The Extra-Ordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things: Fourteen natural steps to health and happiness

by Larry Dossey

Download PDF

Return to Master Book Reviews Table of Contents

New York: Harmony/ Random House 2006.  305 pp   Notes 32 pp   $24.95

Larry Dossey is one of my favorite authors. I always look forward to reading anything he has written, as there is always information and wisdom with healing in his writings. This book is certainly no exception.

His fourteen chapters consider the topics of optimism, forgetting, novelty, tears, dire, music, risk, plants, bugs, unhappiness, nothing, voices, mystery and miracles. In each, Dossey’s gifts of pattern recognition and lateral thinking, which point out fresh awarenesses  
and understandings of the world.

Here are just a few of the numerous gems you will find in this lovely, informative book:

Under Dirt:

Throughout history, rituals evolved as a way of acting out and neutralizing the dirt of the shadow [deeply buried aspects of our awareness], thus functioning as a kind of safety valve for the psyche. These rituals were bawdy, relatively innocuous, and fun. For centuries the Church didn’t make much headway in its attempts to clean up the behavior of parishioners. They were still trying to sanitize things when, in 1444, the Theological Faculty of Paris issued a letter to all the French bishops fulminating against festivals known as “Fools’ Holidays.” Even the priests joined in these celebrations, in which worshippers gleefully elect a “Fools’ Pope,” which was a deliberate insult to His Holiness. These events must have been quite a show. “[In} the very midst of divine service masqueraders with grotesque faces, disguised as women, lions and mummers, performed their dances, sang indecent songs in the choir, ate their greasy food from a corner of the altar near the priest celebrating mass, got out their games of dice, burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, and ran and hopped about all over the church.” (p. 88-89)

While we all enjoy bawdy humor, which is today shared broadly and generously in internet passalongs, the ritualization of such humor as a release for negativity is largely missing in our lives.

Under Plants:

…African and Asian immigrants [to the ecologically isolated island of Madagascar] confronted nearly fiteen thousand species of flowering plants, 90 percent of which they were totally unfamiliar with from their previous habitats. Yet in a mere hundred generations they managed to sort through this huge inventory of exotic plants, so that today they have an impressive array of useful herbal remedies for sale in any market. How did they do it? there simply hasn't been time to test every strange plant, and determine which part of the plant, in which season, and from which species, works best – and whether it should be eaten whole, boiled, dried, or fresh. As Watson succinctly puts it, they must have had help.

And the help, it seems, comes from the plants themselves. When Watson asked a local healer how they know that an extract from the leaves of a local flowering plant, picked in the spring, is good for a condition they call ‘milky blood,’ he always gets the same answer, “Oh, it’s easy,” they say, “we ask the plants.” (p. 137-138)

As with any of Dossey’s observations, there are always quotes and references that enrich his discussions and invite deeper explorations by interested readers.

Under Risk:

Do risk and safety really contradict each other? Many ancient philosophers said no. they maintained that opposites were actually in cahoots with each other. Oppositional relationships were fundamental, they said, a kind of glue that held the world together. As the ancient Greek sage Hermes Trismegistus allegedly said, “By the friendship of contraries, and the blending of things unlike, the fire of heaven has been changed into light, which is shed on all below…”

Dossey considers a variety of evidence of health benefits of risk-taking, such as a study showing that men who are moderately more aggressive having stronger immune systems, and women who risked joining the work force evidencing better cardiac health.

This is a great book to keep by your work station or bedside for a few delectable minutes of refreshing ideas.

Review by Daniel J. Benor, MD, ABHM, Editor, IJHC

Return to Master Book Reviews Table of Contents