Healing Power Beyond Medicine

book.

Part I

Awakening: Body-Mind-Spirit

Chapter I

Introduction

Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.

—Hippocrates

Healing Power Beyond Medicine includes an integration of what I define as a biopsychosocial-spiritual paradigm (body-mind-spirit) that better defines and enhances spirituality. In addition, eight obstacles to healing are identified, and a plan of action is presented, which includes five ancient healing modalities now known as Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM): mindfulness, meditation, sound healing, Reiki, and aromatherapy with therapeutic grade essential oils. To demonstrate the successful outcomes of this integrated approach to healing, personal anecdotes, reflections, poems, and more than 45 inspirational case histories from among my patients and students are shared throughout the book. Whereas it has been widely reported that spontaneous healings occur at a rate of 1% and living longer than expected occurs at a rate of 3%, I have found these percentages to be 20% and 95% among my students and patients.

I do present alarming facts as other authors present alarming facts about the healing challenges we face. I also echo the wisdom voices of awakened and enlightened beings as they have been heard before. However, I take a step beyond the wake-up call to an awakening of personal empowerment. I offer skillful means and a toolbox that allows us to take charge of our whole life without having to depend on others. The means are integrated into what might appear to be a shotgun approach but this reaction is only because of the insidious reductivist conditioning that still permeates our psyche as a result of Descartes separating mind from body in the 17th century. Since that time we have continued to dissect the whole of human existence even further, to the extent that we have been reduced to specialties of conventional medicine that exclude the most essential component of all in regard to healing—our indestructible, beginningless endless spirit or primordial consciousness, luminous clear light and joy—whose essence is as space. Lao Tzu (1997) expressed:

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.

There are already enough names.

One must know when to stop.

Knowing when to stop averts trouble.

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

In the wake of one’s suffering, I often hear the words, I need hope. However, to wish for hope when there appears to be none would be wishing to cling to a future oriented non-conceptual construct outside of ourselves. For example, if someone is lost in a storm on a mountain, consumed with fear and despair, would we tell that person to have hope? Or, would we direct that person, right now, in a crucial moment of life or death, to tap into his inner strength, look directly into the eyes of fear and despair and transform those self-defeating emotions into fearlessness? On an absolute view, we can be in whatever we experience without clinging to hope and hopelessness or fear and fearlessness, such as when Tibet’s great yogi Milarepa said, I have forgot to think of hope and fear. However, because most of us have not reached that level of discipline and realization, when the bottom drops out we need to begin somewhere in order to be able to pull up our boots by the boot straps.

New research findings from Johns Hopkins University report that between 1999-2005 the suicide rate increased among middleaged white Americans by 7%, when normally this population is not impacted by suicide (Hu, Wilcox & Wissow, 2008). It is anticipated that this rate will continue to increase, particularly during this perilous time of economic crisis, prohibitive health care costs, soaring unemployment rates, home foreclosures, and loss of investments and life-long retirement plans. The American Psychological Association reported from a survey of 2,529 individuals that 61% of individuals have health concerns and 59% have economic concerns that are a significant cause of stress (APA, 2008). Only one in eight cancer patients have the financial means to pursue conventional medical treatment, and of those few patients who do seek treatment, many of them will not heal, nor will medical treatment result in positive health outcomes. These grave statistics are among a preponderance of evidence that demonstrates an urgent need for us to become equipped with viable skills that facilitate healing beyond medicine.

The fact that the Office of Alternative Medicine (CAM) and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) were developed as a result of public demand for the recognition and integration of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is encouraging, and that demand is now reflected in the mainstream media. For example, on June 24, 2009 MSNBC News reported that 83 percent of Americans are concerned about health care reform, and on June 30, 2009, CNN News presented a segment, Looking Beyond the Doctor’s Office: More People Looking to Alternative Medicine. However, physicians and many other health care professionals still adopt a reductive rather than a holistic and spiritual view of the patient and do not typically view CAM as a viable option for their patients. In a research study among cancer patients, it was reported that as many as 75% of patients never discuss CAM with their clinicians although findings suggested that patients value clinicians’ acceptance of CAM and prefer that their clinicians and health plan providers would more actively support and inform patients’ use of these forms of therapy. A common attitude summarized by the participants in the study was, With a life-threatening illness, you can’t afford to be closed-minded about any approach to healing (Vuckovic & Wick, 1999). In addition, NCCAM appears to be challenged with how to research and report the spirituality that is inherent in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

