Consciousness & Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine

by Marilyn Schlitz/ Tina Amorok, with Marc S. Micozzi

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St. Louis, MO: Elsevier/ Churchill Livingstone 2005.

This book is a marvelously rich sampler of writings by clinicians and theorists in mind-body healing, some of them in original offerings, many as excerpts from previous articles. They are arranged in a coherent pattern, with sections/subsections on

DEFINING INTEGRAL MEDICINE;

MAPPING THE HEALING SYSTEM: Mind-Body Medicine, New Perspectives on the Body, Re-Visioning Illness; Honoring the Spectrum of Life;

HEALING: A MOVE TOWARDS WHOLENESS: Psychology’s Move Toward Wholeness, Spirituality Religion and Healing, Essential Capacities;

HONORING MULTIPLE WAYS OF KNOWING: Epistemological Pluralism, Integrating the Wisdom of the World’s Healing Systems;

ENVISIONING A NEW STORY FOR HEALTH AND HEALING: Transformations of Medicine, Sociopolitical Transformations of Integral Medicine, Healthy Earth-Healthy Human, Social Healing.

… the extent to which these gay men were ‘closeted…’ [revealed that] HIV infection advanced more rapidly in direct proportion to the extent participants concealed their gay identity. The investigators successfully ruled out explanations based on demographic characteristics, health practices, sexual behavior, and antiretroviral therapy. (p. 71)

Booth and Ashbridge’s model is reinforced by the many conspicuous metaphors between the mind-brain and immune-healing systems, long ago postulated by the psychoimmunology pioneer George Solomon. Both systems have the capacity for memory; both are designed for adaptation to environmental stressors; both serve functions of defense; both are harmed by inadequate defenses; both are harmed by excessive defenses; and both develop either tolerance or sensitivity to “noxious” (i.e. stressful, antigenic) agents. (p. 76)

The history of our lives, our joys and sorrows, has been inscribed upon our bodies. Our bodies remember everything from our first breath to our last dream. (p. 120)

Many years into my daily practice of surgery, I realized that the steps used in the enactment of a surgical operation mirror in pattern and sequence those used in rites of passage, which the anthropologist Mircea Eliade and others have delineated. The parallels between the two sequences, both on the literal and symbolic level, are indeed remarkable.

Summary of the Initiatory Sequence (Rites of Passage) 

• A crisis, social or individual

• Fasting and contemplation (separation)

• Purification and stripping off outer life

• Voluntary entrance into sacred space

• Death/rebirth sequence

• Blood or sacrifice ritual

• Regeneration/rebirth

Surgical Sequence

• An illness, accident, or other potential life-changing event

• Fasting (NPO--nothing by mouth the night before)

• Purification and cleansing

• Remove garments of outer life

• Enter an inner sanctum (operating room)

• Lay down on an altar (operating table)

• Undergo a death/rebirth (soma/anesthesia)

• Healing/rejuvenation" (p. 122)

• In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, from abstraction to concreteness;

• In early modern medicine, from exteriority (theories of humors and dispositions) to interiority (“mechanical, dense and opaque… an extremely intricate machine…”

• Pursuing mechanistic explanations, modern medicine moved from qualities to causalities;

• Moving towards more systemic thinking, from states to processes;

• Shifting from analyzing the parts separately to holistic explanations and systemic integration

In doing this work, I have had a chance to spend a lot of time with the same group of patients over a period of many years. We got to know each other very well. They were about as different from each other as you could imagine--in age, race, religion, socio-economics, demographics, sex, sexual preference, disease severity, you name it. At first, it seemed the only thing they had in common was heart disease. But over time we began to realize that many of them had something else in common: an emotional or spiritual heart disease. By that I mean the sense of loneliness, isolation, and alienation that I think is epidemic in our culture." (p. 307)

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