Imagery
and Spirituality
Martin L. Rossman, MD
Spirituality
is a topic that
is finally being addressed in medicine after 300 years of relative exile. When
the revolution sparked by Descartes freed the body for scientific exploration,
it left the mind and spirit to the Church. Psychology and psychiatry laid claim
to the mind about 100 years ago, but continued to leave the realm of the spirit
to religion until very recently.
When
I was in medical school I was cautioned never to talk either politics or religion
with patients, for fear it would create a schism in the doctor-patient
relationship. While spirituality and religion are definitely not the same, they
are often confused, and the implication was clearly that neither was a proper
topic for a medical setting.
Now,
things have changed. Dr. Herbert Benson hosts a conference on Spirituality and
Medicine twice yearly at Harvard University and draws 1200 people each time,
mainly physicians. A growing body of challenging modern research shows that
prayer and spiritual beliefs have significant effects on health, both expected
and hard to believe. A USA Weekend poll in 1996 revealed that 79% of Americans
believe that faith can help them recover from illness and a recent survey
published in the Archives of Internal Medicine[1]
revealed that 84% of Americans want their physicians to ask them about their
spirituality when they are faced by serious illness.
What is
spirituality?
Webster’s
Dictionary defines spirituality as “having to do with the life force, or
essence”, and also “of the spirit or the soul, as opposed to the body.” We
might define it as having to do with that part of us that is invisible and
immaterial, but without which we would be inanimate. The spirit is whatever
that is that breathes life into us, that mystery that brings life, by whatever
name you call it.
Spirituality
has to do with the big questions in life -- what is life anyway? How did it get
into us? Why are we here? Is there meaning in life? Did we exist before we were
born? What happens to us after we die?
Spirituality
often has to do with religion, but does not require religion. Spirituality is
not necessarily tied to any particular belief and requires no outside
organization to validate it. Our spiritual beliefs have to do with what we
believe happens before we are born into this life and what happens after we
leave it. If you believe there is nothing before and after, then that is your
spiritual belief system.
I
always ask about my patient’s spiritual beliefs because they affect their
health care in some critical ways, especially if they are facing a serious or
life-changing illness.
How Does
Spirituality Affect Health?
What
you believe about your spiritual nature can significantly affect your health
care decisions. Consider the following scenario:
A
person is diagnosed with cancer. How do you imagine they are likely to respond
to their diagnosis and treatment with each of the following spiritual belief
systems?
1.
I
am an eternal spirit, a child of God, and I trust that whatever God brings me
is ultimately for my spiritual growth and development.
2.
I
am an accident of nature, a speck of dust in the passing wind; what happens to
me is of no concern of any larger entity or plan, and there is nothing I can do
about it.
3.
I
am a conscious co-creator of my universe. Decisions and mental patterns I
create can alter and change my physical reality.
4.
I
am a sinner and have offended a wrathful God. He has chosen to punish me for my
evil deeds by giving me this awful disease.
5.
I
am human, I am alive, and I am a mystery. I don’t know where I came from or
where I am going, but I am going to do whatever I can to live and be healthy.
You
can imagine how these different orientations might affect the energy and
commitment that a person brings to their treatment plan; their willingness to
tolerate difficult treatments; and the way they deal with the psychological
strains of such an illness. The issue isn't which beliefs are right and which
are wrong, it's about how they will affect the way you approach health and
healing.
Oddly,
the beliefs that may seem at first glance some of the “better” orientations on
a spiritual level may not be those that create an optimal medical orientation.
What we do for spiritual reasons may or may not be in the best interests of the
body. An extreme example is offering yourself up for sacrifice, as did the
ancient Mayans; or for ritual torture or self-flagellation, as have both Lakota
sun dancers and Catholic priests.
A
somewhat less extreme but more common example are people who believe so
wholeheartedly in their faith that they believe no earthly measures other than
prayer should be taken to alter the course of their health. This is the
orientation of a number of prominent religious sects, who have periodically been
taken to court in America in order to force them to have seriously ill children
medically treated. The point I want to make here is that sometimes a deeply
held spirituality can mitigate against medical treatment.
