Читать книгу The Language Your Body Speaks - Ellen Meredith - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThinking Outside the Box about Healing
Mother Teresa was visiting a health center in India when she came across a man in extreme spasms. His arms, legs, and torso were all contorted and twisted, and he was in agony. She stepped up to him, took one look — a look I can only describe as pragmatic compassion — and then began stroking him all over his body, firmly and rhythmically. It was not a gentle stroke of consolation, as if to say, There, there, oh suffering one. It was more like the calls of a coxswain, bringing a crew into perfect synchronization. As she stroked, his body unfurled, released, relaxed, until he was lying there with arms and legs extended, in obvious release from the pain.
I saw this scene in a video years ago and have revisited the interaction repeatedly over the years, puzzling over just what I saw. On one level, it was the power of loving intention. But it was not just some special Mother Teresa healing magic. If it was a miracle, it was the miracle of the simple and ordinary: the power of touch, and someone’s clear will and intention overriding whatever massive electrical mess was going on in that poor man’s body.
Although Mother Teresa was a skilled healer, the powers she used in that moment were something that I — or anyone — could have called upon to help that suffering soul.
Mother Teresa had the tools for the job in her hands. And somehow, she also had the inner certainty about what to do in that moment and how to do it.
First, she believed she could make a difference. She saw a soul suffering in front of her and stepped forward to do something about it. She practiced a form of active compassion. She asked herself: Is there something I can do for this man in this moment that might help? Can I respond to what the body and soul in front of me are expressing and asking for?
Second, she used touch to communicate (using energy medicine rather than chemical interventions). She trusted her hands. She used them to communicate a focused, calm, organized rhythm to the man’s body. The communication spoke directly to his body’s energies, gave them the organization they needed, and overrode whatever misfires his nervous system was producing. Our hands emit energy that speaks to the energies that make up and run the body. She knew how to use her hands to carry out this communication.
Third, she had inner guidance on how to proceed. Call it faith, or years of habitual listening to her inner compass, but Mother Teresa needed only a few seconds to get a sense of what would be helpful in that situation. Her inner compass was well-calibrated through years of use in practical situations. She did not do a medical triage or logical analysis; she clearly consulted her own inner wisdom and came up with a response that was timely and appropriate. She was not moving from person to person indiscriminately stroking them all!
Fourth, she was willing to try something and observe the results. One of the big differences between Mother Teresa and other people wishing to help was that she stepped in and acted. She didn’t pray over the man, tell him he created his own reality, or exhort him to change his diet. She didn’t make an appointment, sign him up for ongoing care, or give him a treatment plan. She stepped in and tried something in the moment that she sensed he needed right then. In doing that, she came up with one key to help that man and the people around him understand what might support his healing over time. This is what we do each time we engage in energy dialogue.
Was it the complete answer to how to heal the illness that sent his body into spasms? Probably not, but it was a response that he didn’t have before his encounter with Mother Teresa.
In self-healing, we too often lack those four elements: belief you can make a difference; energy medicine tools and conscious touch; inner guidance; and willingness to act in the moment to address what is in front of you. These form a foundation for using energy dialogue to heal yourself.
Mother Teresa’s intervention wasn’t medical, but it was powerful medicine. It was a direct communication in the moment. Can you imagine how different your life would be if, in each moment, you could respond to what is and provide something your body, mind, and spirit need right now?
• • • EXERCISE: MOTHER TERESA TOUCH • • •
This can be tried for nearly any ailment, except one in which it is painful to touch the skin or body. It is particularly good for muscle spasms, stomachaches, digestive woes, heart irregularities, mental irritation or upset, many autoimmune conditions, and even organic issues like kidney disease.
Using a regular rhythm, either one that matches a heartbeat (lub-dub) or one that is brisk but not too aggressive, stroke repeatedly on the body. You can imagine yourself as the coxswain of a rowing crew, helping all the rowers to synchronize their strokes and pull the boat forward in a strong but steady rhythm. It is helpful to stroke downward along the whole body, including the torso, arms, and legs, but you may find that stroking sideways or at angles is also helpful.
Stroking behind the ears and down the back of the head is great for calming reactivity. Stroking down the back and front helps you to ground.
Continue until you feel a release (if you are doing it on yourself) or until the person you are helping takes a deep breath or asks you to stop.
Experiment with how firmly to stroke. Get feedback from your own body, and if you are helping another, from that person. Too light a stroke may irritate the skin and body. You want the rhythm, pace, and clarity of the stroking to set a pattern to replace the confused discomfort or reactivity of the body.
Here is a suggested pattern to use:
Start with your head and stroke from front to back, crown to neck for four to eight counts.
Cross your arms and reach across to each shoulder with your hands, then stroke down both arms for four to eight counts.
Stroke down your front, from collarbone to the bottom of your torso, with one hand on each side of the midline, palms open and covering as much territory as possible. Do this rhythmically in counts of three, four, or five (experiment with what feels best), for as many repetitions as you need.
Starting at your upper chest, place both hands side by side at the midline, and spread the skin horizontally, stroking in counts of three, four, or five. Move your hands down the midline to your belly and repeat, then to your lower belly and repeat.
Stroke down both legs together if you can, or one at a time if that is easier. Stroke the fronts, the inner thighs and calves, the outer thighs and calves, and if you can reach them, the backs of your legs.
If you can get someone to help, have them stroke down your back. If no one is available, use a towel. First rub the towel over your heart to infuse it with caring energy, then pull it down your back.
QUESTIONING THE NORMS
In traditional cultures, medicine is an act, a substance, a symbolic object, or a ritual that catalyzes healing. The medicine man or woman acts as a healer, priest, educator, mediator, teacher, and power broker. In our conventional, allopathic context, taking medicine has come to mean pharmaceuticals, and the practice of medicine is primarily focused on diagnosing problems and attacking illness, not on cultivating harmony between mind, body, and spirit and catalyzing the body’s abilities to heal.
We take so much for granted as natural and normal in our conventional medicine that would make no sense to someone from outside:
•Imagine touring a hospital with a shaman and explaining why we think it supports health to put people who are sick in bland, sterile rooms, apart from loved ones and beloved or sacred objects.
•Imagine taking your visitor to a medical office and trying to explain how the doctor can figure out in ten to twenty minutes what is making someone sick without examining the patient’s life, relationships, food, living quarters, spiritual state, thoughts, energetic affiliations, or other key factors that are considered crucial in most healing traditions.
•Imagine touring a pharmaceutical company with a tribal herbalist and explaining how little white items with no obvious link to nature — or spirit — can serve as medicines.
Allopathic medicine, when it works, can be spectacular. When it doesn’t work, it can get the whole process of healing spectacularly wrong.
I had a friend from elementary school who was diagnosed at the age of twenty with a rare kind of cancer. The whole process of finding and diagnosing his disease was a story of unlikely successes: This was not a cancer with many symptoms (he had a lump near one of his testicles); the blood work he got was not routine, but for some reason his particular insurance allowed the doctor to order it; and the specialist who examined him happened to practice in a teaching hospital where an eager intern thought to test for this nearly unheard-of cancer. And although my friend was given less than a one percent chance of survival, he did survive. They were just pioneering a trial of a new treatment and were able to include him in the study. He was one of the lucky ones for whom it worked.
If the story ended there, you could call this a spectacular triumph of allopathic medicine.
But our shaman visitor might have some follow-up questions. Was my friend healed or merely cancer-free? Had the circumstances that caused his body to go out of balance and develop the cancer been addressed? Was he able to heal his spirit and pursue his soul’s true path into a fulfilling life? Could he reintegrate into harmony with people and community? Did he find a new balance that allowed him to live life in a healthier way?
We don’t expect doctors to ask these questions. Their follow-up is generally designed to identify whether the cancer is now in remission and to make sure there is no recurrence. In our culture, it is the purview of psychologists, ministers, nutritionists, complementary medicine practitioners, and even family members to deal with further aspects of healing (if we even realize these actually are aspects of healing). Of course, ideally, it would also be part of each person’s self-care.
In fact, my friend never found wellness. For a while, he was happy and relieved to be cancer-free. But the instability in his systems, which had triggered the cancer, was still there, and it took many forms over the next twenty-five years of his life.
Although he had regular checkups, the focus was so much on ruling out a return of the cancer that he developed a number of issues that were not treated as skillfully. His thyroid fluctuated from overactive to underactive. He married, but his unaddressed mood problems finally caused his marriage to rupture. He began to withdraw from life in ways that became apparent in retrospect, but at the time were masked by the melancholy, aches, and pains caused by the medications and divorce. And at the age of forty-five, he committed suicide.
This is not a condemnation of allopathic medicine! In my friend’s situation, allopathic medicine did what it is designed to do and produced better results than studies might have predicted. This is a commentary on how we, as a culture, view healing, wellness, and the relationships between body, mind, and spirit.
The purpose of this discussion is not to bash our Western system of medicine and healing, but I think it is important to occasionally remind ourselves, as users of that system, about the crisis in health care we are experiencing in the United States and other industrialized countries. The training, technology, and delivery of allopathic medicine is so unwieldy, true healing frequently gets lost.
What is most relevant in calling out the health care crisis is that it pushes us to go back to the drawing board and rethink healing, health, care, and how to understand illness and wellness. Maybe most important for this book on self-healing using energy medicine, it pushes us to rethink our roles as participants in our own well-being.
Speaking Allopathy
allopathic: relating to or being a system of medicine that aims to combat disease by using remedies (such as drugs or surgery) which produce effects that are different from or incompatible with those of the disease being treated.
— Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary
Western medical systems are built on the foundations of science and the scientific model: That is the language, the mindset, we turn to when we want to influence the body. There are plusses and minuses to this. There are medical interventions that succeed in ways that other systems of healing might not: A surgery to repair a ruptured organ can be a lifesaver. However, if you want to learn to participate in your own healing, science is probably not the best model — or language — for you to use.
Consider the predominant medical perspective for a moment. It sees you as a primarily physical organism, animated via multiple chemical and organic processes. The workings of your body are perceived as a complex of interconnected functional systems. And when something goes wrong, the interventions tend to focus on altering chemical communications via pharmaceuticals, conducting surgical fixes to repair the physical structures, and bombarding invaders — such as germs, viruses, bacteria, and even your own rogue cells — using toxins such as chemotherapy, hoping these will kill the invaders but not the body hosting them.
This perspective has its limitations for me as a self-healer.
If I see myself as a set of interacting chemical processes, I am dependent on scientists to study the right things and to come up with the right interventions. I have to accept the pharmaceuticals that come with pages of side effects because I believe in the interventions those chemicals can bring. Yet the holes in our scientific knowledge base are extensive, starting with who participated in the research and who funded what trials. In addition, although the belief is that your body communicates via hormones, hormone specialists will tell you that they know amazingly little about what these agents are and exactly how they work.
If I think of myself primarily in scientific terms, then unless I can learn all the complexities and lingo, I am dependent on experts to help me understand my own body and, for that matter, my own mind. I don’t ask my body what it wants or needs because I don’t expect to understand the answers. And I most likely won’t listen to the answers until they have been scientifically validated.
If I believe that healing is a matter of balancing the chemistry, then I can find myself with expensive bottles of pills and tinctures trying desperately to modify chemical communications that are far more subtle than the pills can truly regulate. What if I need half a dose one day, a triple dose the next, and no dose the day after that? What if I need the chemical supplement at 10 AM, but at 3 PM the presence of that same chemical communication agent in my system is befuddling normal functions?
If I see my health challenges as arising exclusively from organic and chemical processes, then where do emotion, meaning, spirit, my behaviors, my beliefs, and lived experience fit in?
If I buy into the model of attacking disease, what do I do if the disease arises from lacks or imbalances in how I’m caring for my instrument? What do I do if the very agents meant to silence the symptoms or kill off the invaders interfere with my body’s ability to maintain wellness?
If I buy into the mindset that sees my body as a machine, and illness as a malfunction of that machine, then I think in terms of very mechanistic fixes when something goes wrong, and I miss the communications about what my body, spirit, and mind are asking me to cultivate.
Speaking Energy
On the other hand, if I shift my perspective, and see myself as a web of energies, moving in patterns, creating my body in interaction with my mind (consciousness) and spirit, in a rich language that has meaning, then I can learn to tune in to those energies and patterns. I can learn to communicate with them in both specific and universal ways and create the conditions that allow my body and mind to thrive.
If I understand that my body is part of an energetic spectrum that spans spirit, mind, and body, then I will know that something going wrong with my body can be effectively addressed by working with that whole spectrum.
The language of energy is not a metaphor! It is as real as science as a way of understanding how we are constructed, and it offers us significant tools for interacting with our own being to support healing, health, well-being, and the creation of a meaningful life.
When you shift your perspective to understand the workings of your body, mind, and spirit as energy communications, healing becomes a very individualized and personal matter. And you don’t have to learn Latin and study science to understand your instrument.
