January 2005, Volume 5, No. 1

Path to Self

Image credit: Mirtala

Editor's Musings

- Buddha

Is it possible to identify commonalities across the hundreds of variations on the themes of healing?

Between Acupuncture and Zen, your problems may be addressed at many possible levels within the wholistic spectrum. Each modality has its unique characteristics and blends of elements to address your ills - through body, emotions, mind, relationships (with other people and environment)and spirit. One or more of these healing approaches may have precisely the key you are seeking to help you resolve your problems - or may miss the mark in some way that leaves you with minimal response or no benefit at all.

Most of the CAM therapies make broad claims to help many of the same problems. Evidence is beginning to accumulate to show that many of these claims are accurate.

Despite their differences, I am impressed that we can identify several common elements among these therapies - having experienced and studied many of them, and having reviewed the available research confirming the efficacy and effectiveness of a broad spectrum of CAM studies (Benor 2004).

Here is my distillation of the essence of healing interventions - common elements that are found across the spectrum of modalities…

Research

The Mind Resonance Process¨ is an elegantly simple yet profoundly powerful cognitive process that can be used to release traumatic negative perceptions, beliefs, emotions and memories rapidly and permanently. The benefits are many, including renewed energy, inner sense of peace, sense of joy, a sense of rejuvenation, greater resilience to stress, enhanced physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, a more solid sense of one's true identity, and much more.

This paper gives a brief description of employing MRP to help release a traumatic memory. The nature of the actual memory is not important. What is essential is only its qualities as experienced by the individual. As most trauma is experienced emotionally with similar common denominators of reactions except. perhaps, for degrees of intensity, this allows us to generalize the use of one example to many other traumatic memory experiences...

The MRP appears effective in releasing significant negative memories quickly, easily and with permanence. When a negative memory is shared, helping one individual release it with MRP, allows the other to release it spontaneously, with no knowledge of the intervention, and with the intervention occurring from a distance....

(Read more in IJHC January 2005, Volume 5, No. 1)

IJHC/WHR Observations:

Research in the format of single case studies often provides seminal information that opens into new areas for more complex studies.

This study begins to confirm reports that when a person releases negative feelings that may involve another person, the other person may simultaneously experience this release – even though the second person is many miles away and has no way to know about the first person’s change of heart.

The Path to Self

I revisited my internist, and he ordered lab work. Result: A very aggressive case of Hepatitis C (HCV). Since he was not familiar with the treatment of Hepatitis C, I made an appointment with a liver specialist at UCSF, who upon seeing my lab work ordered a liver biopsy for the very next day. At that time, my liver enzymes (ALT) were at a level of 1200 (the normal range is 17-31). When the specialist reviewed the pathology report of my liver biopsy, damage to my liver was already detectable. She asked me if, by any chance, I had been in the hospital in January of that year. Indeed, I had been. Her rationale for asking was based on the fact that my biopsy showed I had genotype 1a of the Hepatitis C virus, the strain that commonly comes from hospital infections, often from unsterile equipment. Further, she was able to deduce from the biopsy that I had contracted the virus just two months previously.

To all the students who went to bed crying or woke up screaming. To all those who needed to leave their hearts at the door.

I just graduated with honors from Tufts University School of Medicine, the class of 1999. I don't feel honorable, though. I have become disillusioned - disgusted even - by medical training and medicine as a whole. I want to help others dispel their illusions as well.

Medical school is four years long. The first two years are basic science lectures, more like an extension of college. The last two years, however, third year and fourth year, involve rotations through hospitals. "One of the few statements with which most physicians would agree," one doctor writes, "is that the third year, the year on the wards, is the critical year in medical education."

"In no year of their adult lives," another contends, "do students change so much as during the third year of medical school."

This is my story of third year, the worst year of my life.

For many students, who - like me - have had no prior clinical experience, third year is the first real contact with medicine, the first taste of what doctors really do, what doctors are really like. I saw medicine as a humanistic career of intimacy - helping people, sharing, caring for people. But what I found was a profession that didn't even seem to care about people. No one around me seemed to question what was happening to them, to the patients, to all of us. As Michelle Harrison wrote in her book A Woman in Residence, "I came to feel I had been fighting a war which no one else even knew existed."

The unusual format of this book is a result of its origins. It started out as excerpts from my diary, a compilation of notes I scribbled to myself in the dark - fragmented snippets, flashes of images. Disjointed and chaotic, it is a reflection of my life and mind at the time...

