with how firmly to stroke. Get feedback from your own body, and if you are helping another, from that person. Too light a stroke may irritate the skin and body. You want the rhythm, pace, and clarity of the stroking to set a pattern to replace the confused discomfort or reactivity of the body.
Here is a suggested pattern to use:
Start with your head and stroke from front to back, crown to neck for four to eight counts.
Cross your arms and reach across to each shoulder with your hands, then stroke down both arms for four to eight counts.
Stroke down your front, from collarbone to the bottom of your torso, with one hand on each side of the midline, palms open and covering as much territory as possible. Do this rhythmically in counts of three, four, or five (experiment with what feels best), for as many repetitions as you need.
Starting at your upper chest, place both hands side by side at the midline, and spread the skin horizontally, stroking in counts of three, four, or five. Move your hands down the midline to your belly and repeat, then to your lower belly and repeat.
Stroke down both legs together if you can, or one at a time if that is easier. Stroke the fronts, the inner thighs and calves, the outer thighs and calves, and if you can reach them, the backs of your legs.
If you can get someone to help, have them stroke down your back. If no one is available, use a towel. First rub the towel over your heart to infuse it with caring energy, then pull it down your back.
QUESTIONING THE NORMS
In traditional cultures, medicine is an act, a substance, a symbolic object, or a ritual that catalyzes healing. The medicine man or woman acts as a healer, priest, educator, mediator, teacher, and power broker. In our conventional, allopathic context, taking medicine has come to mean pharmaceuticals, and the practice of medicine is primarily focused on diagnosing problems and attacking illness, not on cultivating harmony between mind, body, and spirit and catalyzing the body’s abilities to heal.
We take so much for granted as natural and normal in our conventional medicine that would make no sense to someone from outside:
•Imagine touring a hospital with a shaman and explaining why we think it supports health to put people who are sick in bland, sterile rooms, apart from loved ones and beloved or sacred objects.
•Imagine taking your visitor to a medical office and trying to explain how the doctor can figure out in ten to twenty minutes what is making someone sick without examining the patient’s life, relationships, food, living quarters, spiritual state, thoughts, energetic affiliations, or other key factors that are considered crucial in most healing traditions.
•Imagine touring a pharmaceutical company with a tribal herbalist and explaining how little white items with no obvious link to nature — or spirit — can serve as medicines.
Allopathic medicine, when it works, can be spectacular. When it doesn’t work, it can get the whole process of healing spectacularly wrong.
I had a friend from elementary school who was diagnosed at the age of twenty with a rare kind of cancer. The whole process of finding and diagnosing his disease was a story of unlikely successes: This was not a cancer with many symptoms (he had a lump near one of his testicles); the blood work he got was not routine, but for some reason his particular insurance allowed the doctor to order it; and the specialist who examined him happened to practice in a teaching hospital where an eager intern thought to test for this nearly unheard-of cancer. And although my friend was given less than a one percent chance of survival, he did survive. They were just pioneering a trial of a new treatment and were able to include him in the study. He was one of the lucky ones for whom it worked.
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
