Cancer touches all of our lives, directly and indirectly. How should we most effectively meet it?
Co-host Walter Mason reviews Finding Our Life Force - an inspiring book of reflections and meditation programs for people living with cancer, as well as other life-threatening illnesses.
Walter writes: "Even as a perfectly healthy person I was moved beyond description by following the Journey of the Stones series in my own daily meditations."
Caro Jonas is one of the co-founders of the Life Force Foundation, a 20 year-old Australian support group for cancer support. Together with Jane Gillespie, breast cancer survivor and member of Life Force, she has written an extraordinary book of healing meditations that work on an emotional level to help those diagnosed with cancer.
It is fascinating collection and will be of enormous interest to anyone struggling with serious illness, or caring for or loving someone who is. The book is described as a tool by which "cancer patients and their carers can move through the emotions that emerge with the cancer journey gently and compassionately".
The book's practical exercises are powerful and very easy to use and follow; in doing some of them I could see their immense potential for everyone. The real-life stories that follow the exercises also help readers to understand what happens to patients and their loved ones after a cancer diagnosis.
It is a new and gentle approach to caring for oneself in a time of serious illness and the perfect complement to other books that have become justly famous classics in the field, books such as Petrea King's Quest for Life and Louise L. Hay's rather more controversial You Can Heal Your Life.
The fact that it is based on the actual work of a cancer support group makes it tremendously solid and complete and it is a book I wouldn't hesitate to give to almost anyone faced with a diagnosis of cancer.
Read the The Universal Heart Book Club full review here:
