The spiritual dimension of illness and recovery: consciousness, emotional wounding, the five spirits of Chinese medicine, shamanic practice and spiritual abuse. Written to be legible to sceptics without flattening what it describes.
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,…
Read more about One Minute Without a Name: Waking Up as Pure Awareness
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…
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…
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…
Read more about The Razor’s Edge of Healing: Spiritual Abuse and Medical Hexing
Hopefully it is evident by this stage of the series that spiritual healing is a physiological human capacity, that stress and trauma plant the…
Read more about The Wound Is the Way: Integrating Spirit and Matter in Healing
The last post in this series reviewed three traditional paradigms of spiritual illness, each thousands of years old. Their efficacy has been borne out…
Read more about Rhythms of the Heart-Mind: A Science-Friendly Guide to Spiritual Healing
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…
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…
Read more about The Trickster’s Touch: How Expectation Shapes Healing
The last few posts on spiritual medicine have been a progression toward understanding the traditional Chinese medicine axiom that all disease originates from an…
Read more about When the Burden Is Too Great: Two Pillars of Spiritual Medicine
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…
Read more about Healing from the Heart: Emotional Imbalance as the Seed of Illness
In the last post in this series, we explored the idea that thoughts, emotions, and perceptions have measurable biochemical effects. In this light, “spirit”…
Read more about The Five Spirits of Humankind: A Map of Consciousness
What is spirit? It is no small matter to define something without matter, but if we are going to examine what it means to…
Read more about The Science of Spirit: A Bridge Between Consciousness and Healing