Troy was told by his neurologist, You have ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. You might live two years and then because of the paralysis, one day you’ll stop breathing. Devastated, Troy found a small room in the hospital where, for the next three hours, he could cry without causing a disturbance. He found the walls and ceiling closing in on him—trapped—with no possible escape—no hope—only terrifying fear and despair. The two options that his physician had presented to him were 1) impending death or 2) a costly and experimental prescription drug of nearly $1,000 a month that might delay his death by five months. Troy doesn’t recall how he found his way home; however, the diagnostic experience he endured, and its aftermath, exacerbated his symptoms to the extent that he could not get out of bed the next day. He lay motionless and wondered how he could share this death sentence with loved ones. His greatest despair was the painful awareness that conventional medicine had little or nothing to offer him. Yet, in the darkness of a moment when he had no escape door and no place to hide, he was introduced to a profound teaching about fear that teaches us about courage. A voice whispered from an unknown part within him, You have to do something. Troy telephoned me and walked through my door a couple of days later. He had done exactly as Lao Tzu described, A journey of a million miles begins with a single step.

Troy became one of my students and adopted the complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) of mindfulness, meditation, Reiki, and sound healing, which resulted in a spiritual healing. Nearly two years later, his disease has shown slow progression, and he lives in a state of remarkable peace, joy, gratitude, and a sense of oneness with the universe—an option that conventional medicine did not offer to him.

Troy is among a growing population of people who choose to heal beyond medicine because their only other choice is to give up or die in fear and despair because their physician has chosen to impose what they view as a predictable outcome based on their limited statistics and world view. In my experience, these anticipated outcomes are not predictable at all; thus, it saddens me when I am aware of people who continue to suffer because they would never think to search for another option and recognize their own power to heal on biological, psychological, social and/or spiritual levels. Who encouraged these people to believe that they should only place hope into something external to themselves—such as scientific researchers—who will hopefully come to the rescue and find a cure for their disease? Is our society somehow responsible for this displacement of hope? In my opinion, that is placing hope in nothing more than a crapshoot.

Dot was diagnosed in Stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph glands. She was told by her physician, You have less than a 1% chance of living two years. Although most people would have given up and died, Dot wasn’t one of them. After I sent Reiki to her at a distance and mailed a sound healing CD to her, she attended one of my First Degree Reiki classes in San Diego. Two months later when she advanced to my Second Degree Reiki class, she announced upon arrival, NSD (no sign of disease), NSD!!!! It is seven years later, and I keep receiving NSD reports from her. Her astonished physician reported that her fighting spirit exceeded that of his favorite football team.

Sandy was in Stage IV breast cancer that had metastasized. Her physician told her to prepare for hospice but because she was in a great deal of pain, she decided to enroll in my First Degree Reiki class with her son who also wanted to be able to help alleviate her pain as she prepared for death. At the end of the class, she said, I’m healed. I’m either healed into life or I’m healed into death, but I’m healed. She experienced a spontaneous healing that day, and eight years later she remains free of all cancer.

Cathy, a single mother in her mid 30’s, was also diagnosed in Stage IV breast cancer that had metastasized to her bones. She diligently sought medical opinions from oncologists at three of the top cancer clinics in the United States. As a result, she was told that would live less than 6 weeks if she did not undergo surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Cathy asked one of the oncologists if he would work with her if she chose to integrate alternative medicine. He replied, No, we are a research institution, funded by pharamceutical companies. If I deviate from their research protocol, I couldn’t work here. Complementary and alternative medicine would skew the data points. Cathy gasped, You mean I’m a data point? Despite the sensation of drowning in a sea of intense fear, Cathy courageously refused surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy and chose, instead, to augment her spiritual strength with Reiki, sound healing, meditation, positive affirmations, and aggressive homeopathic treatment. Two years later she is vibrant and free of cancer.

Keri, a young woman in her 20’s, was diagnosed in Stage IV lymphoma and underwent the surgical removal of her gallbladder and the lymph nodes in her right arm, followed by radiation. This aggressive course of treatment did not avert her fast-growing cancer, and the prognosis was that she would live less than a year. Keri came to see me for individual healing sessions and enrolled in my mindfulness and meditation class, which enabled her to see that her worry of the future was adversely affecting her ability to heal. She also completed essential oils and First and Second Degree Reiki classes, benefitted from using lavender essential oil, and attended group healing circles. Today she is not only cancer free, but the swelling in her right arm, the result of surgical removal of lymph nodes, has reversed itself, a reversal that her physician believed was impossible.