While
there are large studies that show that, in general, having a sustaining faith
is good for your physical health, in some cases the reverse seems to be true.
Many highly revered spiritual leaders, especially from the Orient, have very
little regard for their own physical health. If we were to hold the spiritual
belief that our souls developed over many lifetimes, as do many of the eastern
religions professed by such teachers, then we might well take actions in this
lifetime that are not based solely on our serum cholesterol and mathematical
odds of developing heart disease.
I
have medical doctor friends who were both devotees and physicians of some of
the most prominent Indian gurus who came to the west in the 60’s and 70’s. They
suffered a fair amount of consternation and frustration at trying to be both at
the same time. As students they wanted to believe in the teachings being
transmitted by their teachers, but as physicians they were constantly trying to
get the gurus to take their pills for high blood pressure or to forego the
sweets they loved because of uncontrolled diabetes. The gurus would simply
laugh at these earnest physician/students and tell them not to be so attached
to their earthly forms. If these bodies were only temporary havens for their
immortal souls why were the doctors so worried? These gurus simply had little
attachment or concern about this particular incarnation and preferred to enjoy
life as it came (and went). How might your approach to medicine be different if
these beliefs were genuinely true for you?
You
can also imagine how having some of the other beliefs I mentioned would also
tend to work against people working to get better. Let's take someone who believed that they were powerless to
change anything. Such people, like the gurus, would probably not bother to do
things to support their health, but their internal experience would likely be
quite different from the guru’s enlightened indifference. They would feel
helpless, victimized, and trapped by circumstances. They would be likely to
accelerate self-destructive behaviors in attempts to relieve such feelings.
They could easily become bitter and depressed, and reject both professional and
personal attempts to help them. Their
emotional collapse could aggravate or accelerate the inability of their innate
healing mechanisms to overcome their illness. Once people have given up, they
also become exceptionally difficult people to help.
Conversely,
people with attitudes that allow or even encourage them to participate in
either a secular or spiritual way are more likely to use treatment well, to get
the most out of it, and to have a better experience all the way around, no
mater what the outcome. This doesn’t mean it’s fun and games, just that they
have resources to draw on when things get tough, and those resources can be
critical when things look bleak. A study done at the University of Texas asked
elderly people before they underwent heart bypass operations whether they drew
strength and comfort from their religious or spiritual faith -- those that
answered "no" were three times more likely to die in the six months
following surgery.[2]
This
might be a good time to look at some of your own spiritual beliefs – just to
become more aware of what they are. This is especially useful if you don’t
belong to an organized religion, since you may have fewer opportunities to
formally think about these things, but if you do belong to an organized
religion, it may well be of interest to you, too. Whether you believe that the
larger organizing patterns of life are a personal God, a cosmic plan, a force
or whatever, see where you fall on the line above the following questions:
I believe that God, or the organizing principle of
the universe:
0 Has it in for me Looks
out for my welfare 10
0 Is impersonal Knows
who I am 10
0 Does not exist-it’s all random Knows what it’s doing 10
0 Does it’s
own thing Responds
to my prayers 10
0 Is cruel Is
loving 10
0 Has nothing to do with healing Can
heal anything 10
0 Is apart from sins and good deeds Punishes sins, rewards good
deeds 10
0 Prefers certain religions Is non-denominational 10
As
you look at your responses above, what do you notice? Is there anything you've
learned about your own beliefs by going through this exercise? Is there
anything you notice that might either help or hinder your efforts to be well?
A
question worth noting whenever we consider our beliefs, spiritual or otherwise,
is whether they are amenable to be changed. Certainly people who never think
about spiritual issues in daily life can become intensely aware of them when
they or someone they love gets seriously ill. It's been said that there are no
atheists in fox-holes, but there are relatively few in the ranks of the
seriously ill as well. How amenable are our spiritual beliefs to change? And
can or would you change them simply because they might be good for your health?
O.
