Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to The Yes To Life Show. I’m Robin Daly, host of the show and founder of Yes To Life, the charity that helps people with cancer in the UK to learn about and utilize a wide range of lifestyle and complementary methods that, together with any conventional treatments, create what’s called an integrative approach to care, an approach we have advocated for for 20 years. My guest today is someone who’s been on the show before telling us her remarkable story of surviving two stage four cancers without resorting to conventional care. Fiona Shakila Burns has gone on to become a practitioner supporting others but also an educator and activist, bringing people together to support one another. I feel lovely to have you as my guest on the show.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Well, it’s a real honour to be here Robin, thank you so much for inviting me.

Robin Daly
I was actually just remembering before we came on air, the first time I met you, which was a very long time ago now, but the first thing you said to me, do you mind if I give you a hug? And be quite a hug oriented person, I acquiesce. But anyway, it was a nice beginning.

Robin Daly
last time we spoke you told us your whole remarkable story, really an exceptional and inspiring one. So as that’s still all available for people to listen to. would you just give our listeners a summary version of the key elements of this a crazy and remarkable story of yours.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Sure. first of all, when I was 11 years old, I had stage, I’ve had stage four cancer twice, basically. I was 11. I had leukemia and sarcoma, um, did the Gerson therapy. Luckily I had parents who were very switched on. So that’s juicing coffee, enemas supplements, basically detoxification, nutrification got better, um, got better quite quickly. Went on to lead a normal healthy life. 31 years later, when I was 42, I got, metastasized cervix cancer, which went to the ovaries in the brain. So again, a really serious cancer, probably more than the first one. And I just did everything I could to heal myself. I didn’t want to have surgery. So I ended up managing not to have any surgery, which is remarkable. I’m very grateful for so I’ve still got my ovaries, still got my cervix, still got my brain.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
I got better. I got actually got better within 10 months using a whole range of everything which people can find on your website.

Robin Daly
Absolutely. I imagine that second time you came to it, even though it was a pretty gruesome diagnosis you had there, what your parents were able to achieve with you when you were just a child must have really left you with an open door to say, well, maybe I could do this.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Absolutely. luckily my dad was still alive and he said that to me again. I felt, yeah, okay. I have done it before. So that did really help actually psychologically.

Robin Daly
because it’s an insurmountable mountain for a lot of people to think. Even to face a diagnosis like that at all, but to think of taking it on yourself would be major.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
It was very shocking and but hard work that I got there.

Robin Daly
So now you’re a practitioner and you’ve been a herbalist for years, but you’re also a psych K EFT and matrix re-imprinting practitioner. So everyone’s going to have at least a general idea of what a herbalist does, but the other techniques are going to need a little bit more explanation for a lot of listeners. So do you want to introduce us to them?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
the reason I trained in those is because they really helped me on my second healing journey. Second time round, it was much more of a deep dive into the psycho-emotional side of things. And that’s largely become my work now because it’s so profound, basically, once you understand this, once you clear the emotional root causes of disease, then you can actually get better completely. EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique, and it involves tapping on meridian points, the ends of meridian points, or the ends of meridians, using language. And you basically dialogue, and it’s a way to remove trauma, and it’s very effective. Matrix re-imprinting is a very refined version of the EFT, which is specifically aimed at removing trauma, and it allows you to work with the echo, so-called. It’s basically the part of you that’s still holding the trauma, so it could be a six-year-old self, it could be a 12-year-old self, or it could be a last week self. You tap on younger self, and you converse with her, and you find out what she needed that she didn’t get at the time, because trauma is undigested experience. you get a chance to actually, because there is no such thing as time, believe it or not, that’s the truth. There is no such thing as time, which gives us the gift to be able to work on everything that’s ever happened in the present. Now we can work on it, and it will actually affect us. we can time travel with it basically. It’s interesting where I put that into it.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
so you can heal, you can do so much healing emotionally and it’s very quick, effective. I love it. Yeah, I do love it. And then Psyche K is working on beliefs. So whatever we believe is true. So if we believe that we’re going to get well, then we can get well. If we believe that we can’t get well, then we can’t get well. Whatever we believe, if we believe we’re lovable, then we’re lovable. If we believe that universe is a friendly place, then the universe is a friendly place. So it’s actually, it’s a way of getting into the software of the mind and actually updating it with beliefs that are true rather than ones that aren’t. So by the age of six, we’ve been programmed with beliefs according to whatever’s happened to us pre age six, which means that we’re living with a very outdated system unless we update it. And for me, the site Kay was a really profound turning point in my healing journey. Second time round. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it. I’d done so much self-development work and counseling and I’d done so much work on myself previously, but I still didn’t have these basic core beliefs in place that I needed in order to be healthy. And this gave me a chance to do that. And it’s using kinesiology. That’s what the K stands for. Yeah, it’s kinesiology of the psyche kind of thing. That’s one. So it’s psyche.