It is imperative that we shift from a paradigm of conventional medicine that ignores or patronizes spirituality and develop skillful means to integrate cost-efficacious ancient healing modalities—now classified in the West as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)—that demonstrate positive outcome results in regard to health and healing without iatrogenic effects. More important than CAM is the need for greater integration of spirituality into the process of healing, which takes us on a journey beyond intellectual knowledge into a microcosm of deep awareness, reflection, experience, and understanding. Healing does not occur without it, which is why I place emphasis on its need for recognition, development, and integration into daily life. Spiritual realization is our birthright and our innate nature, and it is prudent to have methods and skillful means that will assist us in that realization.

With spiritual orientation as the foundation of a biopsychosocial-spiritual paradigm, fear can be transformed into fearlessness and courage, and despair can be transformed into peaceful acceptance. Mindfulness brings us home to rich inner awareness as we proceed in the direction of a healing course of action. Meditation allows us to cage and still the swinging monkey. The swinging monkey is a representation of the mind chatter I have defined as the undiagnosed addiction that keeps our compulsive thoughts swinging to the time-delineated pain of the past and the worry of the future. Your thinking is like a camel driver and you are the camel; driven in every direction by its bitter control, Rumi said. Nothing can more sabotage our health and healing efforts. The trained and disciplined mind enables us to let go of the obsessive treadmill-like negative little story that keeps us in a state of pessimism often to the point of exhaustion. Only with a still and un-scattered mind can we discover the ocean depth that rescues us from being tossed to and fro by thrashing waves at the surface. At this depth, our sense faculties become dormant and only aspects of the mind (primordial awareness or space) appear—awareness, clarity, and joy. It is possible to find joy in the Eastern way of being rather than the Western way of doing.

As a result of calming and disciplining the mind, a supportive stage is set on rock rather than on sand, and an environment is created in which we can successfully progress through eight necessary steps to healing: 1) transform fear 2) let go of the little story; 3) view pain, illness, and disease as a teacher; 4) understand the Law of Cause and Effect; 5) be the person you wish to become; 6) believe in what you’re doing; 7) develop compassion for self and others, and 8) approach a plan with diligence. We can also integrate other powerful CAM into our lives—such as Reiki, sound healing, and aromatherapy with therapeutic grade essential oils. The utilization of these lifelong tools are a testament that healing and wholeness can be restored without iatrogenic or adverse side effects, and peace, harmony, and gratitude can become a way of life.

Chapter II

Past and Present Models of Healing

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

—World Health Organization (WHO)

Everywhere else in the world, including the pre-Columbian native culture of the Americas, medicine has embraced and integrated the deeply engrained cultural belief in body-mind-spirit. The Ancients studied the stars and the earth with awe and humility and a desire to participate in the rhythms of the universe with a sense of oneness. Division between objective and subjective truths—science and religion—didn’t exist. Only recently in the West have we seen a growing awareness and paradigm shift towards ancient and traditional body-mind-spirit growth and healing philosophy; however, there remains the challenge of how to access, develop, and integrate spiritual modalities into our lives and particularly, into conventional medicine as we know it to exist.

Descartes Disconnects Mind-Body

We can thank René Descartes for an unfortunate epoch in history, when, in the 17th Century, he initiated the belief that the mind and body are not connected. His statement, I think, therefore I am, is not philosophically accurate because thinking faculties cannot shed light on man’s ultimate Being or true nature. The human mind, like the phenomenal world it cognizes, is in perpetual flux and can yield no finalities. Intellectual satisfaction is not the ultimate goal (Yogananda, 2001, p. 427). Nonetheless, with the intention to save scientists from becoming a dying breed due to Church oppression, Descartes separated reality into two parts: what could be measured was given to science and that which could not be measured was given to the Church. Unfortunately, this separation of science from spirit led to the deeply engrained European belief in the dualistic separation of mind and body. As Europeans later immigrated to America, they brought this philosophy with them to the extent that separation between church and state became part of our constitution. The disconnect between mind and body was woven into our culture and into our psyche. The scientific method was hailed as a be-all and end-all to knowledge. The biomedical model emerged with a reductive perspective that focused on single-category, single-cause, and single-effect models of health, illness, and suffering. Contemporary science, with its left-brain analytical bias has continued to be skeptical of anything that is spiritual, intuitive or mystical that cannot be measured by its standard of the scientific method. This denies the validity of that which is sacred. Consciousness itself is subjective.

