Alternative Medicine: Take Stock of Your Illness and Your Healing Dynamics

Just as you are a unique individual in the universe, what you will need to heal is most likely unique to you. It will be some package of treatments, events, and people at a certain time and over time that will be the answer for you. And for that package to help you undergo the most lasting and complete healing, you will most likely need to make changes in how you live your life. Not superficial changes, not new diets or exercise programs. Real changes in your being.

To do so, you will have to leave your comfort zone of the familiar and the comfortable ways of being in some profound way. Outer changes might occur in your relationships, your job, your lifestyle, your habits, your living and working environment. But the inner changes will underlie the outer ones, and the inner movement will shift you in how you are in your world.

Changing the Context

You are expressing disease because you, as a dynamical system, are dysfunctional within the larger system/environment in which you live. Given your personal social, physical, and/or chemical environmental context, you are not being the best you that you can be.

If you can change the context – move to a new city or change jobs or get a divorce from a bad marriage, you might recover. But, if you can change yourself, you will recover. Sometimes the context will change as a part of the inner changes, sometimes not. What changes is how to relate to the world around you.

Maybe, though not many people can. More likely, some personalized package of care will help you make the changes and support you through them until they become an integral part of you.

To be sure, spontaneous healing does occur, as does healing from treatment with an isolated intervention, be it conventional or alternative. Miracles do occur, and some people get to stay the same and nonetheless give up their disease.

At the same time, in my practice I used to watch in amazement and sadness when dozens of patients with a chronic disease would flock to a particular treatment after word spread through their support network that one of their own had experienced a remarkable recovery from the “same” health problem during the treatment.

I never saw the others respond as miraculously or as well to the same treatment as did the one person for whom it appeared to make such a difference. It was as though that one person was poised and ready to respond, that the treatment somehow spoke to his or her condition in some unique, well-matched way.

The other patients were apparently not poised to respond to that treatment, and its language was unfortunately foreign to their conditions. I believe that the person with the miracle recovery did need the treatment they received at the time to experience their excellent outcome. It wasn’t a meaningless coincidence, but it may have been a meaningful synchronicity. The inner and outer circumstances were all set just right when the treatment arrived into his or her life. And the treatment arrived, because of the readiness of the person and the environmental context.

The point is that health care providers, healers, and treatments are external to you. Most of us need them to heal. However, they are a necessary but not sufficient element of the healing process. True healing must come from within, assisted and/or nurtured by the external help. At just the right moment.