Leah: A Story of Meditation & Healing (2017) is the story of a young girl who is diagnosed with an inoperable tumor. When Dina, her mother, is told by an oncologist that Leah had about three weeks to live, Dina contacts David, a meditation master. This exquisitely written book tells the poignant story of the healing work David undertook to shrink the tumor. It takes the reader on a voyage from a state of medical hopelessness to a surgeon who steps out of an operating room with a smile on his face and tells Dina: “It’s a miracle. We got the whole thing. The tumor formed a sack around itself and was shrinking inside her.”
As Richard Gere wrote in his forward to the book: “With an open heart and deep insight, Stuart Perrin explores the true nature of health and disease. In Leah, cancer is a disorder of the spirit whose roots can finally be cut by a fundamental change in one’s spiritual life. An important story of purity, loss and understanding…”
And further praise from the actor Alan Arkin: “An immediate and very easy to understand account of the healing process as it works within the healer. If this book falls into the right hands at the right time, it could save lives.”
Norman Cousins Review
“There is a powerful simplicity and directness about this story and I have no doubt that it will have a wide audience. The quality of the writing and the nature of the narrative give the book a strong hold on the reader’s attention. Please accept my thanks for the privilege of reading Leah.” —Norman Cousins, American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate.
PWA Newsletter Review by Hal Seidman, Jan. 1987
The Story of Leah by Stuart Perrin is the story of a thirteen year-old girl with an inoperable tumor. And a diagnosis of three weeks to live. This is not an AIDS story. And yet within its mystery is a solution for all of us.
The story unfolds more in the mind of the child’s friend and meditation teacher, David, than in the actual events. In great urgency, David attempts to stabilize and reduce the size of Leah’s grapefruit-sized “mother” tumor by leading the girl into deep meditation.
As a prerequisite to this, David assumes the mantle of unconditional love toward Leah and her mother in order to both energize himself and clear the air of any negative energy and personal judgment. This unconditional love forms a bridge of trust between Leah and David. The burden of the cancer is now shared equitably between the stronger and weaker “partners.”
Can anyone imagine a more powerful and immediate medicine to be administered to any patient? An act of unconditional love merging with Leah’s unconditional trust to produce HOPE. The first act of WELLNESS.
David takes the reader with microscopic intimacy Into the inner workings a meditation teacher’s mind. He presents an interior world, just as Carlos Castaneda does, of high drama and powerful visualizations.
A panoply of healing power is called upon, not only from the personal resources of David, but from his teacher and his teacher’s teacher. All are summoned and come to the fore in his visualizations in an act of transcendental compassion and healing. Down through the ages, the art and wisdom of healing merges into the present as it is focused on a child’s tumor through the process of healing meditation.
Simultaneously, David’s creative insights are spurred as to the origins of the cancer. For the origin goes beyond the forming of the tumor itself. The fertile ground in which the tumor grows is the product of an ambivalent and angry childhood that Leah experienced growing up with a divorced mother whose life see-sawed between endless affairs with both men and women. A childhood fully experienced, but not adequately expressed. Except, perhaps, in an inoperable “mother” tumor.
How the story ends is both complex and profound. The kernel of truth that is discovered is not only Leah’s story, but becomes our story. If truth can heal wounds, then the wisdom found in the Story of Leah has a vital message for all of us suffering today.
Cover by Ana Cissa Pinto