When Nothing More Can Be Done

 “Illness and the opportunity it presents people to engage consciously and actively in a journey toward wholeness can be one of the most transformative experiences that life offers. It provides you with space for self-reflection, for caring for yourself and your needs in a way that may not have been possible in your busy everyday life. It can give you time for learning about who you are, your purpose, your potential; a time for reassessing your priorities and the value of your relationships, work, and possessions. Illness (or disease) can be the beginning of a deep, spiritual quest.” Rituals of Healing :Using Guided Imagery for Health and Wellness, by Jeanne Achterberg, Ph.D., Barbara Dossey, M.S., FAAN, and Leslie Kolmeier, R.N., MEd., (p. 12). 

New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

As  Hurricane Sandy slams into the U.S., the system brought winds high enough to knock out my power here in Michigan. It is difficult to read about and watch the reports of damage. And it comes at a time that is already tender for me as I prepare to be guest speaker at Berrien Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Sunday morning at 10:30.

The title of the message is, "When Nothing More Can Be Done." The message is based around the inner journey that happens to a person when the medical community gives up on him or her. In 1999 when Jane's surgeon saw 22 malignant tumors on her liver, he closed her back up and told her he could not keep cutting on her. Saying her head was in a bad place, he suggested she find a "holistic healer".

I have never met that surgeon, but I am grateful to him for giving Jane a nudge toward changes that were much more than skin-deep. In Love & Survival: 8 Pathways to Intimacy and Healing, Dr. Dean Ornish reminds readers that even when drugs and surgery are necessary, they are just the beginning. The physical body – the heart, is more than just a mechanical pump. Ornish says you also have an emotional heart, a psychological heart, and a spiritual heart. 

“Curing is when the physical disease gets measurably better. Healing is a process of becoming whole. Even the words heal and whole and holy come from the same root. Returning healing to medicine is like returning justice to law.”(p. 15)

You can read my story, but the abbreviated version is my having been in chronic pain, on lots of prescription pain medication, diagnosed with a degenerative disease, and told that I would never have quality of life. Quite often I have been heard saying it is fortunate that you do not have to take bad medical advice, even if you paid good money to get it.

When Jane called me that first day, I told her the truth: Healing is the most natural of processes. I told her we can all remember a time when you cut a finger or skinned a knee. Something inside you allowed healing to occur. That something inside you is your innate healing capacity.

The greatest goal for everyone who works as a facilitator of healing, is to support the individual discovering the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors which turn on this innate healing capacity to its maximum.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is actually more of a manual for the living. It does address the questions around what might happen to us after death. As Annie Shapiro writes, "Once you realize that life and death are not separate, then death becomes just a continuation of the journey."

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital, a model of care from the Middle Ages.

While mere focus on cure—rather than on healing—might see all death as failure, when you come to look at life as the process of living, as more than flesh and bones, you gain a greater sense of the sacred art of healing. You might enjoy reading this review of Victoria Sweet's book, God's Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage To The Heart of Medicine: "Because caring was what created the personal relationship between patient and doctor. And that relationship was the secret of healing." (p. 82)

I am so blessed to have Jane Foster accompany me on Sunday morning, and I am sure folks there will want to hear her share some of her personal account. If you are not able to be there in person, you can meet Jane in a short video interview I did when Jane and I met for lunch in May 2011.   

The things that promote a genuine sense of meaning in our lives, our connection to others and to what is sacred, can heal our lives even when medicine is not able to cure our bodies.