Timeless Healing Principles
I use this term as there seems to be steady offerings of the newest and latest health care suggestions. I have been watching this since 1983. So many of these latest and greatest ideas, so seemingly logical, are contradictory to the trends or fads of just a few years prior. Seeming to be “evidence-based” and scientific progress, I think it is mostly driven by marketing branding. It made me ask - What are the real rules of effective healing that are never changeable?
I decided those would be what I would explore and use in my medical practice. I am ongoingly amazed by their potent effects, not a pill or scalpel in sight! Here are a few.
To the degree someone improves their health, a true law of healing has operated, whether or not they are conscious of the healing principle. After watching a veteran walk out of the treatment room carrying (and not using) his cane, one of my friends said “Another miracle - this is getting monotonous”. Healing miracles have to follow a healing law; we call them miracles because we aren’t familiar with the principles.
To be well, you have to live in the solution, not the problem. You have to have the mindset that existed before the injury or illness, free from the fear and adaptation that inevitably accompanies health limitations. You may have learned a lot about healthier behaviors, but the health problem no longer requires daily attention, because it is gone. You don’t have to pretend you are better, but you won’t be completely healed if you dread its return. Everyone has had a health condition completely resolve and life returned to normal, so this idea is congruent with some of your previous experiences. For example, a 60-year-old female saw me in 2022 with lingering post COVID symptoms - hair loss, headache, marked memory loss and poor thinking, marked fatigue, limited breathing and obsession about being ongoingly ill. I gave her one treatment of craniosacral osteopathy and osteopathy for her lungs and a day of IV NAD. I happened to see her her 3 weeks later, not at my office, and I asked what she noticed from that one treatment. She said she had not noticed anything, it was not effective. I asked about each symptom individually. The headaches were gone. Her thinking and memory were now normal. The hair loss had stopped 95%. Her fatigue was gone and she was very busy. No trouble with breathing. She had forgotten about being ill so her obsessive concern was gone. This was as it should have been, the concern no longer affecting her mind nor her daily routine.
Resolving chronic conditions requires new resources. You can no longer live the way that brought on the illness, even if you don’t think you made errors. This means becoming more aware, more capable, more resilient, usually through dietary, mental, emotional and behavioral changes. It takes time and discipline to discover and change the factors that led to the chronic illness. A book called CURED by Harvard psychiatrist, Jeffrey Rediger, M.D. summarizes the experience of people who resolved supposedly incurable illnesses. Dr. Rediger’s criteria for interviewing each patient was that they must have had rock solid mainstream medical documentation both of the incurable illness and of its resolution. Each person so cured had done four things in their own way: they changed what they ate, they lowered inflammation, they greatly lowered stress and they revised their sense of personal identity. This last idea means they examined their life and changed areas of inauthentic or meaningless endeavors. Stultifying jobs, relationships, or routines were eliminated and they then lived from a more authentic heart with all the energy that provided them.
Self responsibility. Who’s going to be best at recognizing the details of your situation and determining which experiments you can reasonably make to improve your health? Ultimately, we must take responsibility and act with discipline toward better vitality. All people make many errors in vitality maintenance until they learn better tactics. Then comes a decision only the individual can make.
Self examination. To make effective interventions, I need to see the truth. If I don’t, then my strategies will be inadequately informed.
Surrender. If I have an ongoing health issue, then there is likely to be something about it I don’t fully understand or some aspect I am not willing to change. We almost always consult our prior understanding and our preferences when formulating strategies. Of course, we tend to trust our prior experiences. But if the problem is not resolving, there is a flaw in the approach. I must be willing to consult what I don’t know yet, because what I don know so far has proven itself inadequate. Simply put, I must look outside my ego, my understanding and my preferences. Perhaps atrusted advisor, competent in the issue or even better, one’s higher power.
Relinquishing pertinent attachments. A diabetic may have an unhealthy attachment to sweets. An elite athlete may be compelled to overtrain, leading to less capacity, musculoskeletal injuries, ongoing fatigue and mental burnout. Overly attached to will can create such consequences. Whatever the health challenge, there will be an error in behavior, recognized or not. So many of us know what to change but can’t seem to make the change.
