The Fearless Way: Mudras, Mantras & Chemo
How Learning to Let Go Saved My Life

by Susan Sattler

Phoenix Century Press • 2012 • 302 pages
Book design, cover design, illustrations • Print and digital versions

Embracing Impermanence

In her memoir, The Fearless Way: Mudras Mantras and Chemo – How Learning to Let Go Saved My Life, Susan Sattler shares her journey of transformation from the infusion room of the Cancer Center at Stanford University to the sacred meditation caves in Wu Tai Mountain in northern China. What she learned along the way changed her life forever.

When she heard her doctor say the dreaded word “cancer,” a suicide in her psychotherapy practice and the sudden death of her mother had already led her to Yuan Miao, a Chinese/Tibetan enlightened woman who had recently come alone to the West. Miao became her teacher and friend, and shared with her the esoteric practices and wisdom of her ancient lineage, passed down to her by her Tibetan grandmother. As Susan wove these secrets into her own Western spiritual lineages, her training as a psychotherapist, and her background as a daughter of a Western medical doctor, she learned how to heal not only her body, but also her mind and spirit, as she surrendered to the reality that we can’t control everything that happens.

The Fearless Way raises important questions about how to find joy in a world in which the unexpected happens, impermanence rules, and things we thought would last forever, inevitably don’t. Susan’s story will help anyone faced with loss or illness discover how to let go of the old and allow something new to arise – the dance of transformation.

The book includes a series of practical exercises—incorporating mudras, mantras, breathing and visualization—and numerous examples of the imparted wisdom of Susan’s teachers. She shares information about how to maintain a healthy “internal terrain”—the environment in which disease either flourishes or flounders. Readers will have a real-life example of how to surrender the need for control, embrace impermanence, and achieve an integrated approach to healing.

Susan Sattler is a Marriage, Family Therapist who has spent 25 years helping people move toward greater wholeness and unity in their lives. She earned her M.A. in Education at Stanford University, and her M.A. in Clinical Psychology at John F. Kennedy University.  

Website: thefearlesswaybook.com
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