A readiness to laugh, learn and love, and to connect and engage in some creative way with life will lead to greater happiness and health. That's the view of well known Western Australian psychotherapist and spiritual mentor, Dr Loretta do Rosario who spoke to Margaret Evans.

"Don't move the way fear wants you to. Instead, move from within. Create a foolish project today. Noah did."

A poem by 12th century Sufi mystic Rumi.

Turning the corner into a tranquil garden setting just minutes from the busy midweek hubbub of Fremantle, the bright blue wooden footbridge that suddenly appears before me brings a surge of childish delight. The touch of whimsy, the sheer joy of such primary colors - the next one along the path is bright red - marks this spiritual retreat as something out of the ordinary.

Feeling like Dorothy following the yellow brick road to the Land of Oz, I cross the blue bridge over a Japanese-style rockpool to meet Dr Loretta do Rosario, a woman you immediately sense shares your pleasure in the unexpected splash of creativity before you enter her oasis of Zen-like calm.

As Wellness Facilitator for the Cancer Support Association of WA, a position she has held since last August, the impressively credentialled Loretta is convinced that people who embrace a challenge and engage with life in their own uniquely creative way enjoy a greater sense of wellness and soul. Quoting a personal favourite, the 12th century Sufi poet Rumi, who appreciated Noah's apparently outrageous vision to "save the world", she gives a belly laugh of total approval.

In more than 20 years of research and work in transpersonal psychology and spiritual development and mentoring, during which she completed a doctorate on the spiritual health and wellbeing of people with chronic illness and disabilities, Loretta has become convinced of the essential importance of what she calls "holding yourself dear". And it's the message she conveyed to a conference in Perth last month aimed at helping people living with cancer approach their disease against a holistic background of physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing.

"I've found in my research that regardless of whether we're well or we're ill, it's not the bits and pieces that we do, aromatherapy or massage or whatever it is, that makes the difference. It's how you hold your life together, the holding of the overall, the connecting of the overall, the patterns of your life. The difference is when people go down this path of holding their lives dear," Loretta explains.

"Fragmentation these days pulls us in so many different directions. So many women will say 'I'm a mother, I'm a wife, I'm so many other things. Who am I? I don't know!'

"And most people don't care because they've lost that energy. They're so burnt out inside that they don't even have the energy to care anymore."

Instilling that energy to care is the mission Loretta has taken on in her new role with the Association, a non-profit organisation formed to help people affected by cancer in their lives, either as a sufferer or as a family member or friend. As she puts it, "to be paid to love is an extraordinary privilege", invoking the original meaning of the word therapist (from the Greek therapon) as 'comrade in a common struggle'.

And her own journey has included many meetings with people whose thoughts have stayed with her including Raymond Carver, a cancer sufferer himself, who said: "And did you get what you wanted from life, even so. You did?

What was it that you wanted? To call myself beloved and to feel beloved with the earth".

It's particularly with people facing the end of their life that Loretta is most conscious of the intensity of spiritual connection… and the privilege she enjoys in meeting people who are facing up to their own mortality with remarkable calmness and even acceptance.

"It's paradoxical, but many of those who hold their life most dear are the ones who say ' If I die tomorrow, it's okay. I'm happy. I'm not asking to die, but if my life goes, it's okay.'

"I have found that the people who have made a difference to their lives, whether they've been cured or died, whether they've had 10 years or 50 after their initial diagnosis, are those who love life. They love themselves and they've found new love in life whether if be partners, jobs, dogs…."

She's the first to admit that not everyone is prepared to " go down the spiritual route" at such times of personal crisis. "But what I have found, and I've been very privileged when doing my doctorate work in the early '90s to meet a range of people with very serious conditions, is a sense of connection and coherence at the end of one's life. It doesn't necessarily mean "God stuff" - it's more a sense of 'I am one with life," Loretta explains.

One such person who has made a profound impression on her and others is Maureen Borello who writes of her own more than six year battle against cancer in the Association's newsletter Wellness News. In an article titled "Life is a Wonderful Challenge and Gift", Maureen opens her personal story with: "The doctors expected me to be dead many years ago." Riddled with tumours from a primary kidney cancer, Maureen has defied the odds and writes that she has "seen [her] cancers disappear through much hard work and inner healing. Instead of giving up I chose to listen to the inner healer within and fight for my life".

Meditation, reflexology and chi gung are among the techniques she uses every day to, as she writes, "stimulate the natural life force and vitality that we all have within our bodies. And till this day, I'm always clearing my energies, my body, my lymph nodes - so my chi can flow well."

Maureen is vital living proof of what Loretta is convinced is a crucial wakeup call inherent in many illnesses and personal crises. At the Perth conference she outlined her belief that "dis-ease" and disharmony can often be the trigger to grab hold of a fragmented life and begin to live with a greater sense of wholeness.

"For those already deeply down a spiritual path, it may be a call to better live and better learn," says Loretta.

"And I find those who really learn are those who choose what I call the three Ls and the three Cs - to laugh, learn and love and to care, connect and be challenged meaning to be creative. They take these six variables and go for them, whether they're housewives, executives or business people. It doesn't really matter." The audience of people already attuned to a holistic approach to coping with illness and seeking to play a role in their own path to health and happiness was fertile ground for Loretta's theory of 'the Five Factors of Wellness'.

The first, says Loretta, is the power of hope, exemplified by people like Maureen, closely allied with the power of positive social support. She gives another example of a woman called Christine faced with a devastating breast cancer diagnosis and an imperative from her doctor to "come in tomorrow because we have to whip them both off".

"Up until then, she'd always described herself as a 'Yes' woman - yes to her husband, yes to her kids, yes to the P&C - the proverbial doormat. But for the first time she said 'No'.

"Instead, she took up her own battle and received unconditional support from her family. Instead of saying 'Doctor, doctor, tell me what to do', Christine is an example of choosing for yourself whether you live or die. And the power of that authentic discriminative force, of choice, is tremendous." The power of taking control of your life is also borne out by studies of stress levels, as discussed in NOVA (April 2002) by Nick Martin. In one British study, higher level public servants, those with more control over their work environment, had lower stress levels, and in an interesting parallel, lower rates of dementia, than those further down the ladder with less control over their lives. Loretta, too, supports the view that taking control of your own wellness is a way of releasing the pressure cooker valve.

Meaningful engagement with life, creative pursuits of any sort, is the fourth of her factors of wellness and here the belly laugh endorsement of Sufi poet Rumi makes her point.

And, finally, the power of spirituality - "the power of connection, or holding one's life dear" - completes her paradigm.

Working with people who want to be well, spiritually as well as physically, is the mainstay of Loretta's varied career, both as therapist, facilitator and, more recently, spiritual mentor. Her long experience has allowed her to witness the shift in the mantra of cancer treatment away from the "fight your cancer" rhetoric of the '70s and '80s towards more the imaginative, symbolic energetic healing gaining credence today. Loretta is convinced more than ever that "love is the greatest power".

"It's the heart that really runs the show and that's been the body of opinion over thousands of years. It doesn't matter if you have a good mind, meaning consciousness, or not, if you don't have the creative fire within. So it really comes down to love."

And, according to this very thoughtful and well read woman, the imperative we must all take from the horror of September 11 is that we must love ourselves as the starting point for any greater good to come of it.

"It's the heart that changes the mind. It's the heart space that creates thoughts, stimulates imagination… and then the positive relationships and positive connections follow."