Carl Simonton, M.D., can rightly be considered the father of interest in
mind/body healing in the field of cancer. It was hearing him and his former
wife, Stephanie, talk about their work with imagery and cancer patients that
first inspired me to learn about this approach to healing. Besides his work
with visualization, Dr. Simonton also teaches his patients a method of
evaluating their beliefs, whether they are about cancer, healing, or spiritual
issues. The method comes from the work of psychiatrist Maxie Maultsby, Jr.,
M.D., who has written several professional and popular books about Rational
Behavioral Therapy. Maultsby believes, with good reason, that some beliefs are
healthier than others, and challenges us to look at beliefs we may take for
granted and see if they serve us well. He invites us to ask five questions
about each belief:
1. Is the belief based on fact?
2. Does the belief protect my life and health?
3. Does the belief help me achieve the goal?
4. Does the belief resolve or avoid significant
conflict or help me cope with the conflict?
5. Does the belief make me feel the way I want
to feel?
If your answer to 3 or more of the above
questions is "yes", it's a relatively healthy belief. If your answer to 2 or less is
"yes", it's probably an unhealthy belief.
If
you've become aware of a belief you have, spiritual or otherwise, that may not
be supporting your efforts to heal, examine them with these questions and see
if there's another way to see the same phenomenon. If you're not sure of what
another way to see this might be, it's a great time to visit your Inner Advisor
and ask for help. Examine any new
belief statements that occur to you with the same questions till you come up
with one that really fits for you, and helps to support you in your life and
your healing.
Spirituality, Prayer, and Healing
Prayer
and healing have been associated as long as we have records of human attempts
to heal. In all pre-modern cultures, and in western culture before the
“Cartesian revolution[3]”,
spirituality and healing were intimately linked. The causes and cures of
virtually all disease were felt to be in the spiritual realm, either due to the
influence of evil spirits, or as punishment for lack of virtue. Cures were also
thought to be in the hands of the spiritual or supernatural world, whether
mediated by the Holy Ghost or various pagan spirits in response to prayers,
sacrifices and healing rituals.
"Physicians”
in primitive cultures, shamans and witch doctors, are always
“physician-priests”, as were physicians in ancient Greece, Rome, Tibet, China
and India. The archetype of the physician-priest is strong, cross-cultural, and
mirrored in what has now become a joke in modern culture about physicians
acting as Gods. One of my favorites has a long line of people are waiting at
the pearly gates for St. Peter to check their credentials, and a guy dressed in
a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck just walks past everyone, waves
at St. Peter, and walks right in. Some
people get upset that he just let the guy in because he was a doctor, and St.
Peter says “Oh, that wasn’t a doctor –that was God. He just likes to pretend
he’s a doctor!”
While
we can chuckle at such jokes, part of the confusion and disappointment we have
with medicine these days is, I believe, from an incomplete recognition and
separation of these roles in physicians, and the unmet expectations that result
from this on both sides of the white coat. In an effort to separate themselves
from supernatural attributions, doctors have both rejected and introjected the
archetype, resulting in a confusing mixture of entitlement and reductionism
that loses the power of the mystery inherent in the healing relationship.
Before the advent of modern medicine, when doctors were limited to only a few
effective interventions, a popular medical axiom was "God heals; the
physician simply collects the fee."
We would do well to remember that whether we consider it God or nature,
healing happens from within when circumstances allow it, and along with the
ministrations of outside interventions, a good physician needs to respect and
know how to mobilize the invisible, intangible aspects of healing that come
from belief, trust, and forces outside our ability to control.
The Remarkable
Effects of Prayer on Healing
The issue I'd like to focus on here is the
relationship between prayer and healing, and then, the relationship between
prayer and imagery. In 1988 Robert Byrd
published a study in the Southern Journal of Medicine that showed that people
recovering from heart attacks in the Coronary Care Unit of one of the hospitals
belonging to the University of California San Francisco recovered better if they
were being prayed for, even though they were being prayed for from a distance,
by people they didn’t know, and the patients didn't know anyone was praying.
These patients were released in less time, had fewer complications and better
coronary function than patients for whom nobody was praying[4].
This study, controversial as it has been, has now been replicated more than
once, and was most recently validated by a study published in the Archives of
Internal Medicine[5]. An even
more startling study by psychiatrist Elizabeth Targ, MD and colleagues showed
that HIV patients prayed for without their knowing, at a distance, had both
improved immune system measures and better clinical outcomes than a randomized
control group who were not the subject of prayer[6].
