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, at their root, are energetic exchanges of protons and neutrons. Learning the language of energy gives you power to understand and shift the course of illness and disease. More important, it allows you not only to decode illness but also to encode wellness, since it works through interaction and dialogue with the energies that are moving and shifting within you, creating your physical, mental, and spiritual experience.
Speaking energy goes way beyond explaining physical phenomena using what science has discovered about the subtle energies. Speaking energy entails shifting how you understand yourself to be constructed and learning how to participate more consciously in the energetic exchanges within and around you. Practicing energy medicine similarly goes well beyond learning techniques or studying modalities. It involves activating your ability to speak the language of energy and addressing your body, mind, and spirit in their own native idiom.
However, using allopathic medicine or energy medicine does not need to be an either/or proposition when you are trying to address your health. There are times when allopathic medicine is a godsend, and times when energy medicine is a more effective mode of communication. Often, the two can complement each other.
My friend with the rare cancer got treated medically for cancer and that threat to his life was neutralized. But if he had been seen by his medical team as a web of meaningful exchanges that had fallen out of balance, creating cells that no longer followed healthy replication patterns, his practitioners might have addressed both the cellular issues and the imbalance in his web of meaning. He might have learned self-care tools that no practitioner can provide day in and day out. He might have found practices that balanced his body’s chemistry from within. And he might have found true recovery and wellness, rather than cancer remission among his life-hampering imbalance.
A BROADER PERSPECTIVE ON HEALING
What does it mean to transcend the limitations of allopathic medicine and our shared cultural beliefs about healing? Too often when we are looking for new approaches, we turn to complementary medicine but bring our conventional medicine mindset to the task. We want the same old model of diagnosing problems, receiving treatment, and then taking a substance to medicate. We want approaches that are scientifically validated. How can you transcend these cultural expectations and learn to think differently in order to harness the true potential of energy healing?
Reclaim Subjectivity
The scientific mindset calls for objectivity and discourages subjectivity. This means that all the information that arises within you — your inner knowing, your experiential insights, your personal experience, the personal storyline in which the health challenge developed — is considered mostly irrelevant.
A young doctor finishing up her residency recently told me that she is not able to use her intuition in her job. She is expected to practice evidence-based medicine, which means she must cite studies that validate her medical choices. This might be a good idea if studies were funded to research all kinds of people and if these studies were able to account for the multiple dimensions of how disease and illness play out. But that isn’t what happens.
By asking doctors to turn off their intuition and rely on evidence, I believe the medical profession is hampering the way the mind is designed to work: Right-brain intuition guides our journey, and left-brain logic works out the details of the itinerary. What would happen to medical care if doctors were encouraged to use both evidence and intuition to guide their choices, and they could use both medical and alternative remedies as needed?
Validate Your Authority to Determine Your Own Well-being
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