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Unconventional Cancer Treatments - Advisory Panel Meeting transcript.

From the beginnings of medical history, humans have held a belief in a spiritual connection to others separated from them at a distance. These beliefs have been held as the basis for the efficacy of prayer, so-called energy healing, and the ability to heal others at a distance ("nonlocal healing"). Despite the longevity of the concept, these phenomena are largely dismissed by the advocates of the biomedical model because they do not fit the expressions scientific paradigm. Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis is reported in the November 6, 2005 issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.


What is Self-Care?
by Jeanne Achterberg, Ph.D."


Dr. Zhivago, in Boris Pasternak's great book, said "We are made ill by saying the opposite of what we feel, groveling before what we dislike, and rejoicing at what brings us nothing but misfortune." While this may seem to be a gloomy statement on human nature, I have found most people nod affirmatively when they hear or read it. Being pulled from inner needs and personal truths by a demanding environment may be one of the root causes of disease or disharmony. Research has shown that many conditions are either preceded or made worse when personal concerns go unnoticed or unattended. Even the most conservative physician will agree that you are more likely to get sick when you are "run down," which is just another way of saying that work, relationships, or other worries may overwhelm your attention to self-care. Being truthful about who you are, how you feel, and what you need are the first steps in leading a more wholesome or healthy life. Taking care of yourself is a choice that you can make daily, even hourly. One way to remember who you are and what you need is to create a personal healing ritual or ceremony that you can do daily. This means developing a structure for your self-care activities, a self-generated ritual - one you design and can do along every day. Here are a few guidelines to consider from the book, Rituals of Healing: Using Imagery for Health and Wellness (New York, NY: Bantam, 1994).
  1. Set your intention. Your general intention has already been described: you are taking time to pay attention to your needs. But you may also have more specific intentions, such as listening to your body. Headaches, back problems, even colds and flu give early warning signals, and if you can detect them, you can sometimes steer them off by getting more sleep, avoiding stressful situations, watching your diet and fluid intake, and generally being kind to your body. Your intention may simply be to take a break from nagging, obsessive thoughts or the intensity of your day. After setting your intention - and it may vary from day to day - remember to hold it throughout your personal healing time.
  2. Time. Decide on a time of day when you can take at least 20 minutes to take care of yourself. It is no surprise that finding time is the stumbling block for most people. The best time, of course, is when you are overly stressed and busy and not functioning at your best - precisely when you feel the least permission to excuse yourself to take time out. Try to find a time that is yours and yours along, perhaps early in the morning or in the evening before you become too tired.
  3. Place. Find an area, no matter how small, where no other activities take place - a corner of a room, a special chair, a window seat, even a small rug or blanket on the floor. Put some comforting objects in this area. Many people use candles, incense or music to focus their attention.
  4. Activity. Plan an activity that engages you and relaxes your mind and body. This can be prayer if you have a religious or spiritual orientation, listening to music, focusing your gaze on a candle, paying attention to the breath, or doing a mental check of the state of your body and your life.
  5. Hire a healing team. If you need assistance planning your personal healing rituals, seek out members of your healing team. Here is where you can exercise your personal choice. Biofeedback therapists, hypnotherapists, specialists in guided imagery, meditation teachers, and spiritual counselors are just a few options. There are also many self-help books and tapes on mind/body therapies.
This material is adapted form the article "First Word; What is Self-Care?" by Jeanne Achterberg, Ph.D. published in "CHOICES in Health and Medicine" March 2002 Volume 2 No. 2.

Ritual: The Foundation for Transpersonal Medicine

Jeanne Achterberg

A serious study of how humans help themselves and each other in times of illness is sobering, humbling, and shreds any mantle of arrogance that holds effective treatment to be a modern invention. From the beginning of recorded history, however, the search for the truth of what will cure or relieve suffering has proved to follow a convoluted and ever-mutating path. Potent psychotherapies come and go. Drugs listed in the Physicians Desk Reference (PDR) are said to lose their effectiveness quickly and must be replaced by new compounds with different names and shapes. Treatments and diagnoses also differ from tribe to tribe, even among the "tribes" of the Western world--Great Britain, Germany, the United States, and France--where outcomes are, nevertheless, essentially similar.1

If there is a thread of common experience running through the past and present of medicine, it is the ritual accompanying the medicaments, ministrations, and various gadgets that humans have used to treat each other for millennia. Indeed, these things and practices may well be regarded as symbols of healing only and not the part of the process of healing itself. A wide range of cultural and temporal diversity in symbols is therefore to be expected because all symbols must address the current metaphor or myth if they are to have any power to communicate or represent the unseen worlds.

Therefore, let us put aside for a time any imputed psycho- or biologically active properties of the symbols of healing and look instead to any inherent healing potential of the ritual itself.

RITUAL AND MEDICINE

Ritual is the medicine of the transpersonal--it reenacts in the outer world what is experienced in the invisible world of dreams, death, vision, and feeling. Through ritual, people traverse their inner worlds of self and one another, connecting with thought, prayer, and the sustenance of their presence. Ritual, when performed in the truest sense, is done in space that is called sacred.2

Rituals for healing have the purpose of giving credence and significance to life's transitions; they provide maps of form and guidance for behavior during perilous times when bodies, minds, and spirits are broken. The acts of ritual allow people to share their common experiences and to give visible support to one another. The symbols and events of healing ritual cement the healer/healee bonds and engender faith and hope that the passage into the place of wholeness, harmony, or relief of suffering will be achieved.

The dual face of healing ritual is that all members of the participating community benefit by receiving and by giving, by caring for others and surrendering to receive care. The other duality of healing ritual is that in transcendent moments one is reminded both of the sgrounded, unitive connection in the flow of all life and, at the same time, one can perceive revelatory visions that are far beyond the life experience itself.

Modern health care is by no means devoid of ritual. Physicians, badly miscast in the shaman's role, are the ritual makers for most of life's major passages--birth, death, pregnancy, menopause, puberty, and old age. A stay in the hospital or a visit to a clinic is heavily steeped in ritual with prescribed behaviors, dress, and demeanor, and prominently displayed symbols of healing (diplomas, the caduceus). These rites and symbols have great power--a nod of the head or a word can be either life giving or the kiss of death. The missing element, therefore, is not ritual per se but rather an awareness of participation in its transpersonal functions.

Healing rituals both reflect and create the values of a culture. Therefore, in our discussion, it is important to keep in mind that for many people (not all), effective modern healing rituals must affirm the knowledge and wisdom of this time, including advanced technology and the marriage of health care to the scientific metaphor.