This study has been rigorously examined by many skeptical scientists and found
to be impeccably designed. By the rules of science it should become an accepted
part of what we know to be true at this point in time, but it so challenges
some of our most basic scientific beliefs about the nature of reality that most
people cannot yet accept it. How, after all, can people pray anonymously, at a
distance, without the knowledge of the intended beneficiary, and have an effect
on their blood counts and physical health?[7]
Returning
more directly to our subject of prayer, imagery and healing, my question is –
if I can pray for someone I don’t know, who lives at a great distance from me,
and there are effects that can be demonstrated in their physiology, how much
easier would I expect it to be to have a similar effect in my own body? And do
I have to be praying to a power more powerful than me or can I simply be
thinking about the change I'd like to see happen?
Is Imagery the
Same as Prayer?
Imagery
is often used in prayer, whether through rituals, music, poetry or the icons we
surround ourselves with in places of prayer. And yet imagery can be effectively
done without being set in a prayerful context. Perhaps the only real difference
between thinking of this inner process we are working with as imagery or prayer
is whether you feel you are appealing to a higher power or God, or appealing to
your subconscious mind or brain for a response.
Prayer
in relation to healing is generally considered to be a way of asking for divine
intervention, although there are other types of prayer that may even be more
effective. Studies have been done of healers who utilize prayer that indicate
that prayer may be more effective if the outcome is not specified. For
instance, people felt to have healing gifts were asked to pray over seeds to
accelerate their rate of germination. Over one group of seeds, the healers
prayed for faster germination and growth. Over the second group, the healers
simply prayed "Thy will be done." .The second group consistently
showed faster rates of germination than the first.
When
we pray for healing, we are often asking for something that is already
happening, such as an illness, to stop happening; or for something we don't
feel is happening, such as healing, to begin happening. We are asking for the
body to be reconstituted or brought back into wholeness, into a state that
existed before an illness began. At the same time, a devout person might
believe or assume that the illness is God's will, or it wouldn't be
happening. How can this apparent
contradiction between acceptance on the one hand and resistance on the other be
resolved?
There
is a similar area of confusion in the world of imagery. People who use imagery
and visualization to heal are often divided between those that advise you to be
very specific in what you visualize versus those that advocate asking for
healing and allowing it to happen in its own way. Some people feel strongly
that the imagery is a command to the universe, or the subconscious mind, or at
least to the body, and that if the imagery is clear, strong, vivid and
consistent, the body must follow with manifestation. Such people insist that
imagery should be very specific and should be done with the frame of mind that
you are in control, that it will inevitably happen the way you imagine it, or,
as Uri Geller, world renowned spoon-bender and psychic says “Imagine it
happening as if it will really happen”.
Others
consider imagery or visualization a type of request and say that if you clearly
ask for what you want to happen, it is more likely to happen, but it's not
assured.
I
think it’s possible to reconcile these two approaches whether you consider
yourself praying or simply doing imagery.
I offer you the "Rossman hedge bet", suitable for either
prayer or imagery. If you are praying, create a prayer something like this:
“Dear God, thank you for all the gifts you have given me throughout my life,
thank you for the health I do have, and thank you for life itself. Thy will be
done. And if it is acceptable to your will, please (insert your prayer,
visualization, or request here.) If you
consider yourself doing imagery, the same attitude can be taken. The mental
attitude might be “I don't know whether I can make this happen or not, but if I
can, then this is what will happen." In other words, if it's up to you,
this is what will happen. If it's not up to you, then it's not up to you. I
have found this approach very useful for people who are sometimes inhibited
about using imagery because they are afraid they might fail to create the
outcomes they desire -- we don't know how much influence we can have on
healing, and we'll never find out unless we check it out.
This aspect of belief is the age-old “free will” Vs
“determinism’ conversation and pragmatically it boils down to personal belief.
Where are YOU on this particular axis of belief?
0 Everything is predetermined I have total control 10
If
you mark yourself all the way to the left side, you don’t need to do imagery,
prayer, visualization or anything at all since all is pre-ordained. There are
comforts to this belief system which include a) you have no responsibility and
b) you can’t make a mistake. The downside is that you have no say in what
happens to you, and may become victimized if you don't like the way things are
going.
