September 27 (Day 210) Kids Kicking Cancer

September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month

Kids Kicking Cancer (KKC) was founded by Rabbi/Professor Elimelech Goldberg, who is both a black belt in the martial arts and a father who lost his first child to cancer in 1983. He is also a Clinical Asst. Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Wayne State University Medical School. Rabbi G (as he is fondly called by his students) created the Kids Kicking Cancer program after serving for 12 years as the Director of a New York based summer camp for children with cancer. His experience in the martial arts, as a spiritual leader and as a parent who can identify with other parents facing serious disease, has provided him with remarkable insight into issues facing children and families with a diagnosis of cancer.


Children with cancer typically feel a tremendous loss of autonomy, control and personal identity. They are required to endure treatments that cause them to feel sick in order to heal. They are confronted with multiple fears, including mortality, hair loss, falling behind academically and socially, as well as many other issues that affect how they view their bodies, their lives and their destinies. Rather than allowing children to view themselves as victims of disease, KKC trains pediatric cancer patients to see themselves as capable and important participants in their own healing. The impact of this change in perception on the psychological and emotional outlook of the children is dramatic.


By focusing its program around the healing themes of martial arts training, KKC not only strengthens children physically, but also teaches them to tap into the inner light of their spiritual self – a focus that generates incredible power, energy and internal strength. The inner spirit or soul of each child is viewed as the defining element of the child, rather than the body or the tumor that has invaded the child’s body.  Instead of emphasizing all the things that pediatric cancer patients cannot do, KKC focuses on all the things they can do. The goal of KKC is to help children with serious disease to heal, while empowering them physically, spiritually and emotionally.

Kids Kicking Cancer is a non-profit 501© 3 organization that provides weekly classes for children, both inpatient and outpatient, in the mind-body techniques found in the martial arts.  We emphasize relaxation and mental imagery, and skill each student according to his or her capabilities to engage in breathing, meditation, and active karate exercises. We also instruct the parents, siblings and the medical personnel in these methods. Our instructors are invited to accompany their students and further assist them in the hospital rooms and clinics as they undergo painful procedures such as spinal taps and bone marrow aspirations. Our mantra: “Pain is a message one does not have to accept.”


 
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Source:  Kids Kicking Cancer.