Robin Daly
Very interesting to note that you didn’t say replacing your core beliefs with nicer ones, you actually said replacing them with ones that are true. Yes. And so that was a very interesting distinction as much as you’re saying well the ones that were actually giving you the grief are actually not true and if you investigate the truth of things you get to some ones that actually serve you much better.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Exactly. Yeah. And it’s like resetting the whole circuit, we can, living from place.

Robin Daly
That’s very much like talking about the kind of a false optimism that has been talked about a lot to do with things like cancer where people sort of put on a stick of the smile and try and be, you know, optimistic and that’s going to be helpful. But it doesn’t, of course, affect your core belief in any way to do that.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
all that toxic positivity.

Robin Daly
Right. I haven’t heard that term yet. That sounds about right. The really helpful word there is true, actually finding out the truth yourself. And of course, there’s a risk involved in that because you might find out the truth is pretty black, but you’re actually encouraging people that that’s not the case. And so it’s worth taking a look.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
The truth isn’t black. The truth is never black. No.

Robin Daly
All right. But some people may fear it is though, that’s what I’m saying. Yeah. And that’s why they’re busy putting another belief on top of it all the time to try and never go there because it’s too dangerous.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
It’s absolutely true, actually, I agree.

Robin Daly
The other thing I was very interested in is you saying that when you were 11, okay, when you got on, you did all the stuff and you got better. Now what, 30 years later or whatever it was, or you’ve accumulated a life of experience of habits, of ways of doing things, ways of seeing things. There’s all sorts of experience gone in there of, you know, losses and failures and heaven knows what else. You’ve got a mountain of stuff, all probably, a lot of it is built up because of your basic beliefs that are out of place. to try and deal with a chronic situation like cancer under those circumstances is much harder than it is when you’re 11 and there’s not too much stuff in the way where it’s a much more physical issue.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
That’s very true. I think that’s why when I was a kid, all I did, I just did the Gerson therapy and that, that did it. That healed me. But yeah, when I, so as an adult, I obviously did all the nutritional stuff, but I knew it wasn’t enough. You know, I knew there was some fluid. So yeah, yeah, you’re right.

Robin Daly
But your parents’ attitude, can do attitude if we can do this, actually transmitted a lot through straight to you,okay, we’re going to fix it. you didn’t really see it as a problem necessarily in the same way you would do as an adult.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Well, I think the main thing was I had such distrust of the medical system. I’d witnessed my sister dying of chemotherapy, basically. that was very shocking and that’s made me really clear that I wasn’t going to go down that route because, I mean, she died within 11 weeks of them treating her, you know, and I felt in a way she gave me a gift by, you know, showing me that experience because I just was never going to put myself in their hands.

