Spirit Medicine
I woke to the soft pull of sheets and nothing else—not even my name. For a moment, there was only touch: fabric against skin, the quiet weight of my own limbs, the dim geometry of a body arranged in a bed. Many people know a milder version of this—those brief seconds of fog when you…
If you can sit or lie down in relative comfort, you can meditate—the only requirement is passive receptivity. The biggest obstacle to sticking with a meditation practice is the false belief that you’re “doing it wrong” if thoughts arise while you sit. Unless you have a very mature practice (usually built over decades), the cessation…
We’ve come a long way in exploring the concept of spiritual medicine, so I thought it would be helpful to revisit the arc of the series with a theoretical case study. Consider a middle-aged woman I’ll call Freya: she’s married with two kids, a teen and a pre-teen, and works full-time as a nurse in…
It’s worth expanding on a topic that came up in the previous post in this series. Spiritual bypassing is the idea that one’s religious adherence or spiritual practice can be used to sidestep personal responsibility. It can show up as assigning to the Divine something that is within your control. When we question the notion…
Hopefully it is evident by this stage of the series that spiritual healing is a physiological human capacity, that stress and trauma plant the seed of imbalance, and that spirit as consciousness is the driver for healing on a subtle level. Have you ever heard of Takotsubo syndrome? First described in Japan and often called…
The last post in this series reviewed three traditional paradigms of spiritual illness, each thousands of years old. Their efficacy has been borne out over time, but just because a way of doing something has deep roots doesn’t mean the fruits are pertinent to today’s culture. As Western culture leads with the scientific method and…
The foundation is set. If you’ve been following this blog series, you now have a firm grasp of spiritual medicine—beginning with consciousness as spirit and appreciating the subtle interplay of body, mind, and emotions as expressions of our spiritual nature. Now we need to qualify the notion that at the root of all healing is…
Many are familiar with the concept of the placebo effect, especially as it pertains to drug trials designed to determine whether a therapy’s benefit exceeds the power of expectation alone. That the bodymind can replicate nearly any pharmaceutical intervention is a staggering fact—you’d think we’d stop everything to study how best to nurture this effect.…
The last few posts on spiritual medicine have been a progression toward understanding the traditional Chinese medicine axiom that all disease originates from an imbalance of emotions stemming from stress and trauma. Another way to express this is that the disruption of our internal terrain caused by stress and trauma sets the stage for disease…
The last post in this series broadened the notion of spirit as conscious awareness by detailing the five shen of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)—the different facets of consciousness that make up the human experience. TCM teaches that we are amalgamations of earth and spirit, standing “between Heaven and Earth” and serving as stewards of both…