Customized Healing: Blending the Best of Eastern and Western Medicine

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Redefining Health and Healing

Beyond the world of physical there is a higher,

spiritual realm of forms or ideas beyond matter or mechanism.

—PLATO

THE SPIRIT OF HEALING

For almost thirty years as a nutritional and holistic therapist, I have worked with tens of thousands of people. With every consultation, I have become increasingly aware that nature has equipped each of us with the ability to heal. It has also become clear that somewhere in the extreme of today's life, people have lost this ability.

But just exactly what is healing and why does it seem to be so elusive? I believe it is because of the quality of our lives. Take a break from your everyday attitudes for a moment to look deeply within, and there, beneath the surface of life, you'll find a force that animates, elevates, and fills everyone with energy. Although people are not often conscious of this inner aspect of being, it is unconsciously acknowledged when a particular person is noted as being full of life, having a lot of spirit, or a good vibe. These comments all indicate a recognition of a transcendent, spiritlike quality in other human beings.

It is this spiritual essence that I believe holds the key to healing potential.

Although many talk about spirit, the truth is that, as a culture, most people have lost touch with it, along with their wholeness and an awareness of themselves as spiritual, not just physical, beings. In order to heal, it is first important to become whole. Yet without a spiritual sense of self—a sense of spirit and energy—people are left less than whole, dis-associated, and out of touch with an integral part of themselves.

It's easy to see why this has happened. This culture's extremely materialistic bias maintains that only physical things are real, and it invalidates internal realities based on intuition, energy, feelings, and beliefs. Because of this, people have incorrectly defined spirituality and have often respond to it with misunderstanding and mistrust. A good many believe that spirituality is some amorphous thing that can only be found in religious institutions, or is something mystical and mysterious.

But spirituality is simpler than all that; it is as much a part of daily life as the air you breathe. Spirituality is all around everyone every day.

It's every aspect of the universe and of nature.

It is the inspiration that comes with the birth of a child, the joy that is felt with the coming of spring, or the grief felt at the death of a loved one.

Spirituality is reflected in the unique energy of each and every living thing.

Spirit is everything that is not material: life-force energy, dreams, hopes, beliefs, emotions.

Intuition, too, is a type of internal, spiritual phenomenon that science can't measure (maybe one day they'll figure out how—science can now measure many things it couldn't a century ago) and contemporary culture doesn't value. Consequently, unlike their ancestors, people don't trust themselves, their instincts, or what they know in their hearts to be true. This results in a division between the mind and the heart, the mind and the spirit. People may even say they care about soulful and spiritual phenomena, but often the bottom line is that they don't believe that things they can't see can affect them. People forget that they believe in plenty of energies that can't be seen: the forces that bring electricity into the home, the voices at the other end of the phone, the pictures and sound in TVs, computers, and the Internet.

This separation between hearts and minds—the denial of instinctive, intuitive, spiritual natures—creates a terrible rift in the fabric of human beings that has resulted in a grievous lack of self-integration and self-esteem. But how can anyone possibly find the key to trusting and loving themself if they are disconnected from their true nature?

Herbert Maslow, the esteemed human behaviorist, taught that the greatest of all human needs is self-esteem. Greater than the need for food, shelter, or clothing is the need to establish a true self-identity. Without this, it is not possible determine values, priorities, or reasons for living. To love, to be whole, and to heal, every single person must know and be who they are.

The truth is that who people are is not just their material bodies, but also their souls, spirits, and minds.

Not everything can be measured by science yet, and not everything can be known, understood, or treated from the outside. Human beings are a miraculous complex of physical (material) and non-physical (spiritual) energy systems. Like the electricity that illuminates a light bulb, they are powered by an unseen energy life force.

To customize and maximize true healing potential, you need to begin by acknowledging this energy force as it expresses itself in the energies of your mind, spirit, and soul. These parts of yourself—your beliefs, intuitions, thoughts, feelings—must be cared for with as much attention as you devote to your physical body. You need to acknowledge that the body, mind, spirit, and soul are connected in a practical sense. You cannot hate or resent this connection and pretend that those feelings have nothing to do with your hypertension and indigestion. Every scientist and physician now realizes that those feelings have everything to do with physical health. No point keeping a stiff upper lip when your heart is heavy but is refusing to express the grief. Eventually, the grief will find physical expression because emotions are real and have the power to affect the workings of the body.

In physics, it's the relationship between energy and matter.

