If the story ended there, you could call this a spectacular triumph of allopathic medicine.
But our shaman visitor might have some follow-up questions. Was my friend healed or merely cancer-free? Had the circumstances that caused his body to go out of balance and develop the cancer been addressed? Was he able to heal his spirit and pursue his soul’s true path into a fulfilling life? Could he reintegrate into harmony with people and community? Did he find a new balance that allowed him to live life in a healthier way?
We don’t expect doctors to ask these questions. Their follow-up is generally designed to identify whether the cancer is now in remission and to make sure there is no recurrence. In our culture, it is the purview of psychologists, ministers, nutritionists, complementary medicine practitioners, and even family members to deal with further aspects of healing (if we even realize these actually are aspects of healing). Of course, ideally, it would also be part of each person’s self-care.
In fact, my friend never found wellness. For a while, he was happy and relieved to be cancer-free. But the instability in his systems, which had triggered the cancer, was still there, and it took many forms over the next twenty-five years of his life.
Although he had regular checkups, the focus was so much on ruling out a return of the cancer that he developed a number of issues that were not treated as skillfully. His thyroid fluctuated from overactive to underactive. He married, but his unaddressed mood problems finally caused his marriage to rupture. He began to withdraw from life in ways that became apparent in retrospect, but at the time were masked by the melancholy, aches, and pains caused by the medications and divorce. And at the age of forty-five, he committed suicide.
This is not a condemnation of allopathic medicine! In my friend’s situation, allopathic medicine did what it is designed to do and produced better results than studies might have predicted. This is a commentary on how we, as a culture, view healing, wellness, and the relationships between body, mind, and spirit.
The purpose of this discussion is not to bash our Western system of medicine and healing, but I think it is important to occasionally remind ourselves, as users of that system, about the crisis in health care we are experiencing in the United States and other industrialized countries. The training, technology, and delivery of allopathic medicine is so unwieldy, true healing frequently gets lost.
What is most relevant in calling out the health care crisis is that it pushes us to go back to the drawing board and rethink healing, health, care, and how to understand illness and wellness. Maybe most important for this book on self-healing using energy medicine, it pushes us to rethink our roles as participants in our own well-being.
Speaking Allopathy
allopathic: relating to or being a system of medicine that aims to combat disease by using remedies (such as drugs or surgery) which produce effects that are different from or incompatible with those of the disease being treated.
— Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary
Western medical systems are built on the foundations of science and the scientific model: That is the language, the mindset, we turn to when we want to influence the body. There are plusses and minuses to this. There are medical interventions that succeed in ways that other systems of healing might not: A surgery to repair a ruptured organ can be a lifesaver. However, if you want to learn to participate in your own healing, science is probably not the best model — or language — for you to use.
Consider the predominant medical perspective for a moment. It sees you as a primarily physical organism, animated via multiple chemical and organic processes. The workings of your body are perceived as a complex of interconnected functional systems. And when something goes wrong, the interventions tend to focus on altering chemical communications via pharmaceuticals, conducting surgical fixes to repair the physical structures, and bombarding invaders — such as germs, viruses, bacteria, and even your own rogue cells — using toxins such as chemotherapy, hoping these will kill the invaders but not the body hosting them.
This perspective has its limitations for me as a self-healer.
If I see myself as a set of interacting chemical processes, I am dependent on scientists to study the right things and to come up with the right interventions. I have to accept the pharmaceuticals that come with pages of side effects because I believe in the interventions those chemicals can bring. Yet the holes in our scientific knowledge base are extensive, starting with who participated in the research and who funded what trials. In addition, although the belief is that your body communicates via hormones, hormone specialists will tell you that they know amazingly little about what these agents are and exactly how they work.
If I think of myself primarily in scientific terms, then unless I can learn all the complexities and lingo, I am dependent on experts to help me understand my own body and, for that matter, my own mind. I don’t ask my body what it wants or needs because I don’t expect to understand the answers. And I most likely won’t listen to the answers until they have been scientifically validated.
If I believe that healing is a matter of balancing the chemistry, then I can find myself with expensive bottles of pills and tinctures trying desperately to modify chemical communications that are far more subtle than the pills can truly regulate. What if I need half a dose one day, a triple dose the next, and no dose the day after that? What if I need the chemical supplement at 10 AM, but at 3 PM the presence of that same chemical communication agent in my system is befuddling normal functions?
If I see my health challenges as arising exclusively from organic and chemical processes, then where do emotion, meaning, spirit, my behaviors, my beliefs, and lived experience fit in?
If I buy into the model of attacking disease, what do I do if the disease arises from lacks or imbalances in how I’m caring for my instrument? What do I do if the very agents meant to silence the symptoms or kill off the invaders interfere with my body’s ability to maintain wellness?
If I buy into the mindset that sees my body as a machine, and illness as a malfunction of that machine, then I think in terms of very mechanistic fixes when something goes wrong, and I miss the communications about what my body, spirit, and mind are asking me to cultivate.
Speaking Energy
On the other hand, if I shift my perspective, and see myself as a web of energies, moving in patterns, creating my body in interaction with my mind (consciousness) and spirit, in a rich language that has meaning, then I can learn to tune in to those energies and patterns. I can learn to communicate with them in both specific and universal ways and create the conditions that allow my body and mind to thrive.
If I understand that my body is part of an energetic spectrum that spans spirit, mind, and body, then I will know that something going wrong with my body can be effectively addressed by working with that whole spectrum.
The language of energy is not a metaphor! It is as real as science as a way of understanding how we are constructed, and it offers us significant tools for interacting with our own being to support healing, health, well-being, and the creation of a meaningful life.
When you shift your perspective to understand the workings of your body, mind, and spirit as energy communications, healing becomes a very individualized and personal matter. And you don’t have to learn Latin and study science to understand your instrument.
The capacity to understand — and speak — the language of energy is coded into us, every bit as much as the capacity to learn English or Chinese. But like learning English or Chinese, we need to be supported in learning to speak. We need to be exposed to the language of energy in its specifics to activate our innate ability to use it.
Your body is made of energy and communicates energetically. Even chemical communications,