If
you've read this far, you are probably not on the left margin. If you mark
yourself far to the right, you are likely to be very interested in learning to
use your thoughts, your mind, and your imagination to influence your health.
The advantages of this belief system include a) you are never a victim and b)
you experience yourself as having a great deal of freedom. The downside is that
you have a great deal of responsibility for everything.
If
you are somewhere in the middle, like me, you will want to learn the Serenity
prayer so often used in 12-step meetings: "God, grant me the serenity to
accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and
the wisdom to know the difference.” You will want to learn the skills of
mind/body/spirit healing whether you consider them skills or prayer and use
them to your best advantage, then accept the outcome.
Where Does
Insight Come From?
Another
intimate link between imagery and spirituality comes from the receptive aspect
of imagery that I explore throughout my book Guided Imagery for Self Healing. When you ask for guidance from
your Inner Advisor, where is that advice coming from? Is it from the other side
of your brain, from body tissues with their own memory and intelligence, or
from something external to you, something extracorporeal and spiritual in
nature – a higher self, a godhead within, a guardian angel, or the Akashic
records? As I have said before, it’s
what you believe that makes the difference, and whatever you believe, you can
make good use of this process.
Where do you stand on this axis?
0 Inner guidance comes from me from
outside me 10
I must reiterate that I am not convinced that it is
worthwhile to spend too much time on this question – the question I always
think is more important when my patients are facing serious crises is – is this
guidance useful to me? Does it point in a direction I can and will take? That
is likely to help? That bears an acceptable level of risk? Are there ways to
minimize the risk or amplify the potential benefit? Will anyone be hurt if I
follow this advice? Is it ethical? Is it legal? Is it affordable? What might I
do if I do not follow this advice? If you've received useful guidance, be thankful
for it and don't worry too much about where it came from!
When We Don't
Physically Heal
Sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, and the
efforts of talented doctors and healers, and the prayers of loved ones and
strangers, we don't heal. We all get one thing from which we don't recover. At
these times, our spiritual beliefs, or lack thereof, often come to the fore. A
Hebrew prayer book states “Prayer invites God to let His
presence suffuse our spirits, to let His will prevail in our lives. Prayer
cannot bring rain to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a
ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and
rebuild a weakened will.[8]”
In this way, prayer can almost always bring healing to the soul, whether or not
it brings healing to the body. The same is true of imagery, if you don't pray.
In
a time when so many people have been alienated from the old forms of religion,
guided imagery can allow a person in need to focus their attention, intention,
and will on outcomes they desire, and provide motivation, emotional sustenance,
hope, and clarity of purpose. Offering opportunities to focus the mind in
directions that invoke qualities such as compassion and wisdom allows us to
draw on the timeless qualities that generations before have embodied in a God
or Gods. And whether these are qualities of Gods or of people, they are
comforting, supporting, and healing in the larger sense of the word. An Inner
Advisor, wise and loving, is a very welcome figure whether we are struggling
with the pains of childbirth or the pains of leaving this life.
A
beautiful thing about working with imagery is that it lets you work in a way
that honors your own beliefs, whether they follow a specific religious path or
not.
Imagery and
Religious Trauma
One
of the most unfortunate aspects of organized religion as we look at its history
is the number of people who have been traumatized or murdered in its name.
Probably more people have been killed because of their religious affiliations
than for any other reason we know. A subtler but insidious wound is wreaked on
individuals when religious training is harsh and punitive and severs the bond
of the individual to their own spiritual nature. A great number of people I see
in my medical practice have been traumatized rather than uplifted by their
early religious training. I think this may be one of the great unrecognized
causes of mental and physical illness in our culture, not to mention the
longing pain of feeling disconnected from God and humanity.
Unfortunately,
it is too common in religious training to systematically teach children that
they are sinners, that they have at or near their core something dangerous and
even evil, that many natural impulses and feelings do not merely need to be
controlled or managed in particular ways, but completely suppressed. They may
be taught, at a very young and impressionable age, that even having these
feelings indicates something is wrong or evil within them. This leads to an
unnatural suppression of normal feelings, and to distortions of such feelings
that can manifest in forms as diverse as sexual dysfunction, addictions,
depression and sociopathy.
Because
of the damage done to their self-image, self-esteem and feelings of worthiness,
these people have often rejected not only the religion that promulgated the
teaching but any willingness to believe in, explore or talk about spirituality.
When these people get sick, or go through a crisis, they may suffer greatly
from missing something that they wish they had -- a sense of connectedness or
belief in something larger and more enduring than they are. This early injury
may make it difficult for them to explore imagery techniques such as the Inner
Advisor, which may seem to them to be too close to spiritual for comfort. In
such cases, I may remind them that whatever guides them from within need not be
a spiritual figure nor do they need to believe in it unconditionally. I
encourage them to try it out as an experiment and see what comes from it --in
many cases, the results are practical, uncomplicated, and don't have to do with
anything remotely spiritual in nature. In other cases, they can be powerful
experiences that help people reconnect with their own spirituality.
Dan
was a man in his 30's who was one of the first AIDS sufferers I had ever met.
He had outlived his expected lifespan, which in the early days of this
diagnosis, was felt to be less than two years. He had been actively involved in
finding things to battle his disease, and had explored and utilized methods
from generous nutritional supplementation to body building to psychotherapy. He
came to me frustrated that he couldn't use visualization for his healing,
because it made sense to him. He was alright imagining his immune cells healthy
and fighting off the disease, but was blocked when he tried to contact an Inner
Advisor. Whenever he tried it, an image of Jesus came, which caused him great
pain. As a gay man, having been raised as a Catholic, it was deeply ingrained
into him that he was a sinner and was condemned to hell. While his rational
mind rejected the thought, it caused him deep emotional pain. I encouraged him
to go back inside where he met with an Inner Advisor and to ask again for an
image. The image again was of Jesus and Dan literally curled up on the couch,
writhing with pain and anguish. He rolled off the couch in his distress and
actually scared me --he looked like a man having an appendicitis attack. He was angry, scared and sad all at the same
time, at the rejection, guilt and shame he felt about who he was in the
presence of this figure. I encouraged him to forget about whatever he had
learned in school about Jesus and to actually look at the figure that was there
with him in his imagination. He was surprised to see that in his mind, Jesus
was looking at him with love and without any hint of blame or condemnation. Dan
was unable to accept this, but whenever he went back into his own thoughts, and
memories about what he had learned, I redirected his attention to the image.
The image was consistently and powerfully loving and accepting. Eventually, it
assured him that his teachers were mistaken about Jesus' nature, and about his
teachings, and that he (Dan) was a good man who was welcome into God's Kingdom
whenever his time came.
I
never saw Dan again and wondered many times what had happened to him, and
whether the emotion was too much for him and prevented him from embracing his
spirituality. Six years later I was on a radio talk show and he called in to
say that that one experience he had with guided imagery was the single most
important experience of his life. He had connected again with a sense of
belonging in the universe, and had developed a rich spiritual life that was
sustaining him in his on-going struggle with HIV.
One
common place where this particular kind of spiritual wounding is evident is in
some 12-step program participants. This well known and extremely helpful
program with its applications for everything from alcoholism to co-dependency
has an essentially spiritual nature, although it is possible to utilize many of
its principles without mention of spirituality in any way. There is even an
organization called Secular Steps to Sobriety for addicts who want nothing at
all to do with spirituality. In
standard 12-step programs, however, the 11th step invites people to "seek
through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we
understand him". This gives the individual plenty of room to relate to a
higher power in many ways, but still, the 11th step, among others, is a
particularly difficult step for many addicts who have been turned off or
wounded by religion. Imagery can be helpful here, and I often invite people to
literally imagine God or their higher power however they imagine it to be, and
have a talk with him or her. This is often inhibited by the amount of anger,
even rage, that people may feel directed toward this higher power or their
image of it -- but if they can express whatever they are feeling, the way may
become open for connecting again with their image of God
I
learned this technique from a priest in Sausalito, California, not far from my
home, who would have people do this in a gestalt setting - have the patient sit
in one chair and imagine God in the other. He'd encourage people to honestly
tell God what they were feeling toward him, to express their feelings, to ask
their questions - and, to imagine that God answered them. He'd continue to
facilitate the dialogue till it was done. He related to me that people often
started out enraged, terrified and disappointed, and almost always ended up
feeling more at peace.
Rose
was a long-suffering woman in her 70's that had recently lost her husband to
lung cancer. He was a long-time alcoholic, a heavy smoker who treated her
poorly through their long marriage. She was often upset and tormented by her
dual impulses to leave him and to be faithful to their vows. She stayed with
him to the end, and in his terminal suffering he became softer and much more
open than he had ever been, and was able to express love and gratitude to
her. Following his death, she developed
a cold, which turned into pneumonia, and the cough and fatigue that accompanied
it lingered for months afterwards. She often complained in her visits with me
of various other pains, in the stomach, in the hips, headaches, etc. She was
clearly distraught and not only sad but angry. As we talked, it became clear
that she was angry with "the powers that be" about many things. I invited her to imagine that she could
express her feelings to God and after a while she was willing to try.
Tentatively she began to talk about all the feelings she was holding inside,
and the questions that came with the feelings. How could a compassionate God
allow such suffering in the world? Why had he allowed her husband to be such an
unhappy and mean SOB for so many years, only to tease her with tenderness
before he died? Was God a sadist? The
dialogue got very emotional as she began to cry then sob. She beat on the treatment
table with grief and anger. When I asked her to look to see how God (or her
image of God) was responding, she was ashamed and afraid --but eventually was
able to do that. She cried again as she said that God was looking at her with
understanding and compassion, and felt that he clearly understood the depth of
her pain, and her need to have answers. Without words passing between them, she
said she understood that there were no such answers and that the way it all fit
together was beyond her ability to comprehend. Somehow she found this acceptable
and comforting. She continued to cry intermittently in a gentle way, for a
combination of reasons that now included once again feeling at home with God.
She was able to begin going back to a church that she had loved but hadn't been
able to attend for years, and reconnect with both the people there and a sense
of belonging that had been badly missing from her life.
Other
people I have worked with this way do not return to or join a church, synagogue
or organized religious group, but are able to connect or reconnect with a lost
sense of spirituality, of a connection to a God higher power, or sense of
spirit for which they were longing. This comes in various ways - a sense of a
God that is eternal, a sense of a spiritual place within, or a sense not of a
God at all, but a sense of having a place in the web of life. In all cases
people find it a nurturing, sustaining, heartening experience and valuable
resource in difficult times.
Reference
From the book Guided Imagery for
Self-Healing. Copyright © 2000 by Martin L.
Rossman. Reprinted with permission of H J Kramer/New World Library,
Novato, CA. 800/972-6657 ext. 52 or www.newworldlibrary.com
Martin
L. Rossman, M.D., Dipl. Ac. (NCCAOM) has a medical practice in Mill Valley, California and refers to his practice as one of
Collaborative Medicine because he believes that if the client and doctor work
together, they have the best chance of finding what best supports client health
and healing. As a medical doctor and acupuncturist, he brings a certain
expertise to the collaboration, while the client brings self-knowledge and
willingness to learn more about their health. In addition to his medical
training, he has also studied and actively practiced traditional Chinese
acupuncture since 1972. He was a founding Board member of the American Medical
Acupuncture Association, and is Board-certified by the National Commission for
the Certification of Acupuncturists. He primarily practices classical Five
Elements acupuncture as taught by the internationally renowned British teacher
Dr. J. R. Worsley, but also utilizes other acupuncture approaches. His goal is
to whenever possible help you find and appropriately use natural, non-toxic
methods to support your own innate healing mechanisms. These methods may
include acupuncture, nutritional support, stress reduction and mind-body
techniques such as self-hypnosis or guided imagery, biofeedback training,
bodywork, or some combination of the above. He also believes pharmaceutical medicine
can be an important part that supports healing.
Dr. Rossman is the author of the
award-winning Guided Imagery for
Self-Healing and Fighting
Cancer from Within and numerous CDs, Home Study programs and articles on
guided imagery as a form of self-healing. For more information about Dr.
Rossman or his products, please visit his web site at www.thehealingmind.org