For the purposes of this book, I use the word mind to refer to the whole spectrum of this part of life-force energy—the spiritual phenomena that include emotions, intuition, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

As you become more tuned-in to these internal dynamics, you will come to more clearly distinguish between them. Begin by acknowledging their presence, their power, and the mysterious and wondrous aspect of life they represent. Without this acknowledgment, you can never be whole and you cannot heal.

THE SPIRIT OF WHOLISM

Just as people need to claim wholeness and the natural, right relationship with themselves as physical, mental, and spiritual beings, they also need to claim their rightful place in the world as a unique part of a greater whole. This awareness is all but lost in modern technological life.

Once, the ancient ancestors lived in tune with Nature. They knew who they were because they recognized their intimate relationships to the big, consistent cycles that brought seed in spring, growth in summer, bounty in fall. Westerners today, however, live as though they can conquer and dominate Nature with no detrimental effects. Technological prowess has led most people to believe they are in no way dependent upon, or connected to, the great cycles of birth and growth by which their ancestors lived and died. But everyone is a part of Nature, and Nature lives within everyone. It is not possible to prosper and remain separate from the natural world, for to do so is to remain severed from your own true natures.

To claim the power to heal, it is first necessary to reclaim awareness of whole-ism. As these fundamental changes in awareness filter down into your life, you begin to change the way you think. As you become whole, you will begin to question many of your previous assumptions.

Another result of living in a materialistic, externally focused culture is losing the belief that you can affect your own healing and thinking instead that only an external agent, a doctor in most cases, can fix you when you're sick. Yet, study after study, as well as the many personal histories being published today, show that people who take an active role in their own healthcare—prevention and treatment—have far more positive results than those who don't. Again, the problem involves changing the beliefs that denigrate the power of your energy by denigrating your own experiences, feelings, and intuitions.

This disinclination to trust your own healing instincts has been fostered by a mechanically biased culture and its medical philosophy that generally, and hypocritically, denies that any kind of life-force energy can have an effect on your health, even when that same medical establishment has plenty of studies to prove otherwise and has, in limited ways, acknowledged the relationship between such energy and health (stress leading to elevated blood pressure, heart attacks, or ulcers, for example).

And while some may believe that emotions wield some power in everyday life, it's likely still not understood how they can influence healing. To most, an inflammation remains an inflammation, and a cyst is just a cyst.

Just as it's important to acknowledge the need to be a good steward of your physical life force, you cannot ignore the effect of your emotional life on your health. You can't expect to be healthy in body, mind, and spirit if you don't pay attention to each of these. You need to give your body good fuel and regular exercise; mental health is maintained by exercising (in other words, acknowledging and releasing) your emotions, and by stimulating your mind; your spirit is nurtured with music, meditation, or spiritual practice. However you choose to live your life, you need to remind yourself often that these three elements—body, mind, and spirit—are inseparable elements of the whole human being.

FACING FEARS HELPS ED BEAT BACK ILLNESS

In my work as a nutitionist and practitioner of classic Chinese medicine, Ed, a patient in his sixties, came to see me after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. His doctors had told him he had three months to live. At the time of his diagnosis, Ed's daughter was due to graduate from UCLA in four month's time and he dearly wanted to be present. This presented him with a real problem because flying topped of the list of many immobilizing fears he had experienced throughout his life. But a few weeks later, the cancer diagnosis and his feeling that he no longer had anything to lose led him to decide he was not only going to live long enough to congratulate his daughter on her graduation, but he was going to get on an airplane for the first time in his life and fly to California from the East Coast to watch her graduate. Ed bought a round-trip ticket, and, challenging his most crippling fear, he flew to Los Angeles for her graduation. Shortly after his return—about five months after the doctors had given him his three-month death sentence—Ed's doctors found that his cancer had gone into full remission. Now, about a decade later, he remains healthy and cancer-free.

Everything you do (how you deal with stress, what you think, feel, and believe, how you choose and prepare the food you eat, the kinds of medicines you take, if any) creates an energetic response that either enhances or diminishes your life-force energy. You need to recognize that all parts of yourself—whether flesh, feeling, or faith—are different conduits for the same single animating life force.

VITALISTIC AND MECHANISTIC BELIEF SYSTEMS

What humankind knows and believes about healing and wellness has continually changed from the beginning of time. Healing systems also differ vastly from one culture to another. Although, except for Native Americans and native peoples in North, Central, and South America, people in the West have been steeped in today's material worldview, there is luckily another model to inform them. To learn from this model, you can look both to your own past and to the ancient healing system (still in use and well-studied and validated) of Eastern cultures, most notably India's ayurveda and classic Chinese medicine (CCM), which has been my dominant influence.

