Cancer as Initiation : Surviving the Fire Hardback

This is the haunting personal story of one woman's journey through breast cancer, a disease which has reached epidemic proportions and now claims the lives of 46,000 American women each year.

For Barbara Stone, cancer was not a death sentence, but a challenge to become more fully alive, an "invitation" into a new stage of life.

As a potter, Barbara Stone knew that fired pots are hardened - the hotter the fire, the stronger the pot - but she also knew that pots would sometimes crack or explode.

She came to see cancer as a firing process, transforming her raw clay vessel into beautiful "Stoneware".

Barbara Stone fought this illness with the best tools Western medicine has been able to discover: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

But she combined these treatments with the best tools that Eastern medicine could offer: meditation, yoga, herbs and acupuncture - both to help her body withstand the side-effects of the Western treatments and to bolster her immune system to enable her to survive the cancer.

Stone also utilised many other means of helping her body to heal, including cranial osteopathy manipulation, diet changes and sauna baths after the chemotherapy treatments. She even attempted to record the changes these interventions made in the body's energy patterns with Kirlian photographs, which are included in the book.

Her gripping account draws on the wisdom that came to her through her dreams, and includes journal entries which show the emotional highs and lows of the healing process.

Stone argues that one can take the fear out of breast cancer by gaining greater understanding of the nature of the illness and possible contributing factors and, most of all, explaining ways to prevent immune system dysfunction in the first place.

Barbara Stone teaches, in both English and Spanish, meditation and yoga at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center's Stress Reduction and Relaxation Clinic, founded by Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn.

She also directs the inner city branch of the clinic, which serves low-income and minority populations.

Stone is also a bilingual psychotherapist in a mental health clinic.

She studied depth psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, and is also a musician, potter and mother of two.