In contrast, if we go back in time to the Vedic sages of India, their pursuit of truth was called brahmavidya, the supreme science, a discipline in which attention is focused on the contents of consciousness. In practice, this means meditation. The modern mind balks at calling meditation scientific, but in these sages’ passion for truth, in their search for reality as something that is the same under all conditions and from all points of view, in their insistence on direct observation and systemic empirical method, we find the essence of the scientific spirit. It is not improper to call brahmavidya a series of experiments—on the mind, by the mind—with predictable, replicable results. Of course, the sages of the Upanishads took a different track from conventional science. They looked not at the world outside, but at human knowledge of the world outside. They sought invariants in the contents of consciousness and discarded everything impermanent as ultimately unreal, in the way that the sensations of a dream are seen to be unreal when one awakens. Their principle was neti, neti atma: This is not the self; that is not the self. They peeled away personality like an onion, layer after layer, and found nothing permanent in the mass of perceptions, thoughts, emotions, drives, and memories that we call I. Yet, when everything individual was stripped away, an intense awareness remained: consciousness itself.

The sages called this ultimate ground of personality atman, the Self. If, as Aldous Huxley observed, science is the reduction of multiplicities to unities, no civilization has been more scientific. From the Rig Veda on, India’s scriptures are steeped in the conviction of an all-pervasive order (ritam) in the whole of creation that is reflected in each part. In medieval Europe, it was the realization that there cannot be one set of natural laws governing earth and another set governing the heavens that led to the birth of classical physics. In a similar insight, Vedic India conceived of the natural world—not only physical phenomena but human action and thought—as uniformly governed by universal law called dharma…In its broadest application, dharma expresses the central law of life, that all things and events are part of an indivisible whole" (Dhammapada, 2007, p. 19-20).

The powerful biomedical cultural conditioning in the West, based on Western standards of science via Descartes, still permeates our society, which was observed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama while being interviewed by Howard C. Cutler, M.D., psychiatrist. His Holiness explained that in some instances the basic premises and parameters set up by Western science can limit the ability to deal with certain realities, such as imprints left from past lives. He also discussed the Western mode of analysis that has a strong rationalistic tendency in assuming that everything can be accounted for. For example, he met with doctors at a university medical school who were discussing the brain, stating that thoughts and feelings were the result of different chemical reactions and changes in the brain. The Dalai Lama raised the question: Is it possible to conceive the reverse sequence, where the thoughts give rise to the sequence of chemical events in the brain? Their response was, We start from the premise that all thoughts are products or functions of chemical reactions in the brain (Dalai Lama, 1998, p.6). We have little need for physicians who are unwilling to open the door to other realities and challenge rigid thinking, which is precisely why people began to recognize that their overall health needs were not being met because biomedical research was not having a sufficient impact in humanistic terms.

Medical Training in Non-Compassion

Although a physician’s relationship with a patient can have as much or more of an effect on positive health outcome as technological skill and intervention, modern medical school training still values technical competence far more than interpersonal skills. As a result, physicians are often criticized for not taking time to talk or listen to their patients. Ironically, patients encourage this when they demand that physicians rely on science and technology to quick fix their problems rather than discover the underlying reasons that caused their problems.

Charaka (Frawley & Ranade, 2001) stated, "The physician who, though knowing the disease, does not reach the inner self of the patient with the light of his knowledge, will not succeed in his treatment. Yet, as most of us have experienced, many physicians see a patient with one foot in the door and one foot out the door even after a patient has waited in the waiting room for an hour or more. I have personally known physicians who book patients at five-minute intervals and one who would never take his eyes off of my patient chart the entire time he talked to me. This does not allow time to create a healing, spiritual environment where a patient feels compassionate concern. Although I have seen literally hundreds of students and patients who have undergone failed conventional medical treatment, I have heard less than a handful of stories about their compassionate physician. Instead, I hear accounts of their physician’s behavior—primarily in the way they communicate—that are impersonal, cold, and far removed from the realm of compassion for human suffering. I cannot help but reflect on the words of Cecily Saunders, the founder of Hospice, when she came to the United States and told a group of medical doctors, You are a bunch of bloody barbarians! Pain can be controlled!"

On more than one occasion, I have sat at a dinner table and listened to surgeons tell their operating room jokes. I expressed my concern about the impact this has on the patient who is undergoing surgery. Although the surgeons claimed that jokes alleviate their stress, I suggested far more appropriate options, such as prayer, mantras, or sound healing music played in the operating room. We now know that the unconscious patient can hear every word while under general anesthesia. For example, a patient with cancer recently confided that she gave up following a surgical procedure. After engaging in psychotherapy to determine why her sudden death wish, it was discovered under hypnosis that her surgeon made the comment during surgery, I’m patronizing this woman. She should have been dead a long time ago.