Anything from ego has a plus and minus. All erroneous strategies have an upside or we would not persist in them. Someone who lies chooses the self protective aspect of lying and hopes to avoid the likely consequences once the lie is exposed. A pint of ice cream can be emotionally soothing but years of ice cream pints will alter your metabolism. Such tactics were beneficial at some point, but are often applied to the wrong problem. It becomes an ego expression proportional to the attachment we have to the benefit. A saint was sitting under a tree and man man ran up to him, desperate.” Help me, they are after me and are going to kill me”. The man climbed the tree and hid in the upper branches. Soon thereafter a group of thugs came by and asked the saint if they had seen the man and which way did he go? Did the saint point down the road or up into the tree? After all he is a saint and not a liar. He lied to the potential murderers and pointed down the road, allowing the man to eventually escape. The lie had no benefit to the saint and protected life. If he had pointed up he would have been protecting his sense of honesty, a function of his ego, but at the expense of another’s wellbeing.
Doctor-patient relationship. A patient must bring a belief that the doctor is knowledgeable about the malady and can make a positive difference. This is first determined by reputation and discussions with friends or other trusted sources; later by direct positive experience. The patient must bring an openness to consider new ideas and courses of treatment and behavior and some acknowledgement of value received. The doctor must have appropriate knowledge and competency, maintain healthy boundaries by sticking to the purpose of the visit, listen very well and acknowledge concerns, speak in an understandable way and educate regarding pertinent mechanisms of illness and recovery and acknowledge developments during the course of treatment.
A healer is only a catalyst. In chemistry a catalyst is a substance necessary for the reaction of two other chemicals. The catalyst interacts but is unaltered by the reaction and is not used up. A healer functions like that. More change is possible, but the healer doesn’t change.
Healing is alive within you, waiting for the right conditions. Nutrition, acupuncture energies and varying degrees of emotional support go a long way toward improvement.
Trauma exists in the nervous system and not in the event. Trauma can happen in a mere moment. Eventually the traumatic input comes to an end. But then the reactions can reverberate for decades. The unfinished parts of such a process exist in memory and are expressed in the autonomic nervous system and then in PTSD behavior.
Trauma cannot exist in the presence of an empathetic observer. Once we trust that we are physically safe, the emotional part of ourselves looks for resolution. There exist strong mechanisms for social engagement that sooth us and allows more rapid resolution. Strength through numbers creates synergistic effect, typically more potent than individual effort.
Resolving autonomic nervous system dysfunction resolves much chronic illness. Stress is expressed by the autonomic nervous system. Stress lowers immune capacity. The immune system responds with inflammatory responses. There is no illness without inflammation. Developing personal strengths lowers the impact of potentially traumatic inputs. Then less stress remains in the mind and less autonomic response is needed. Less immune function diminishment and better health and capacity to meet the world. Many autoimmune illnesses resolve this way.
When the body aligns with gravity, the body heals itself. This is a main concept in Rolfing Structural Integration and is very potent. Gravity’s effect on our bodies and physiology is with us 100% of our lives without any exceptions. Venous flow is highly related to gravity. Orienting to surroundings requires spatial monitoring mechanisms and a constant awareness of up and down. Strength requires an orientation to the ground and is expressed in some vector relative to the plumb line of gravity.
The 5 actions that cause pain. Lying, Stealing, Harming, Attachments and Lack of Self Control. If I lie, I instantly become a liar. If I steal, I instantly become a thief. Lying, stealing and harming change my daily strategies as I have to manage the consequences of such behaviors. Attachment to having an object or my preferences met sets me up for pain if I lose the object or don’t get my way. Lack of Self Control is sometimes described as incontinence (of energy). If I am at a rave and dance all night, there will be consequences. If I cannot control my sweet tooth, there will be consequences. If I am driven to succeed or compete, I risk exhaustion. There is overlap between incontinence and attachments.
The 5 actions that do not cause pain. Cleanliness, Contentment, Self Discipline, Self Reflection, and Surrender to a Higher Power. Cleanliness isn’t just about soap and toothpaste. It also implies what we watch on TV, the behaviors we choose and the thoughts and emotions we allow. Contentment in all situations is challenging and usually takes decades to even do partially. It implies relinquishing attachments. Self discipline opposes energetic and behavioral incontinence. I never feel bad if I have acted well according to my best values. Self reflection may bring up painful insights but is not the cause of the pain. Once the self examination has informed me, then I am better equipped to act better. Acting congruently with the truth is a very powerful personal resource, a foundation of success. Surrender to a higher power implies realizing the limitation of an ego led mind. I like having divinely guided intuition on my side, when I can remember to consult it.