The capacity to understand — and speak — the language of energy is coded into us, every bit as much as the capacity to learn English or Chinese. But like learning English or Chinese, we need to be supported in learning to speak. We need to be exposed to the language of energy in its specifics to activate our innate ability to use it.
Your body is made of energy and communicates energetically. Even chemical communications, at their root, are energetic exchanges of protons and neutrons. Learning the language of energy gives you power to understand and shift the course of illness and disease. More important, it allows you not only to decode illness but also to encode wellness, since it works through interaction and dialogue with the energies that are moving and shifting within you, creating your physical, mental, and spiritual experience.
Speaking energy goes way beyond explaining physical phenomena using what science has discovered about the subtle energies. Speaking energy entails shifting how you understand yourself to be constructed and learning how to participate more consciously in the energetic exchanges within and around you. Practicing energy medicine similarly goes well beyond learning techniques or studying modalities. It involves activating your ability to speak the language of energy and addressing your body, mind, and spirit in their own native idiom.
However, using allopathic medicine or energy medicine does not need to be an either/or proposition when you are trying to address your health. There are times when allopathic medicine is a godsend, and times when energy medicine is a more effective mode of communication. Often, the two can complement each other.
My friend with the rare cancer got treated medically for cancer and that threat to his life was neutralized. But if he had been seen by his medical team as a web of meaningful exchanges that had fallen out of balance, creating cells that no longer followed healthy replication patterns, his practitioners might have addressed both the cellular issues and the imbalance in his web of meaning. He might have learned self-care tools that no practitioner can provide day in and day out. He might have found practices that balanced his body’s chemistry from within. And he might have found true recovery and wellness, rather than cancer remission among his life-hampering imbalance.
A BROADER PERSPECTIVE ON HEALING
What does it mean to transcend the limitations of allopathic medicine and our shared cultural beliefs about healing? Too often when we are looking for new approaches, we turn to complementary medicine but bring our conventional medicine mindset to the task. We want the same old model of diagnosing problems, receiving treatment, and then taking a substance to medicate. We want approaches that are scientifically validated. How can you transcend these cultural expectations and learn to think differently in order to harness the true potential of energy healing?
Reclaim Subjectivity
The scientific mindset calls for objectivity and discourages subjectivity. This means that all the information that arises within you — your inner knowing, your experiential insights, your personal experience, the personal storyline in which the health challenge developed — is considered mostly irrelevant.
A young doctor finishing up her residency recently told me that she is not able to use her intuition in her job. She is expected to practice evidence-based medicine, which means she must cite studies that validate her medical choices. This might be a good idea if studies were funded to research all kinds of people and if these studies were able to account for the multiple dimensions of how disease and illness play out. But that isn’t what happens.
By asking doctors to turn off their intuition and rely on evidence, I believe the medical profession is hampering the way the mind is designed to work: Right-brain intuition guides our journey, and left-brain logic works out the details of the itinerary. What would happen to medical care if doctors were encouraged to use both evidence and intuition to guide their choices, and they could use both medical and alternative remedies as needed?
Validate Your Authority to Determine Your Own Well-being
Related to the notion of subjectivity is the question of who has the authority to decide what you should do in order to heal — or even what healing would look like for you. In our culture, doctors are often seen as allknowing priests, and friends and family tell us not to question that. Physicians’ input can be valuable, but many of them don’t distinguish well between what they know and don’t know. Missing from their knowledge base is what your individual soul is trying to enact, how your lifestyle and beliefs affect your health, and how your energies — which underlie the chemical behaviors of your body — flow and interact.
The authority we give doctors and scientists to define our individual and collective truth is sometimes taken to an extreme. The other day I read an article with the teaser: “Scientists have proven the existence of past lives.” The need to have something proven by science that has been explored and validated as a truth within many spiritual traditions is almost a caricature of our culture’s obsession with scientific “proof.” How can we trust ourselves to find our own path to healing when people around us are trained to ask: Can that be proven scientifically? Has that been validated with medical tests? Is that what your doctor thinks?
In this book, I use subjective information to guide the discussion as much as possible: I prefer using anecdotes that illuminate concepts and understandings rather than offering scientific studies to prove my points. This is a nonscientific form of discourse. You might ask yourself whether it bothers you to not have science repeatedly cited as an authority. Can what I am saying be true if I don’t cite some study that proves it? I am not saying science is always wrong, nor am I rejecting science. Instead, I think focusing solely on science deflects us from understanding the communications of our bodies and minds. It undermines our confidence in our ability to participate in our own healing and it curtails other ways of knowing.
