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Planetary Connections: International News & Forum For New Consciousness
P.O. BOX 44, Evesham, Worcs WR12 7YW
This internationally distributed newspaper is unusual in focusing on positive events around the globe, including world peace, environmental and health issues. It also unusual because its subscription rates are flexible, reflecting the amount of its value to the reader. Issue No. 1 Autumn 1993
Larry Dossey, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine
New York: HarperSanFrancisco 1993 291pp Refs./Notes 22pp $22 cloth ISBN 0-06-250251-4
This marvellous book examines the effects prayer may have upon ourselves and upon others whom we pray for. In a most enjoyably readable style, Dossey reviews an enormous range of evidence which demonstrates that prayer can be a highly potent and effective force to bring about both positive and negative changes.
Dossey brings together the lessons of religious teachings, medical research, psychology, parapsychology and modern physics, showing how prayer can be a potent force in our lives to deal with illness and dis-ease. This is not a one-sided evangelical work. Dossey presents a view of the intuitive, higher awareness attainable through prayer - balanced with the reasoned analysis of a medical clinician who has a wealth of experience in treating people with serious illness and an appreciation of psychological mechanisms whereby one may benefit from healings on many levels. He explains the many nuances of suggestion and placebo effects, showing how doctors can promote health or contribute negatively to a course of disease. He explains many of the mechanisms whereby the mind may influence the body. Most importantly, he takes us beyond these levels to the dimensions where prayer can contribute to healing. He also presents practical and philosophical considerations on healing, as in how surrendering can be empowering.
Dossey reviews clinical and research evidence for near and distant healing. The explanation he favours for healing derives from modern physics, which has theories supported by research to demonstrate that non-local effects may be predictably observed and that time is not the linear river of conventional western cosmology. He points out that in the evolution of medical treatment we have gone through Era I, focusing on mechanical approaches; Era II, focusing on mind-body medicine; and are now entering Era III, of nonlocal or transpersonal medicine. Era III includes time-displacement of healings, again supported by research in engineering and parapsychology laboratories.
Dossey does not rely only on research and statistical analyses. He constantly grounds his observations in clinical anecdotes and personal experiences which make his writing more digestible and enjoyable.
In sorting out various approaches to prayer for healing themselves or others, Dossey notes that everyone must find the method which works best for them. Some have more success with specific requests, others with "Thy will be done." Nearly everyone agrees that engaging aspects of one's mind which are not usually within conscious awareness is essential. Dossey points out:
Attempting to use only the consciously aware part of the mind is like trying to shoot an arrow by pushing it forward from the bow string. Everyone knows it's best to pull the string back and let the power of the bow do the work. In many situations one has to let go in the realization that there simply are some things one cannot make happen. Relying on the hidden, unseen power of our unconscious mind is like that.
Several appendices summarizing other authors' works add support to Dossey's arguments, with tabular summaries and references for 131 controlled studies of healing, cases of spontaneous remissions of cancer, and briefer reviews of research on parapsychology and the efficacy of prayer on various medical problems.
Counterpointing the text, in his usual style, he inserts illuminating quotes from philosophers, scientists, the Bible, ancient Greek scholars and more, as in the following:
...as scholars Ann and Barry Ulanov describe in their book on prayer, Primary Speech, "God becomes a big jukebox prayer wheel and our prayers the coins that operate the machine." But the "jukebox prayer wheel" does not always play our selection: "Prayers are sometimes answered by the experience of more struggle, by our being plunged into situations where we must risk more than we ever dared before."
Stanley Krippner and Patrick Welch, Spiritual Dimensions of Healing
New York: Irvington 1992 251pp Refs. 22pp ISBN 0-8290-3162-6
This exciting book, brought out in the publisher's Frontiers of Consciousness series, is a revised English language version of the authors' Zwischen Himmel und Erde which appeared in 1987. It is a book about spiritual healing - who does it, what happens when they do, why it matters and how we might integrate spiritual healing and its insights into our own health and sickness care. Direct in style and encyclopaedic in range, the book eschews an introduction but immediately engages you in the interface of healing and the spirit. For Krippner and Welch, healing works and healing matters, and their book explores modalities and applications across a wide range of principles and practices.