Robin Daly
Okay, so I got my suspicions about what your answer is going to be to this next question, but anyway, let’s go for it. So you’ve got this long experience of supporting people, and then you’ve got your own experience as well. So what do you feel are the most important needs to fulfill for most people face this situation?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
I believe that cancer is an opportunity for a complete life change and update of everything. So I feel that we have to look at every, absolutely everything. So we look at the physical in detail, you know, so it’s looking at environmental toxins. If we understand that toxins are, you know, environmental toxins can lead to cancer, then we have to, yeah, look at all the environmental toxins, look at all of the, you know, the food that you eat, the EMS. So it’s looking at everything in your environment, everything that you’re ingesting and how that’s affecting the body. And then of course you’re looking at the psycho-emotional side of things. You’re looking at your life, how, what direction you’re going in. Are you happy? Are you in a happy marriage? Are you actually enjoying life? You know, because actually the cancer is an opportunity for the soul to check out and, you know, maybe you’re not ready to check out. And in that case, it’s all about healing and, you know, most people aren’t ready to check out actually when it comes to it. They’re like, actually I want to stay here. then everybody wants to, you know, most people will throw everything that they can at getting well. But yeah, cancer isn’t just something that comes for no reason, despite, you know, doctors still believing that. that it was actually, Dr. Theodore Bovary was the original person who, he was the one that said that it was a genetic disease, also known as a somatic mutation theory. And 110 years on, was doctors are still telling us that this is what’s going up. This is the truth. And in fact, there’s been a lot of research to show that it’s not that at all. It is about metabolic, it is a metabolic disease. it is about how your, how your cell is functioning. Ultimately, it’s how the mitochondria is functioning. the mitochondria is affected by so much the epigenetics, the environment that the cell is sitting in, the extracellular environment as well. So,

Robin Daly
That model gives you the logic behind the fact that so many different things can affect the progress of cancer from your emotional or mental state right through to the drink you had last night and because they can all, as we know from research now, these things can all affect the way our immune system operates, the way our energy is affected. All these things do actually have a biochemical result and so it makes sense to the whole thing from that point of view.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
cell studies where they took the nucleus of the cancer cell and put it inside a healthy cell.

Robin Daly
Yes. Well, I know there’s other ones that are great. Oh, fantastic trial, but they’ve managed to ignore it ever since. Exactly. It’s quite old science now.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
So what they discovered is the genetic is not in control at all.

Robin Daly
No, yeah, just for listeners who don’t know the trial, this is mean abyssal. I think it’s maybe 30 years old, 25 anyway, this piece of research, basically by putting a cancerous nucleus into a healthy cell and vice versa, putting a healthy nucleus into a cancerous cell, she showed that the cancerous nucleus was actually cleaned up in the healthy cell and it became healthy and vice versa, if you put the healthy nucleus into the cancerous cell, it was badly affected by being put in that environment. And so, it just shows that the environment is everything, basically. And yeah, as I say, that’s been ignored ever since and they carried on down the same route.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
I know. But one thing that’s actually quite interesting is looking at SNPs. So that’s something I started doing. Single nucleotide morphisms, which basically are spelling mistakes in your DNA, which show tendencies towards, you know, it can show form ethylation, which can lead to cancer. So it’s actually quite interesting to look at the individual’s makeup in that way, and then stand, oh, okay, you’ve got more tendencies to inflammation, or you don’t use vitamin D well, or you can’t use B12, or whatever it is. And you can use specific, actually, it’s really useful.

Robin Daly
It’s quite interesting, isn’t it? Because that whole line of research, based on, as you say, this slightly dud theory, has produced this ability, now we have, to just print out anybody’s genetics, just like that, and not even for that much money. And, funnily enough, the information that it gives us is actually quite interesting and useful, as it can be, in telling us what our inclinations might be, or what our weaknesses might be, things to look out for. So, in terms of, if you use that information in order to stay well, you know, the thing that the NHS doesn’t really do, the health promotion, then it can be really supportive and helpful.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Wouldn’t, isn’t it a shame that we don’t just automatically have one of those done, you know? Well, yeah. It’s forever. In DNA, it’s forever. So you could have… It’s true. It doesn’t change, yeah. And then you could have a reference point and, oh yeah, you know, this is, um, you need extra B vitamins or you need extra D or whatever it is you need, you know, yeah.