Be Willing to Be an Exception to the Rule
Allopathic medicine is based on studies that prove statistically that something is true or effective. A medication or treatment must work for a given percentage of people studied before it is approved for use, though sometimes the demonstrated effectiveness of a medication is not much greater than its placebo effect! There are good reasons for insisting a medication work for many, but this shuts out usages that might help individuals. Herbalists believe individualized potions are more effective than just giving the same generic treatment to everyone with the same complaint.
Years ago, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, I had a client who told me he had healed his AIDS. He had been tested (a number of times) as HIV positive, and then he caught pneumonia, which bumped his diagnosis to active AIDS. After he recovered from the pneumonia, he worked on his health using spiritual and nutritional approaches, and after eight years, he was consistently testing HIV negative. I was amazed and excited to hear his story. I asked: “What do your doctors say? Have you shared your story with others?” The belief at that time was that AIDS could not be survived, much less healed.
He said he was choosing to keep his story private, explaining, “When I tell people, they either don’t believe me or they believe I am in denial and will soon die. I have chosen not to live with their beliefs because that will overwhelm my own truth. So although I do occasionally get retested, I do not choose to live as an AIDS patient.”
This man was an exception, and life is full of splendid, amazing exceptions from whom we have much to learn. What he taught me was not to discount individual solutions or exceptions to the rule. I also learned to be more aware of the power of social beliefs in healing.
If everyone around you believes you can’t heal, it takes tremendous self-confidence and precious resources to break through that field of expectation to find your own path and truth, to become the exception to the rule.
Sue was a nurse who came to see me at the strong request of her partner, who believed in complementary medicine. Sue did not. But since she was scheduled to undergo a procedure the next day to have her thyroid irradiated (which essentially kills the nonfunctioning thyroid so they can balance your thyroid function through pills), she decided to give energy healing a try. I agreed to see her on the condition that, afterward, she have her thyroid blood levels retested before she went ahead with the planned medical procedure.
She agreed. When I tuned in to her throat energetically, I found that her thyroid had basically switched off. I used the language of energy to dialogue with her thyroid and move the switches to the on position. I could see the glandular tissue reanimate and return to normal functioning. I could hear it, the way you hear a refrigerator start up once you change the fuse that has blown a circuit.
She had gone off all thyroid medication in anticipation of the surgery and felt wiped out without it. Within a few minutes of resetting the switches, she reported (with some surprise) that she felt normal again. Joking, she asked, “Did you slip me a thyroid pill?” In a way I did. I activated the communication system of her energies to reanimate the gland, which in turn produced what her body needed!
The next day, Sue followed through on her promise and asked her doctor to test her thyroid levels one more time. The blood work came back showing normal on all parameters. The doctor was mystified. He asked her what she had done and whether she had somehow taken some thyroid medication, though he knew as a nurse she knew better. She told him about our session.
He barely let her get the words “energy healer” out of her mouth before hurrying to assure her that “idiopathic recovery” occasionally happened and telling her he was canceling her surgery. He asked her to return in a week to see if her levels were still adequate and her thyroid was still functioning. (It was.) What he didn’t do was show any interest or curiosity about her unique experience. He didn’t want to know more about energy healing or what led her to try it. He didn’t care that this individual had found a solution that might hold promise for other individuals. He had a name for what happened — idiopathic means unique to the individual — and therefore, it was not valid or interesting to him.
I have seen this response again and again as clients who experienced successful healing or self-healing encountered disbelief or dismissal from doctors, family, friends, and even within themselves. So I have come to see the wisdom of my ex-AIDS client who wanted to fly beneath the social radar. Using energy medicine successfully includes being willing to be an exception, to beat the odds, to defy gravity, to celebrate the unique capacities of our own bodies and energy systems. It is important to leave room for miracles in each dialogue we have with our own physical being. Experience has taught me that what is sometimes seen as a miracle is in fact just a matter of knowing how to communicate via energy.
Learn to Cultivate Evidence from Multiple Realms
I once accompanied a seventy-three-year-old friend with stage IV breast cancer through her medical experience. When she was diagnosed, the nurse said: “Now you’ll get the million-dollar treatment.” She was sent for test after test, shuffling from doctor to doctor, and found herself in a kind of cancer world where natives knew the routine and she was whirled from one invasive experience to another.