The authors emphasise that spiritual is not necessarily synonymous with religious. They use spiritual to describe '...those aspects of human behavior and experience that reflect an alleged transcendent intelligence or process.' (p.5) Such a transcendent, intelligent being inspires and directs us in ways which are not identical with institutionalised religious practice, say the authors, and which as yet is not commonly referred to in conventional medicine, nursing or psychotherapy.
The book explores modalities and applications across a wide range of principles and practices. It begins with a chapter on Healing the Spirit, looking at spiritual practitioners and the world view that frames their work. Chapter Two deals with models of healing, usefully placing the allopathic (conventional, western, biomedical) approach amongst the others they consider so that comparisons can usefully be made. Chapter Three considers shamans. I endorse the authors' assertion that allopathic practitioners have yet to take the shaman seriously. The discussion moves from shamans to shamanic healers - an extensive and well informed chapter on healers in sedentary societies, where shamans are often part time practitioners and still include disciplined alterations of consciousness which are intended to facilitate their contact with the spirit world. In Chapter Five, shamanistic healers are considered. These are contemporary healers who may use shamanic ritual without the whole package. This chapter contains a useful elucidation of the four elements of the healing process: environment, practitioner, patient and procedures. Not all healers match their clients in all four dimensions. Chapter Six looks at priests and religious healers. It contains a very helpful tabulation of Elkins' identifiable values of spirituality, to which the authors add one of their own: healing.
Mediums and spiritists come next, followed by sorcerers and witches. Chapter Nine investigates spiritual healing, including a consideration of opposing views on psychoneuroimmunology, with Wallace Sampson, a sceptic, casting doubts on the work of Carl Simonton, Bernie Siegel and Norman Cousins. Chapter Ten reviews research and evaluative work in spiritual healing. The book concludes with two very practical chapters dealing with the integration of spiritual healing into areas such as counselling, psychotherapy, nursing and medicine.
The Chapters are well referenced to a strong and varied list of sources that on their own would be a good bibliographic guide to the 'new paradigm' of health and the whole spiritual dimension of healing.
It was a pleasure to read and review this book. It is clearly written and clearly the product of genuine commitment and extensive research and personal experience. The chapters on practical application were especially interesting to me. I suspect these are the ones I shall reread and remember the most. I imagine the same will be true for all those of us who are seeking ways of integrating traditional wisdom into the new model of health and healing.
This is not just a book, it is a literary medicine pouch. Shamans of the future will carry it with them, strung around their necks on CD-Rom.
Mike Money
Senior Lecturer, Division of Education, Health and Social Science
Liverpool John Moores University
Jordan P. Weiss, Psycho-Energetics: A Method of Self-Discovery and Healing ISBN 0-9738640-1-7 Oceanview Publishing, 10900 Warner Avenue, Suite 117, Fountain Valley, CA 92708 201pp. $15.95 + post
This is an unusually thorough book for emotional self healing, written and self published by a psychiatrist/ healer. Its premise is that mental constructs which are programmed into the mind and linked with emotions can be altered through specific exercises. A series of affirmations, breathing exercises, visualizations and inner dialogues are suggested in graduated progressions which could aid readers to sort out their emotional and relational difficulties. Simple diagrams, ample clinical examples and suggested questions are provided as starting points for understanding and sorting out one's problems, be they phobias, neurotic patterns of behaviour, cancers, or other mental, emotional or physical difficulties.
Of particular interest are suggested inner dialogues with one's unconscious mind. Using these one may seek out the reasons behind illogical, unproductive or even self destructive behaviours in one's current life which derive from earlier, traumatic experiences that left emotinal scars, defensive habits, and damaged self image.
A section on cancer self help therapy offers suggestions along similar lines.
This reviewer must admit to being skeptical of the benefits of many self-help books, when taken on their own. The complexity and subtlety of emoitonal defences offer strong resistances to the success of people in sorting out their own emotional problems without the aid of a therapist. The unconscious mind is such a vigilant protector of people's buried hurts and fears that it seems likely to resist and divert one's attention away from its deepest problems, when probed by people on their own. This reviewer finds that even with diligent work with the help of a psychotherapist the onion of the unconscious mind is most difficult to peel. Even assuming this unresearched and unproved observation to be true, however, Weiss's book would still be of great help to a person working in psychotherapy and to counsellors and psychotherapists who are open to approaches of energy medicine.