Robin Daly
Okay, onto another topic now, if we may, apart from your direct support as a practitioner, you’ve also been a leader and a role model for many people. Just tell me how this came about in the first place.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Oh, thank you. Um, well, yeah, in, in, uh, after my recovery, second time around, I just felt a real urge to let other people know, um, that cancer isn’t, uh, an incurable condition, you know, and if I, if my level of cancer can actually be cured, then surely, you know, people just need to know how to take care of themselves. Um, and realize that the doctors aren’t supplying all of the answers. So in 2013, um, I put together the first conference, um, the back to health conference, and you came to that and talked to, I was there. Yes. And you actually helped me with the formation of that conference as well. Cause I remember talking to you about, um, the bet who’d be the best speakers and that sort of thing. So appreciate your input.

Robin Daly
Great. It was good to have a colleague working in the West country there. Yeah, it was

Fiona Shakeela Burns
it managed to do one the second year and then it was absolutely exhausting, so successful though, it was amazing. The Cancer You Can group came, that was birthed from that really. So yeah, the Facebook group and then through the group, I’ve run some retreats as well for with cancer. So I haven’t done that actually since lockdown, there was one due for 2020, of course that got cancelled.

Robin Daly
along with a lot of other things. Yes.

Robin Daly
You have a very dedicated group there. They love you to bits on Facebook and it’s obviously fulfilling a need in people to be part of that. I mean, yes, you’ve got a very inspiring story, but probably not everybody knows that. They maybe just know you for who you are and what you represent. What do you think that is to people? What is it that people are looking for that they would come and join your group? Do you think?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
I think it’s the inclusivity and, you know, we don’t have an opinion. No, nobody, we don’t allow people to, um, be judgmental in the group, basically. So that’s one of the rules joining, um, to not put your views on other people. And, um, that we accept, you know, whatever approach people are doing. Most people do do conventional medicine and that’s not for anybody to judge. You know, it might be perfect for, for what, for somebody, but now I just, I, I, I just want people to feel supported and not on their own. That’s the main thing because it’s a very isolating journey, you know, and, and you’re doing so much yourself, Robin. I mean, it’s incredible how far yes to life, you know, what’s, what, what’s actually grown from reality to life.

Robin Daly
We’re beginning to get some momentum there. That’s 20 years later. We’re beginning to get going now.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
great. You just kept out of it. It’s just amazing what’s coming out Yes to life now.

Robin Daly
I love it. Anyway, so I think the thing they say about dogs and their owners looking a bit like each other seems to apply to Facebook groups and their owners as well. I mean, the character you described in your Facebook group is your character, isn’t it? So you put your stamp on it and that’s how you think people should be. And that’s great. I mean, that’s absolutely right.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
I wanted to meet when I was healing from cancer, you know, I felt that only, and I tried to join, there wasn’t, we didn’t really have the internet then. So this, the cancer you can group was one of the first cancer, Facebook groups. there’s, there’s loads now, but at the time,

Robin Daly
that yes absolutely. All right well look I want to go on and talk a little bit about groups, tribes, groups. You’ve got a lot of experience of what group can mean someone with cancer so it’s a topic that we’re actually focusing on this month as part of our 20th anniversary year. We’ve got a separate topic for each month and groups are something that I’m increasingly passionate about as time goes on. Do you want to say a little bit about the power of groups from healing to individuals?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Well, first of all, it’s very bonding. It’s very supportive to meet other people who are going through what you’re going through. And there’s a lot of people exchanging information, exchanging support, inspiring in each other, encouraging each other. And the group energy is actually magnifies what’s possible for an individual. So can I talk about my workshops?