My friend wanted to participate in her own healing. She also wanted to know the scientific basis of the recommendations for the myriad decisions she needed to make. At each decision point, she would ask: “What do the studies say about this?” And after evasions and assurances that her doctors were recommending the best practice, she would ultimately discover they didn’t really know. The research was based on young women or not disaggregated for other key factors, like lifestyle or nutrition. The science just wasn’t there. And the “standard of care” recommendations were not based on women her age or with her self-care skills. They were essentially guesses, albeit educated guesses, masquerading as science.
At one point, my friend had to make the harrowing decision to reject further medical intervention, without the benefit of any relevant scientific evidence and against the standardized recommendations of her doctors. She chose to use the evidence of her body, and her own intuition and wisdom, to make her choice.
That risk paid off: She has remained cancer-free for five years. But the process was agonizing. And she had to give up the notion that science was the only source of evidence that could guide her to figure out what was best for her as an individual.
While more and better research would help, that won’t solve the basic problem. The scientific method calls for controlled environments in which to study a phenomenon and find the truth. But life isn’t lived in isolated circumstances, and studying something in a controlled, laboratory setting often alters its behavior. How can researchers possibly control all the variables to study how a particular body will respond when it has gone out of balance and developed a particular disease? Often, research studies give us the illusion that we understand phenomena when we don’t.
Instead, it makes more sense to incorporate additional ways of assessing and knowing what a particular mind-body-spirit is undergoing. It also makes sense to incorporate nutritional supports, lifestyle, and energy medicine — wellness practices — into the mix.
The Western medical system favors information gleaned from isolating things to understand them, while sometimes dismissing the wisdom of understanding your health in the context of who you are, how you live, what kind of nourishment you receive, how well your instrument is played, what role your mind plays, what your soul’s purpose might be, and how environments have influenced you historically and in the present. These dimensions are significant in energy medicine.
As a self-healer, it is important that you cultivate and assess evidence of what your body needs, can tolerate, and is expressing. That evidence might have some relevant science to bolster it. But it may also be subjective, arising from dialoguing with your body in various contexts and situations. It will be informed by your history and illuminated by alternative expertise about how mind, body, and spirit can heal.
The notion that we should defer to scientific understandings, laboratory results, and standardized treatments even when our own experience is telling us otherwise runs deep in our culture. As a self-healer, you may find it more effective to treat yourself as the main character in a novel, dealing with a rich plot, setting, and cast of characters all influencing your evolution, rather than trying to isolate your symptoms and assess your situation scientifically.
Recognize Your Illness as a Falling Away from Wellness
In allopathic medicine, gallbladder disease is studied as a phenomenon that happens to the gallbladder as an organ. The literature on gallbladder disease focuses on how the organ behaves under various conditions and what can be done to alter that. It does not usually focus on what happened in each patient’s life, what behaviors, physiology, and energy usage caused their gallbladder to tank. Ten patients with gallbladder disease might receive somewhat individualized approaches, but basically the doctor is treating their gallbladder.
In Chinese medicine (and most other forms of energy medicine), a diseased gallbladder is seen more as the result of imbalance in the whole energetic circulation of the individual. Ten people who have diseased gallbladders are treated as ten different energy profiles. Disease is seen as a falling away from wellness (not as a separate thing), so the path to wellness for each individual has to do with what kind of person they are and what is happening for them in terms of nutrition, energy flows, their environmental and lifestyle choices, and more.
This is more than just saying allopathic medicine treats the illness whereas energy medicine works with the person experiencing the illness. In our culture, we tend to think of illness as something apart from life and from the individual experiencing the illness. We medicalize life processes such as childbirth and death, and within the medical context, we get depersonalized. An extreme example of this is when hospital personnel refer to someone as “the heart attack in room C320.” It is a reflection of society’s philosophy about where illness and wellness reside.
If I believe my illness is something I caught, or some faulty part that has malfunctioned, or something only a specialist can address, then I must wait for the drugs, surgeon, or specialist to come rescue me. But if I believe my illness is part of how I function, then I can shift my functioning and nudge my body toward wellness.
If I believe my symptoms are a personal indicator of my internal communications, and not just a named disease with prescribed treatment protocols, then I can dialogue with my body to change the conversation and often heal it from within. Even if my gallbladder must be removed because the imbalance has stressed the organ into nonviability, I still need to improve the conversation and address the whole-self imbalances that led to the organ failure.