Wholistic Approaches

My desire to work as a healer within the NHS came about as a result of illness within my own family. My son Sam was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia at the age of seven in 1995. Sam was treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital and his diagnosis was considered very poor. The medical opinion was that Sam would be fortunate to live more than a few months, because statistically his type of leukemia did not respond to treatment. Sam lived for a further three years, during which time he enjoyed a quality of life that unfortunately his peers in with this diagnosis did not. I know that this extra time we had with Sam was due to the complementary therapies care he received. He had very little problem with side effects and the usual life threatening infections that chemotherapy can bring. I believe that healing supported him to be able to tolerate the conventional medicine he received.

DB: ...How did you come into using your intuitive skills?

FM: In college I was looking for a way to practice spirituality after being dispirited by Catholicism. I was seeking other ways to express my spiritual nature, and a friend in college introduced me to the Hindu meditation practice called Divine Science of the Soul. As I began to practice this method, I started to open up more clairvoyantly, clairaudiently, and telepathically. It just seemed to be an automatic process that went along, for me, with the meditation practice. During meditations, I would often go into spontaneous inner healing of myself - releasing sad emotions, healing physical pain and so on. Over a period of seven years, I began to develop a personal system of healing myself in meditation, using my intuitive awareness, which was developing at a rapid rate as I sat in this contemplative process.

DB: And how did you start using that to help others?

FM In one of my meditations, I had a directional epiphany. I went into intuitive inquiry, and I asked what my path was this lifetime. I heard a feminine voice (very clearly not my inner voice) which said, "Your path is to heal people by reading the colors in their aura." This was in my early 20's and I had no idea what it meant.

And at that point, I began searching - looking for ways to follow that path. I started looking for mentors and teachers as there were no intuitive or healing schools where I lived...

DB: As you've worked with your intuition through the years, what shifts have you noticed in the intuition, as it's developed and as you've developed? ...

The desire to eat unnecessarily has little to do with genuine hunger. It is usually a conditioned response that is activated by a number of factors. The three main factors that set off the response are: the presence of outside stimuli that suggest eating, the need to change unpleasant emotional states, comfort food", and genuine eating situations that get out of hand. I will discuss the outside stimuli first.

I can recall sitting in front of the television, happily engrossed in a show, when a food advertisement came on. Within a very short time I would experience a strong desire to eat something, anything. The same thing happened whenever I visited a coffee shop. I would go in intending only to have a cup of coffee. But the presence of those delicious cakes and sweets would set off the craving in me to eat food that I usually didnÕt need. Like most, I simply blamed the food for causing the craving and left it at that.

When the time came to do something about my ever-increasing weight I knew that it would be an absolute waste of time and energy for me to go on yet another diet or exercise program. I know from experience that these approaches require more will-power than I can muster to make them work over the long term. I suspected that if I could do something about getting rid of the desire to eat unnecessarily I would stand a much better chance of success. These are the steps I took to do this.

Variations on the Theme of Healing

Hate, particularly the energy dynamic of hate, is the primary energy problem in the healing of cancer. Hatred, a part of the human experience, comes from a complex mixture of cultural, genetic, past life, or emotional sources. Any of us could manifest cancer, even with our best intentions to lead loving lives. This hatred is not the fault of the person with cancer...

The healers in Three Heart Balancing are called co-healers because we believe that healing occurs within an interpersonal relationship between the person receiving healing, all the family and friends praying and pulling for the ill one, the medical personnel, the healer, and God or the Source of all. While working with cancer, the co-healer depends on other members of this team to achieve the goal of health.

About 70% of the people who seek Three Heart Balancing for many kinds of cancers experience benefits. About 30% quit treatment. Most of those engaging in healing survive their cancer to live useful lives. Some find an enhanced quality of life while battling the cancer. Those who die will die with dignity, consciousness, and often free of pain. I highly recommend Three Heart Balancing along with other naturopathic medicines, good natural nutrition, and psychotherapy to treat cancer...

Wholistic News Reviews

Diabetes and serious psychological distress

Group therapy interventions for people with cancer & HIV/AIDS

Childhood asthma and stress

An aspirin for your migraine?

Physician self-disclosure and patient satisfaction – a mixed bag

Happy Workers/Health Workers

Some Ayurvedic herbal medicines contain heavy metals

Poetry

Book Reviews