Understandably, Western physicians are increasingly under attack for their lack of compassion, viewed as prescribers and technicians rather than healers. For example, Rosen (2008) discussed a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Researchers looked at transcripts from 20 consultations between men with lung cancer and their surgeons or oncologists at a veterans’ affairs hospital. Of the 384 opportunities physicians had to show empathy to their patients, they missed all but 39 chances. We also recall the story of a physician who was on his way to becoming a promising surgeon in his own right until he left a patient on the operating room table during surgery so he could cash his paycheck at the bank (Swidey, 2004).

However, a physician’s limitations are influenced by how he is taught and trained. Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. psychiatrist, took a break from medical school because he felt discouraged by the lack of empathy in my professors and the way patients—and students—were treated as physical objects seemingly devoid of an internal world. When he returned to medical school, after exploring this widespread blindness to the inner reality of the mind (Siegel, 2010, p. 69) it was clear to him:

Many of my teachers in medicine had honed the physical lens—seeing the subtle signs and symptoms of physiological disease. This was an important, but incomplete aspect of being a healer. I came to realize that these professors lacked the development of the lens that enabled them to see the mind’s feelings or thoughts, its hopes, dreams, and attitudes. Theirs was a world of the physical, and the subjective, internal life of the patient was painfully missing from their worldview (pp. 69; 96).

We are now aware of the insensitive and uncaring treatment that resident physicians receive during their training, working consecutive 24-30 hour shifts for years with little or no sleep. They work these shifts in the operating room, emergency room, on wards and in clinics, and then drive their car home. Yet, for decades, industries responsible for public safety have been subject to federal regulations that limit the number of hours their employees can work. Can we imagine a pilot flying a plane if he hadn’t slept for 30 hours? Teachers of resident physicians have set a standard of little or no compassion when they disregard the health, well-being, and safety of their resident physicians and the patients who are in their care. Fortunately, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) (2008) released a comprehensive, up-to-date report that summarizes the robust evidence that links fatigue with decreased performance and higher medical error rates and asserts that strong and prompt action should be taken.

Biopsychosocial Model

Because medical institutions taught physicians to focus on disease, physicians lacked interest in the personal problems of patients and their families and were viewed as being cold, insensitive, and impersonal. Medicine was soon under attack for failing to address the psychosocial domain. Some believed that the biomedical model should be replaced with a multicategory, multi-case, multi-effect biopsychosocial model that reflected a major paradigm shift in science in general (Schwartz, 1982). A pertinent question was raised: Is suffering an individual pathologic problem or is suffering caused by multiple factors within biopsychosocial parameters?

Parlee (1981) asserted that almost all sociologists and anthropologists, some psychologists, and few biologists are familiar with, and take for granted, ideas on the sociology of knowledge and the social construction of reality that cause gaps across disciplines. Some theorists in the social and psychological sciences argued that little credence was actually given to psychosocial facts in the cause of disease pathology, but rather, only as impacting or exacerbating a pre-existing physiological illness. They argued that the biopsychosocial model was a glossy biomedical model (Armstrong, 1987) and lended a subsidiary status to the social sciences (Engel, 1980), although diseases are defined by members of society before the reason or cause for them is located in the body (Armstrong, 1987; Gatchel & Baum, 1983).

Conceived by Engel (1977), the biopsychosocial model was based on a systems approach that recognizes subatomic elements at the base of the model, progressing through related and hierarchical stages of complexity to cells, tissues, organs, individual’s behavior, and relations with significant others; to culture and society; and finally, to the biosphere. This theory reinforced the belief of many disciplines outside the biomedical realm: Reduction of life to the molecular levels prevents understanding of human health, disease, and wellness because one is not viewed as a whole person. This further espoused holistic health philosophies that emerged more than a decade ago but philosophies that lacked the inclusion of a spiritual realm.

Schwartz (1982) advocated the unifying theory of the biopsychosocial model following the Yale Conference on Behavioral Medicine in 1977. The theory recognized the emerging fields of behavioral medicine and behavioral health, proposing that medical diagnosis should always consider the interaction of biological, psychological, and social factors in order to assess a person’s health and make recommendation for treatment. Later, Dreher (1986) stated that these factors are both cause and effect for most health problems. Yet, despite alleged weaknesses of the biopsychosocial model, it was found that the added social variable proved more useful than the biomedical model in the treatment of disorders such as childhood depression (Lewis and Lewis, l98l); multiple sclerosis (Vanderplate, 1984), grief (Engle, 1977), and premenstrual syndrome (Keye & Trunnell,