Cancer as Initiation: Surviving the Fire

This is the haunting personal story of one woman’s journey through breast cancer, a disease that 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 initiation into a new stage of life. She fought this illness with the best tools Western medicine has been able to discover: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But she also combined these treatments with the best tools that Eastern medicine could offer: meditation, yoga, herbs, and acupuncture.

Her gripping account draws on the wisdom that came to her through dreams, and includes her journal entries which show the emotional highs and lows of the healing process. Stone shows that one can take the fear out of breast cancer by gaining greater understanding of the nature of the illness, and, most of all, explaining ways to prevent immune system dysfunction in the first place.