Try this: When you are grappling with a named disease or condition, ask yourself how having this condition serves you. Then ask yourself what ease would entail and how you could cultivate that.
Affirm the Unique Qualities You Embody
If you go to a dog show, you can see a huge variety of breeds, each massively different, and yet each is called a dog. If you go to the pound, you can expand on this variety. There are commonalities among all dogs, but you would never take care of or medicate a greyhound the same way you would a Saint Bernard or a Chihuahua.
Somehow, when it comes to healing, our culture seems to think a body is a body is a body. Maybe you will require a bit more or less medicine than the next person, based on your size, age, and gender (though even those distinctions are often ignored). But basically, we see the human body as more similar than different.
Donna Eden, an energy medicine pioneer who can see the body’s subtle energies, says frequently that, although there are common patterns (chakras, meridians, the aura, and other energy systems), “each person’s energies are as unique as a thumbprint.”
Can you imagine working with a healing practitioner who helped you identify what can support your individual moving dynamic of energies to thrive?
This is a very different approach than our medical mentality of asking: What is wrong and how can we fix it? Allopathic medicine assumes that a blood profile is usually sufficient to understand what is happening, ignoring the fact that even the time lapse between the tests and the consultation brings a change.
What if we understood the body as an ongoing story, with multiple plotlines weaving in and out? What if instead of looking to eradicate what is wrong, we focused on bringing those plotlines into greater clarity, harmony, and balance?
The notion of sameness makes us miss crucial cues in healing and self-healing. It keeps us from understanding our own breed and individuality and measuring our expectations against that. For example, if your natural energy is slow and stately (like a tortoise), then trying to keep up in a world full of hares will cause you stress and eventually illness.
Knowing what kind of person you are is key to self-healing. Knowing what your soul’s purpose is, what energizes or drains you personally and specifically, what particular foods are nourishing to you, is part of being able to heal. Yet this conversation rarely comes up in allopathic contexts. We may be told to lower our stress, but each individual has a very different relationship to stress. What stresses me may make your heart sing. Recognizing individuality is crucial if we don’t want to jump from one set of shoulds to another.
The idea of measuring ourselves against a norm is deeply ingrained in us. It affects how we interpret our health and success. If you can suspend your socialized mind enough to see yourself not as a body (species human, subtype female or male) and instead see yourself as a web of energies, a web of meaning, you can see how medicine that is individualized to your unique web would be more effective than something designed to manipulate the chemistry of a generic physical body.
Understand the Interplay between Body, Mind, and Spirit
Early anatomists dissected corpses to understand the organs and workings of the body. This evolved into a practice of medicine that is still focused on the body as an object, apart from whatever might animate it. The cosmology behind this suggests a separation between the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of our being. Allopathic doctors are not trained to deal with our emotional or spiritual health. This is problematic if you believe your body, mind, and spirit are interrelated.
On the other hand, cultures that have developed highly evolved forms of energy medicine (China, India, Tibet, aboriginal, and so on) evolved out of a cosmology that considers the mental, spiritual, and physical realms to be interrelated. Practitioners use observation and experimentation, herbs (chemistry), and physical manipulations, just as Western medicine does, but they also use intuition and expanded mental abilities to glean information.
Insights into the health of the body are developed in the larger context of who you are. Evidence is gathered from the patient, the family or tribe, the body’s behavior, movements of the subtle energies, and elemental factors based on the group’s spiritual understandings of how we are constructed. In most cases, healers look at what is needed not only on the physical level but also on the level of soul and mind.
Yoga practitioners do not just identify weak muscles and do exercises to strengthen them; they work to build strength throughout the body, mind, and spirit.
This is more than preventive medicine — it is proactive medicine, or practices that promote wellness.
Understanding about how the soul constructs the body, and how the body reacts to mental and spiritual conditions, is part of most energy healing traditions. But it is often mocked and discredited in allopathic contexts and may be discredited by your friends and family if they see the allopathic model as exclusively valid. It may be seen as superstition or guesswork, primitive or ignorant of reality (as defined in our rationalist, scientific culture). If we want to develop a contemporary understanding of self-healing using energy medicine, we need to recognize this. Social prejudice against complementary healing has diminished greatly in the past twenty years. But it is still alive and kicking in many settings.
