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 you go to a dog show, you can see a huge variety of breeds, each massively different, and yet each is called a dog. If you go to the pound, you can expand on this variety. There are commonalities among all dogs, but you would never take care of or medicate a greyhound the same way you would a Saint Bernard or a Chihuahua.
Somehow, when it comes to healing, our culture seems to think a body is a body is a body. Maybe you will require a bit more or less medicine than the next person, based on your size, age, and gender (though even those distinctions are often ignored). But basically, we see the human body as more similar than different.
Donna Eden, an energy medicine pioneer who can see the body’s subtle energies, says frequently that, although there are common patterns (chakras, meridians, the aura, and other energy systems), “each person’s energies are as unique as a thumbprint.”
Can you imagine working with a healing practitioner who helped you identify what can support your individual moving dynamic of energies to thrive?
This is a very different approach than our medical mentality of asking: What is wrong and how can we fix it? Allopathic medicine assumes that a blood profile is usually sufficient to understand what is happening, ignoring the fact that even the time lapse between the tests and the consultation brings a change.
What if we understood the body as an ongoing story, with multiple plotlines weaving in and out? What if instead of looking to eradicate what is wrong, we focused on bringing those plotlines into greater clarity, harmony, and balance?
The notion of sameness makes us miss crucial cues in healing and self-healing. It keeps us from understanding our own breed and individuality and measuring our expectations against that. For example, if your natural energy is slow and stately (like a tortoise), then trying to keep up in a world full of hares will cause you stress and eventually illness.
Knowing what kind of person you are is key to self-healing. Knowing what your soul’s purpose is, what energizes or drains you personally and specifically, what particular foods are nourishing to you, is part of being able to heal. Yet this conversation rarely comes up in allopathic contexts. We may be told to lower our stress, but each individual has a very different relationship to stress. What stresses me may make your heart sing. Recognizing individuality is crucial if we don’t want to jump from one set of shoulds to another.
The idea of measuring ourselves against a norm is deeply ingrained in us. It affects how we interpret our health and success. If you can suspend your socialized mind enough to see yourself not as a body (species human, subtype female or male) and instead see yourself as a web of energies, a web of meaning, you can see how medicine that is individualized to your unique web would be more effective than something designed to manipulate the chemistry of a generic physical body.
