The next day, Sue followed through on her promise and asked her doctor to test her thyroid levels one more time. The blood work came back showing normal on all parameters. The doctor was mystified. He asked her what she had done and whether she had somehow taken some thyroid medication, though he knew as a nurse she knew better. She told him about our session.
He barely let her get the words “energy healer” out of her mouth before hurrying to assure her that “idiopathic recovery” occasionally happened and telling her he was canceling her surgery. He asked her to return in a week to see if her levels were still adequate and her thyroid was still functioning. (It was.) What he didn’t do was show any interest or curiosity about her unique experience. He didn’t want to know more about energy healing or what led her to try it. He didn’t care that this individual had found a solution that might hold promise for other individuals. He had a name for what happened — idiopathic means unique to the individual — and therefore, it was not valid or interesting to him.
I have seen this response again and again as clients who experienced successful healing or self-healing encountered disbelief or dismissal from doctors, family, friends, and even within themselves. So I have come to see the wisdom of my ex-AIDS client who wanted to fly beneath the social radar. Using energy medicine successfully includes being willing to be an exception, to beat the odds, to defy gravity, to celebrate the unique capacities of our own bodies and energy systems. It is important to leave room for miracles in each dialogue we have with our own physical being. Experience has taught me that what is sometimes seen as a miracle is in fact just a matter of knowing how to communicate via energy.
Learn to Cultivate Evidence from Multiple Realms
I once accompanied a seventy-three-year-old friend with stage IV breast cancer through her medical experience. When she was diagnosed, the nurse said: “Now you’ll get the million-dollar treatment.” She was sent for test after test, shuffling from doctor to doctor, and found herself in a kind of cancer world where natives knew the routine and she was whirled from one invasive experience to another.
My friend wanted to participate in her own healing. She also wanted to know the scientific basis of the recommendations for the myriad decisions she needed to make. At each decision point, she would ask: “What do the studies say about this?” And after evasions and assurances that her doctors were recommending the best practice, she would ultimately discover they didn’t really know. The research was based on young women or not disaggregated for other key factors, like lifestyle or nutrition. The science just wasn’t there. And the “standard of care” recommendations were not based on women her age or with her self-care skills. They were essentially guesses, albeit educated guesses, masquerading as science.
At one point, my friend had to make the harrowing decision to reject further medical intervention, without the benefit of any relevant scientific evidence and against the standardized recommendations of her doctors. She chose to use the evidence of her body, and her own intuition and wisdom, to make her choice.
That risk paid off: She has remained cancer-free for five years. But the process was agonizing. And she had to give up the notion that science was the only source of evidence that could guide her to figure out what was best for her as an individual.
While more and better research would help, that won’t solve the basic problem. The scientific method calls for controlled environments in which to study a phenomenon and find the truth. But life isn’t lived in isolated circumstances, and studying something in a controlled, laboratory setting often alters its behavior. How can researchers possibly control all the variables to study how a particular body will respond when it has gone out of balance and developed a particular disease? Often, research studies give us the illusion that we understand phenomena when we don’t.
Instead, it makes more sense to incorporate additional ways of assessing and knowing what a particular mind-body-spirit is undergoing. It also makes sense to incorporate nutritional supports, lifestyle, and energy medicine — wellness practices — into the mix.
The Western medical system favors information gleaned from isolating things to understand them, while sometimes dismissing the wisdom of understanding your health in the context of who you are, how you live, what kind of nourishment you receive, how well your instrument is played, what role your mind plays, what your soul’s purpose might be, and how environments have influenced you historically and in the present. These dimensions are significant in energy medicine.
As a self-healer, it is important that you cultivate and assess evidence of what your body needs, can tolerate, and is expressing. That evidence might have some relevant science to bolster it. But it may also be subjective, arising from dialoguing with your body in various contexts and situations. It will be informed by your history and illuminated by alternative expertise about how mind, body, and spirit can heal.
The notion that we should defer to scientific understandings, laboratory results, and standardized treatments even when our own experience is telling us otherwise runs deep in our culture. As a self-healer, you may find it more effective to treat yourself as the main character in a novel, dealing with a rich plot, setting, and cast of characters all influencing your evolution, rather than trying to isolate your symptoms and assess your situation scientifically.
Recognize Your Illness as a Falling Away from Wellness
In allopathic medicine, gallbladder disease is studied as a phenomenon that happens to the gallbladder as an organ. The literature on gallbladder disease focuses on how the organ behaves under various conditions and what can be done to alter that. It does not usually focus on what happened in each patient’s life, what behaviors, physiology, and energy usage caused their gallbladder to tank. Ten patients with gallbladder disease might receive somewhat individualized approaches, but basically the doctor is treating their gallbladder.
In Chinese medicine (and most other forms of energy medicine), a diseased gallbladder is seen more as the result of imbalance in the whole energetic circulation of the individual. Ten people who have diseased gallbladders are treated as ten different energy profiles. Disease is seen as a falling away from wellness (not as a separate thing), so the path to wellness for each individual has to do with what kind of person they are and what is happening for them in terms of nutrition, energy flows, their environmental and lifestyle choices, and more.
This is more than just saying allopathic medicine treats the illness whereas energy medicine works with the person experiencing the illness. In our culture, we tend to think of illness as something apart from life and from the individual experiencing the illness. We medicalize life processes such as childbirth and death, and within the medical context, we get depersonalized. An extreme example of this is when hospital personnel refer to someone as “the heart attack in room C320.” It is a reflection of society’s philosophy about where illness and wellness reside.
If I believe my illness is something I caught, or some faulty part that has malfunctioned, or something only a specialist can address, then I must wait for the drugs, surgeon, or specialist to come rescue me. But if I believe my illness is part of how I function, then I can shift my functioning and nudge my body toward wellness.
If I believe my symptoms are a personal indicator of my internal communications, and not just a named disease with prescribed treatment protocols, then I can dialogue with my body to change the conversation and often heal it from within. Even if my gallbladder must be removed because the imbalance has stressed the organ into nonviability, I still need to improve the conversation and address the whole-self imbalances that led to the organ failure.
Try this: When you are grappling with a named disease or condition, ask yourself how having this condition serves you. Then ask yourself what ease would entail and how you could cultivate that.
Affirm the Unique Qualities You Embody
If