Robin Daly
I was going to ask you about this. Bring it in right now.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
I’m running these workshops in London in Battersea Park Clinic in the EE Centre, which stands for energy enhancement. I’ve been wanting to run groups anyway for a while, some workshops for a while. when I went to the EE Centre, I just felt like this is the perfect place to do it because people are being bathed in the energy. It’s scalar wave technology and biophotonic waves. That’s what the EE is, energy enhancement. And it does loads. I mean, it repairs DNA. It just reminds the cell how to be healthy, basically. It returns the cell to homeostasis. I’ve had a lot of good feedback from it. So the groups run on a Sunday once a month. They’ve all got different themes. The first one was transforming limiting beliefs. we had emotional healing because the power of self-love. And then in January, we’ve got take charge of your healing, which is about… So I give a talk. We do some tapping together as well. We do some Kundalini shaking. We do some Psyche putting in new beliefs. And we have some sharing. And each one’s a little bit different, depending on the theme. We’ve got healthy boundaries coming up after January. Andwe’ve got trusting your intuition, fasting, and herbs to support your body and the healing power of your imagination. So yeah, I’m loving it actually. And I’m getting such amazing feedback from… I know it’s just everything we do in the workshop is being amplified by this technology. So people are really getting a good bang for their cause they say in America.

Robin Daly
they do. Interesting concept. I mean, obviously there’s lots of workshops all around the place of this, that, and everything, but to actually place the workshop in a place which is supposed to be doing you some good just by being there, you know, another layer.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
It’s a cheating way to go.

Robin Daly
can you say a little bit more about that aspect of it? what is this energy field? what’s it doing to you?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Okay, so it’s got the two technologies that are being beamed out into the room. You sit in the room, basically, and there are screens all around the room. And depending on which centre you go to, so they’ve all got different amounts of screens. We’ve got one being set up soon in Thornbury, just up the road from… All right. I’m very excited about that. My friend, Kirsty Lewis, is setting that up. well, having had a dramatic response to her breast tumour after sitting in it, for, you know, doing many hours in the one in Battersea. And she was the one that got me going to Battersea, because I was so excited by her. So yeah, the one in Battersea is, I think it’s 24, I’m doubting myself now. I think it’s 24 screens, and Kirsty’s getting 24 as well. But there’s one in Bristol, and it’s 16 screens. I’ve been to it once, so I didn’t like it as much as the Battersea part one. So I just keep going to Battersea Park one until Kirsty’s set up. I might end up running workshops in Kirsty’s and Battersea Park, but we’ll see. I’m definitely, I’m loving it, so I’ll definitely be doing more. Okay.

Robin Daly
So what are these screens doing then?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
the screens are the biophatonic waves and there’s black boxes which emit scalar waves. So two types of waves actually collide and they collide in the room, they collide in your body, in your cell. And they switch on. This reminds the body how to be healthy, rings in light. Light is healing and the scalar wave technology is healing. it’s bringing them together and they both work really phenomenally, powerfully together.

Robin Daly
what you’re saying is they work independently, but they work better together.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
it was entered by Dr. Sandra Rose, actually in the 70s, and she’s an American, and it’s just taken this long to kind of bring it. Now’s the right time for this technology to be shared with the world, and the centre’s popping up all over the place, including places like Delhi, and you know, a conference in Kensington Town Hall for the EE technology, and there was people from everywhere. It’s really chatting the attention of people everywhere.

Robin Daly
Interesting. So, biophotonic is the light part of it, and bio is your cell, I presume they’re referring to, the effects of the light on your cells, yeah? Yes, yes. Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s something that is now moved from woo-woo to science. I mean, yeah, obviously, we know an awful lot now, well, you know, something substantial about how important light is to ourselves, and how it affects our rhythms, and all this kind of thing. Okay, so all these different modules in your course, is it a pick and choose, or do you sign up for the whole series?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
There’s one person who signed up for the lot. I did, I did make a special offer if everyone, if anyone wanted to do the whole lot, the other people are just kind of going, Oh, I fancy the boundaries one, or I want the fasting one or the self-love one. So people are just, it’s like a mix really. It’s people who’ve, um, done one, people are coming back, which is, which is nice. Yeah.

