Tag: books

The Radical Remission Project

On By mary3atkinsIn Friday Tips for Speakers & WritersLeave a comment
Dr-Kelly-Turner-PhD-Radical-Remission-1
Dr Kelly A. Turner

While I was researching and writing my latest book ‘A Journey of Creative Healing,’ I read  the New York Times best selling book ‘Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer against all Odds.’  The author is Dr Kelly A Turner, a researcher and psychotherapist who specializes in integrative oncology.   While Kelly was studying for her Phd she was shocked that no one was investigating cases of  unexpected survivor’s of advanced cancer,  so this became her purpose to research and identify common factors of these survivor’s cures – which she refers to as radical remissions.  The book summarises her decade of research, her thousand interviews of patients and finally identifies the nine key factors that can improve people’s chance’s of remission.

I was thrilled and amazed that most of my steps to recovery from MS mirrored those of these cancer survivor factors.

As with all the other health professionals work I feature in my book ‘A Journey of Creative Healing,’ I sought Dr Turner’s permission to use material attributed to her work. She is also the founder of the The Radical Remission Project that is dedicated to continuing research and creating a community for survivors, patients, guests, and health professionals and the Project’s mission is to collect and verify survivor stories so that these in turn may help others.  Although not a cancer survivor I was asked to document my healing from MS, over half a century ago, to add to their data.

Imagine my delight today  to find that I am The Radical Remission Healing Story of the Month.  (March 2018).

I acknowledge that some sickness is more immediately life threatening than others but I still see that sickness has the same commonality whatever diagnostic label you give it. Looking at the enormous contribution of Kelly Turner’s work and my singular, but no less effective, anecdotal story of recovery, it appears the predominant common denominators of improving your chances of  recovery to wellness are: Taking control of your health, listening and acting upon your intuition, releasing suppressed emotions, embracing social support, deepening your spiritual awareness and having a strong reason for living.

There are other factors in Kelly’s book – you need to read it – and yes in my case, the  vital icing-on-the-cake factor was to consistently put my  focus on doing something that gave me joy  – – a Daily Creative Project.

 

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Friday Tips for Writers

On By mary3atkinsIn Friday Tips for Speakers & WritersLeave a comment

alphabet-15461_150I ain’t Scott Fitzgerald or JK  but I am a writer, albeit with ‘L’ plates.  I think if you scratch the surface of any writer they will tell you they are still learning with each new work. The old maxim remains true ‘it is never too late to learn.’ Stephen King wrote in his non-fiction book  On Writing – a must read for all new writers – If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

Read: Stephen King reads between 70 to 80 books a year and says  it’s not to study the craft; I read because I like to read…. Yet every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones

Write: Do you want to write? Then discipline yourself to write every day. In between writing the final para of Losing You and starting on the next novel squirreling away in my head, I set myself a 75-Day intuitive blogging challenge publishing it on a Facebook page. Each morning after a short meditation that set my intention to receive a topic, I wrote whatever first came into my mind. Most were obvious topical issues or my personal soap box rants but others, like ‘whirling dervishes,’ ‘fields of glory’ and ‘Petula Clarke’s number Colour My World’ came out of left field. If you are not sure what to write, not ready to write then try this intuitive writing exercise, it stretches you and teaches you a lot about your  relationship with writing.