As you set out to learn the language of energy, I invite you to keep your outsider perspective handy, to explore and experiment, to try things on for size, to tune in and investigate what feels true for you. It is not necessary to reject allopathic medicine to learn self-healing through energy medicine. But it is necessary to be willing to work from the inside out, determining for yourself how you are constructed, how to dialogue with and bolster your own unique thumbprint of energies, and what energy nourishment would best support your journey in this life.
• • • MEDITATION: EXPLORING THE WEB OF MEANING • • •
Read these instructions into a recorder or ask a friend to read this slowly for you:
Shut your eyes for a moment and tune in to your body as a creature, like a dog or cat. You may even want to give yourself a good rub, as you would your family pet. Wag your tail. Flex each foot and feel it as you set it down again. Stretch and bend the fingers of each hand, feeling how intricate and amazing your hands are. Shift your back in a swaying motion side to side, feeling how your spine can flex and bend. Feel the flesh, muscle, sinew, bones, and organs that make up this miraculous instrument.
I call this creature your Earth Elemental Self. It feels solid, but each organ, bone, and connector is a community of cells, which are in their turn small energy generators made of molecules and atoms, communicating endlessly within themselves and with other cells to collectively create this thing we call a body.
Now, tune in to your mind: the knowing, thinking part of you, the Talking Self. If your attention is up in your head, in your brain, let that awareness of mind expand to include the knowing, the me, that fills your whole body. Feel into your heart area and its wisdom, your solar plexus, your gut, your hands and feet. Let your awareness travel wherever this Talking Self resides. Your Talking Self isn’t limited to your body space. You can send your mind out into other situations, other places, using your imagination. Feel this part of you that creates dramas, develops your identity and life story, codifies experience using language, thought, and perception. This self is also made of energies, more subtle perhaps than the energies that compose matter.
Now, tune in to your Wiser Self. Feel into your soul, or Source Self. Does it take a form, have sound, color, sensation, light, or come into your awareness through direct knowing? Is your Wiser Self standing apart from you, or is it cohabiting the same area as your body? Is your Wiser Self alone or standing with others? Your Wiser Self is also made of energy — perhaps the most obviously energetic of the three selves. How do you perceive those energies?
The life-force energy you are made of is not neutral; it has light, color, vibration, movement, pattern, and meaning. Just as each note in the musical scale comes together into songs that communicate to us, the energies that you are made of aggregate and communicate meaning. Feel all that meaning that creates you. Let yourself feel the web of energies, spanning a spectrum from spirit through mind through body, moving and exchanging and communicating and pulsing with life.
This pulsing field of meaning is you: a web of energies communicating and connecting, forming patterns and working independently. You are a web of meaning. Feel that, as you felt your own physical body at the start of this exercise. When you are ready, open your eyes, and look at everything in the world around you as interacting energies your instrument has learned to perceive, then interpret, as form, thought, or spirit.
PRACTICE TIPS
•Adopt an energy medicine mindset, like putting on a pair of outsider glasses, to get a handle on what is happening in your body, mind, and spirit. What might your situation look like to an alien, recently landed? What tools do you have — from language, from literature, from life, from friends and teachers — that allow you to understand what is happening for you now?
•Try using nonscientific language to describe your situation. Metaphors are great: “I feel like a volcano about to erupt.” “I feel like a mouse being toyed with by a cat.” “My body feels angry and rebellious — like a teen trying to find her own identity.” Be subjective in characterizing what is going on for you.
•Spend time gathering and assessing evidence of what your body needs, can tolerate, and is expressing. Put aside what you have read about nutrition, body chemistry, even spirituality, and just see what your own body wants to tell you. Treat yourself as an infant who can’t yet talk but who can still express wants and needs. (I provide more guidance on how to engage in energy dialogue in later chapters.)
•Try the “Mother Teresa Touch” (page 15) on yourself when you are feeling emotional, physical, or social imbalance. What are you hearing/understanding about your situation as you do it, and what are you communicating?
•Explore any illness or imbalance in relation to how you function. What is the story that gives it context? For example, I recently caught a cold that everyone around me was getting. It is valid to just say “a cold is a cold.” But in my specific case, I caught it after three months of high stress. It hit my throat at a time when communications were particularly challenged for me. It didn’t affect my lungs, but it hung on and on, sapping my energy to move forward. What can these conditions teach me about how I need to adjust my functioning and nudge my body toward wellness? What needs did the cold meet (albeit in an unlovely way)? Even though everyone I knew was responding to the virus, what did my particular cold have to offer me in my creation of a life, relationships, plotline, and body?