Robin Daly
it’s significantly different for somebody to go and have some therapy on or something on their own and actually to attend one of these things as a group, isn’t it? We were talking about groups when this came out. It’s a different beast, isn’t it? And the potential of a group is far greater than any solo flight.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
It’s like sharing, you know, it amplifies what’s possible and people, when you, when you connect in a group, people, you kind of connect, it becomes quite magical, I think you get interactions where somebody will say, Oh, have you come across this particular thing? And Oh, that’s exactly what I needed to find out about. so there’s a lot of interaction and, and sharing of resources, you know, some fast track weight, you kind of get the information that you need, but also to feel the companionship and the love really, because the end of it, we want, we all need to feel loved and, and actually love is what heals us, you know, at the end of the day, it’s the love that actually heals us. So yeah, you, you can really amplify that with a group.

Robin Daly
Well, thank you for saying that. I don’t know if you’ve come across our charter for oncology, but it’s a six point charter for the way we’d like to see oncology carried out. It’s not about the what, but about the how of oncology. And the strap rhyme for that is, love is the guiding principle for cancer care. So we’re acknowledging exactly what you’re saying. Actually, this is the thing that’s missing from oncology. All the efficiency and the figures and all the rest of it is there. The kind of things you need, you’re going to scrape somebody off the road and save their life, but not enough for somebody who’s facing an existential crisis and their whole life has fallen to bits and they need to know how they’re going to go forward. They are in need of love at that point. And so, yeah, these are the many aspects of the way that a loving service would be delivered. So that’s what we’re trying to highlight.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
useful, what it gives to your brain.

Robin Daly
you’ve been doing this for a long time, and in fact, your life has been all about this, to be honest, you’ve been, you know, had some relationship with oncology right through. And there are lots of changes that have happened over that time, but, you know, mainly in public perception and attitudes, I think they’ve changed a lot. But I think we both agree that healthcare, cancer care in particular, has failed to keep up and is still working with attitudes that seem to be like, okay, in about 1960 something.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
It’s very people, people get treated so badly. It’s like you’re ill and you’ve just, and then you get this shocking diagnosis. Um, people are really spun into fear. Uh, that’s one of the main things I do actually is working with diagnostic shock.

Robin Daly
Wow. That’s actually something that needs to be dealt with, yeah. Yeah. It’s terrible, isn’t it?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
first thing we have to do, because they’re just like rabbits in the headlights. Of course you’ve just been delivered this sort of horrible news in a very, usually a very traumatic way without any care. So yeah, I mean, Matitzda was told, right, you’ve got to live a cancer, go home, get your affairs in order. That’s his symptoms. Amazing. Thank you. Amazing, yeah. Well, the…

Robin Daly
you know, yeah, of course, we’re buried in stories like that, and which is, you know, that’s the foundation of our charter is right. That’s got to stop. We’ve got to do something about it. So there’s a huge change needed in HHS. It’s going bankrupt because it’s trying to do this sort of firefighting approach to chronic disease. It doesn’t work. So the attention needs to go from firefighting. It needs to be moved over towards prevention, health promotion, and it’s got to find a new way of delivering that care as well. So it’s almost like turning the tank around 180 degrees. It’s that different to what it’s doing now.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
really it is that much I know and I guess it has maybe it just has to crumble in order for that to happen I don’t know

Robin Daly
I actually don’t know. I mean, we’ve got this Change NHS initiative, which is asking the public what should we do about the NHS. And of course, we’ve jumped at the chance to put out there and say, whether it make any difference. I’ve no idea. I’ve got a clue whether anybody will read it even. Yeah. But we’ve got to try. Yeah. But anyway, what do you think? I mean, how can this be achieved? Can it be achieved?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
I think it definitely can be achieved. Yeah. The emphasis basically on care and it needs to be on care, not money. That’s essentially what at the moment it is. It’s a money-making operation that shouldn’t be, shouldn’t be anything about money. It should only be about care but that’s what needs to change.

