living.”

After concluding chemotherapy, Joy tried Dahn Yoga. “The biggest change I felt immediately was my constantly cold hands and feet became significantly warmer. But Shimsung was what really changed my life.”

With Shimsung, she experienced true love for the first time. “I never knew I had such love inside,” she says, “and I realized this is what life is about. I realized how having to always win did so much damage to my body and also inflicted so much pressure on my children. Always so preoccupied with doing well, I never learned how to truly reach out and connect with anybody. Every great battle is life telling you that this isn’t the way to keep going.”

With her ability to be in control of her health and her life, she says, “I don’t have any worries about cancer anymore.” And the pre-cancer severe fatigue she suffered? “I’ve nearly forgotten those days ever existed.”

As a Dahn Master, Joy takes pleasure in teaching her co-workers during lunch. In the evenings, she provides support for members at the Dahn Yoga Center, especially for those who have suffered from cancer.

— Mina Kim