This model is based on the premise that all life is endowed with a vitalizing life force, an energy that both animates matter and forms it. In this model, human beings are part of the natural world and subject to its laws.

Vitalism, as this system is called, holds that although man participates in the process, it is Nature that ultimately heals. Health, then, is matter of complying with Nature in order to most beneficially cultivate the life force that flows through everyone.

Perhaps you can remember your grandparents, or the woman up the street, or the old family doctor as vitalists. When you were sick, they would have wanted to know what was going on at school, how you were feeling, whether you'd gotten a chill at recess. They might have asked what you'd eaten for breakfast, whether you'd been properly dressed for the weather, what was happening at home recently and before you left for school. They innately understood that human beings were whole mind/body systems comprised of interwoven energies that profoundly affected health. They ministered to your feelings and asked about your interaction with your world. They knew that good health was affected by, and the result of, adapting to the dictates of Nature—both inside and out.

On the other hand, the materialistic philosophy of today can be described as a mechanistic system. Mechanism is distinguished by its belief that people are separate from nature: the human mind and spirit can be separated from the body and, like machines, can be analyzed and treated in isolation from nature.

Although mechanistic philosophy (which formed the basis of the Western scientific medical model) still dominates thinking, contemporary science continues to move beyond it. The advanced study of physics has established that all of life can be reduced to a common element billions of times smaller than an atom. Quanta, as they are called by physicists, are neither matter nor energy, but a kind of basic essence from which both are formed. When reduced to its smallest parts, then, the entire phenomenal world is comprised of the same basic stuff.

The science of subatomic physics has established that humans are not separate from each other or from Nature, but are connected in one vast energetic field. This is quantum field theory, and it is a first cousin to vitalism.

Science, then, has proven what the ancients (and even the more recents) intuitively knew to be true. This mechanistic-style validation of vitalistic principles is a greater validation of whole-ism.

Reclaiming Intuitive Knowledge

In the past twenty-five years or so, bolstered by the success of science in proving what had always been essentially intuitive knowledge, the Western world has begun to reclaim a more vitalistic model of living and healing. Many techniques from vitalistic medicinal systems have begun to filter into the everyday world, and alternative therapies and complementary medicine are becoming more and more common. Today, there are many programs at respected medical centers that use a variety of preventive techniques to treat illnesses. Nutritional therapy, as well as mind/body medicine (which includes such stress-reduction techniques as breathing, meditation, ta'i ch'i, and yoga exercises) have proven themselves effective in treating a vast array of medical problems. A host of double-blind studies—the only way Westerners will really believe something is true—illustrate how cultivation and manipulation of the life-force energy heals disease and creates vibrant health.

Not long ago, a study of Finnish men indicated that those who didn't feel love or hope were 20 percent more likely to die of cancer than those men who did. Equally fascinating is the research being done at the Institute of Heartmath, a think tank in Santa Cruz, California. Researchers there are monitoring changes in the bodies of subjects as they practice simple exercises that focus loving feelings in the heart. Not only does the actual heartbeat change in a matter of minutes, but these changes dramatically raise the body's levels of anti-aging hormones, strengthen several chemical indicators of immune-system function, balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and lower a hormone that promotes aging and illness.

Every day, the evidence is mounting to prove that a life-force energy profoundly affects the course of the physical body. What the ancient Chinese knew 5,000 years ago is now better understood—that health and illness are not random events, but are largely the result of how naturally the life-force energy is cultivated.

Of course, knowledge is one thing; incorporating it into your life is another. Experience brings belief, and belief calls for more experience. In order to begin to harness your true healing power, you need to alter how you view who you are and what you believe. Perhaps looking at the world through the eyes of a higher consciousness can be your greatest healing experience.

FIXING KATHY'S DEBILITATING

FOOD SENSITIVITIES

One of my patient's stories is particularly vivid in my mind. At the time I worked with Kathy, she was a young woman in her early thirties who had experienced extreme food sensitivities for several years. There were very few foods she could tolerate without getting sick. She became so congested when she ate dairy, wheat, and yeast that she couldn't function. She also had a number of immunological problems. I muscle-tested her (see Chapter 14) and weaned her from the foods to which she showed sensitivity. Kathy came to the office frequently—once a week for the first month, then every two or three weeks.

During the four months I worked with Kathy, we got to know each other better. Eventually she told me that she'd been living with her fiancé for ten years and wanted to get married,