Benjamin B. Wolman and Montague Ullman (Eds), Handbook of States of Consciousness
New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold 1986 ISBN 0-442-29456-5
This unusual book includes sophisticated articles on theories, manifestations and accessing of unusual states of consciousness. It is written by a host of eminent experts in these fields and each entry is well referenced. It provides a very enriching survey of topics which are little known or discussed in conventional texts, but often of great interest to serious students of healing. For instance:
Ernest Rossi, an expert on hypnotherapy, surveys altered states of consciousness in everyday life, with particular focus on ultradian rhythms. Ultradian rhythms are shifts in the dominance of left and right cerebral hemispheres, reflected in corresponding shifts in nasal lateral dominance. If one's left nostril is more open at a given moment than the right, then the opposite cerebral hemisphere is more active. These rhythms vary from about 90 to 120 minutes in different people. At the point of shift from dominance of one side to the other, people are more highly suggestible. It is as though they go into a hypnotic trance for that brief period of time.
(Of relevance to healing: Healees may be more open to healing influence at the time of shifts. Healers and/or healees may be more or less receptive to healing during the period of dominance of one hemisphere or the other.)
Patricia Carrington discusses meditations to access altered states of consciousness.
(Most healers appear to utilise altered states of consciousness during healings. Meditation is a way in which to develop and deepen healers' healing abilities, as well as to open healees to varieties of self healing.)
Elmer and Alyce Green consider biofeedback and states of consciousness.
(Again we are reminded of the vast potentials within healees for self healing.)
Other topics surveyed include: Hypnosis, Multiple Personality, Ego States, Lucid Dreaming, Isolation as an Inducer of Altered Consciousness, Trance and Possession States, Psi Phenomena, Drug-Induced States, Flashbacks, Sleep, Non-Drug Induced States, Dreams, Lucid Dreams, Mystical States, and more.
Highly recommended for serious students of mind/emotions/body/spirit connections.
Larissa Vilenskaya and Joan Steffy, Firewalking
Falls Village, CT: Bramble 1991 $14.95 paper ISBN 0-9626184-3-8
In many cultures there are traditions of walking on hot coals, usually as part of religious rituals. Over the past two decades firewalking has been taught in workshops of only 3-4 hours' duration in the US.
Larissa Vilenskaya is a parapsychologist, healer and firewalking instructor. In this fascinating volume she gives us exhaustive historical and current pictures of the spectrum of firewalking practices.
Of obvious relevance to healing is the question of how people can protect themselves from the harm of intense heat. Fire handling is also one of the feats practised by the dervishes discussed by Al-Dargazelli in this Newsletter.
Sceptics suggest there must be conventional explanations for the fact that most people are not burned during firewalking. They propose that sweat on firewalkers' feet or a layer of ash on the coals might provide protection against the searing heat. Yet these theories do not seem to account for the facts that coals with ash on them burn a small number of the many thousands of people who attend firewalking workshops, or that most have relatively dry feet. Other contradictory evidence can be found in people who hold their hands in the flames of acetylene torches and touch red hot metal with no injuries.
Vilenskaya proposes and supports a number of other theories which may explain firewalking. Vilenskaya teaches that walking upon the coals after participating in her preparatory workshops is not the principal thing to be learned. The important lesson is to listen to one's inner voice as to whether it is safe or not to walk over the coals which are between 800-1200 degrees Farenheit.
The editor of this journal can testify from direct observation to the ability of people to learn to walk on hot coals, as he participated in a firewalk under Larissa's direction in 1985.
RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THIS NEWSLETTER
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Wholistic Healing Publications
Daniel J. Benor, MD, ABHM, Editor
P.O. Box 76
Bellmawr, NJ 08099
Phone: (609) 714-1885 (866) 823-4214
Email: DB@WholisticHealingResearch.com
Web: www.WholisticHealingResearch.com
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