Robin Daly
very well put and I would agree with you but a lot of people wouldn’t even see where how the money is getting in there they say oh wait a minute it’s three nh shares so all this stuff and they don’t see that money’s really involved at all.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
really are taxpayers and we are all paying for it. I’ve completely been making loads and loads of money. It’s just, it breaks my heart really. People are so scared as well when they get diagnosed. And when you’re scared, you give your power away. You’re looking for someone to save you when you’re really scared. Help me, please save me. And then the NHS kind of come along and say, right, this is the plan. We’re going to do surgery. Chemotherapy, radiotherapy, blah, blah, blah, let’s put your appointments up. You’re coming in two weeks. It’s like, haven’t really had a chance to even digest the news, you know. My main advice to people is take your time. Don’t rush into anything. Feel into what you’re doing. Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel right. So when I, you know, because I was told I had to do, you know, surgery, hysterectomy, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, it just felt wrong, you know. So I just gave myself some time to really think about it and feel, you know, what was right for me. And, you know, and that’s what I say. But, you know, take your time to feel into what’s right. Don’t be rushed. You know, of course, it is something, cancer is something you have to pay attention to. And we are going to pay attention to it, but let’s not rush into anything because rushed decisions are rarely good decisions.

Robin Daly
And these are big decisions too, aren’t they?

Fiona Shakeela Burns
life-changing decisions.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
you need a lot of information. That’s the thing. You need to spend some time gathering information, getting really clear on what, what’s going to be the outcome. So if I have surgery, what’s that going to look like in a few years? You know, what’s, what’s radiotherapy going to do to me? Um, what’s chemo, you know, it’s not just about your hair falling out. You know, there’s an awful lot of other stuff that happens when you have chemotherapy that isn’t told to people, but people, you do need, people should be told, um, right at the start, all of the dangers of, of all of the proposed treatments, but they’re not, you know, and this is in my opinion, it’s criminal.

Robin Daly
Yeah, it’s not proper care. We’re going to have to end it there. Fiona, it’s always great to talk to you and carry on doing your great stuff with your group and everything. you’re obviously helping lots of people to find themselves and to get themselves centered and, and behind a course of therapy that works for them, whatever that might be. that’s the most important thing that people are actually making their own choices, they’re doing what they think is best for them. And, uh, so, uh, yeah, it’s not easy in this field to find your way in that way. So any help that comes along in the form of people like you who not only have got some good advice, but you’re, you’ve actually tested this theory out. It works. All right. You could, you’re living proof for the fact that it works. we need people out here. So thank you very much indeed.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Thank you so much. It’s a real honor. Can I just say I do work one-to-one on Zoom and in person as well if people want to come to Bristol as well.

Robin Daly
Okay, thank you. We’ll share details of your website.

Fiona Shakeela Burns
Thank you, Robin. Thanks for everything you’re doing again, and thanks for having me on the show.

Robin Daly
Find out more about Fiona at natureworx.com and there you’ll be able to read about the workshop she was describing during the interview about the methods of support that she uses and you can connect with her if you want to know more. During our chat I was mentioning our yes to life charter for oncology, love as the guiding principle for cancer care. If this sounds like a direction you’d like to see in cancer care then you can read more by going to the yes to life website, scrolling down the home page until you see the link to the charter page and once you’re there you can read about it but also read or download the full charter. You’ll see that it addresses the manner and context in which cancer care is delivered under six headings, hope, empathy, aspiration, respect, trust and open-mindedness. If you like what you read then there’s also a link to a petition to support the aims of the charter and we need many more people to sign up so please do so yourself and encourage your friends and family to do the same. You can also leave a comment as you sign to say why you support its aims. Finally a reminder that it’s not too late to donate to our Christmas appeal, a way that you can help us to help people with cancer to help themselves. You can get to the appeal either by clicking the find out more button on the rolling banner at the top of the home page by yes to life website again that’s yes to life dot all dot uk or you can go straight to the appeal website stockings of hope dot all stockings of hope dot all. For those with cancer and their friends and family there are valuable resources there to provide support throughout Christmas and for donors there’s a free Christmas download of a fabulous recipe booklet containing 33 delicious and healthy recipes for starters, mains, desserts and mocktails. Thank you for listening today, it’s great to be able to share inspirational stories and new discoveries from the world of integrated medicine with you each week and I’ll be back again next week with another yes to life show, so do please join me.