Buddha in the Waiting Room: Simple Truths about Health, Illness, and Healing

by Paul Brenner, MD, PhD

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Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words 2002 142pp $14.95

Paul Brenner is a gynecologist who left medicine for personal development and to be a healer. His path included studies in acupuncture, t’ai chi and healing. He has sessions with people for several hours, listening to the life stories that liberate physical as well as psychological dis-ease – and sometimes disease as well.

I attended a workshop Paul led about twenty years ago, in which he introduced participants to ways in which we could access our inner wisdom. Simple exercises were truly profound in their effectiveness, such as attending to the feelings of rightness and wrongness in our body and consciousness as we listened to workshop partners speaking about issues that were important to them.

Brenner writes:

I suggest that you let your body answer the questions posed by your mind. The body does not know how to lie. Illness is real. Since it is difficult to control your autonomic nervous system (your heart, lungs, kidneys, etc.), which as everything to do with human survival, trust it to know the answers to your questioning mind. And trust your mind to know what has to be asked. Make the unconscious conscious.

Christie, a thirty-eight-year-old, battled breast cancer for almost eight years. “Paul,” she said, “there comes a time when a doctor has no right to tell me what is best for me. I’ve got the cancer and lived with it for more than seven years. I have enough trouble dealing with my own helplessness without having to take on theirs. Sometimes I think I’m staying alive for my doctor. My death is not his failure, damn it – Nor is it mine.”

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