What do we think of when we hear the word healing? For many, the first conclusion is that healing means to get better. But what if this belief and concept about healing isn't the whole picture? If healing doesn't just mean to get better, then what does it mean? And how can this help us help our patients?
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines healing as follows:
heal – transitive verb
1a: to make free from injury or disease: to make sound or whole // heal a wound
B: to make well again : to restore to health // heal the sick
2a: to cause (an undesirable condition) to be overcome // MEND the troubles ... had not been forgotten, but they had been healed — William Power
b: to patch up or correct (a breach or division) // heal a breach between friends
3: to restore to original purity or integrity // healed of sin
Our approach in health care focuses on aspects 1 and 2 of this definition – to heal a wound, the sick or overcome an undesirable situation. While it is important to help our patients find recovery from the ailments that bring them into our office, in some cases, this isn't always possible. Chronic disease, terminal illness or life situations that are permanent are not so simply overcome in the sense that we can erase them from reality entirely.
It's in these cases that we have to focus on the last definition of the word healing – to restore to original purity or integrity. While the example of being "healed of sin" takes on a different tone, what I believe this definition points to is simply: to return to our original intention.
Learning From Pain to Help Heal
The intention of most beings on this planet is to learn, and one of the best routes we have to accomplish this is through pain. Pain forces us to pay attention and address something we may have been ignoring. Most simply put: We experience pain because it is important.
We tend to lose sight of the opportunity to learn when we're dealing with a problem that is solvable. A broken bone will mend, a cold will run its course, but what do we lose when the focus is only on getting over it, rather than learning through it? Finding the purpose in pain is what instigates the path of true healing, which can be experienced on every level of being: the body, mind, emotional body and spirit.
This type of healing is essential for improved quality-of-life outcomes. We may not be able to get a pain level to change, but patients are able to find an improved outlook, less anxiety, better sleep and ultimately have a better relationship with their pain, rather than seeing it as something "bad" that needs to be eradicated.
Shifting the perspective on healing this way allows our patients to find purpose in any pain or discord in life, and results in an improved ability to handle stress and decreases suffering. Pain is inevitable; it's our resistance to our pain that causes suffering, and if we aren't listening to the pain, we aren't learning the lesson in it.
When helping our patients with this re-framing of pain, it's important for us to use our intuition to know what approach to take. Most importantly, we must model these steps for our patients by making that commitment to ourselves. We can not only help coach a patient but also be a model for them to witness in the process.
The First Step in True Healing: Awareness
We can't heal what we aren't aware of, just like we can't fix our finances without looking at our bank account. Cultivating this awareness takes patience and a strong willingness to break free from the common patterns of how we approach healing. It's ultimately about learning how to stop lying to ourselves, which is commonplace for practically everyone: We lie, omit or downplay our true feelings and often our intuition.
From a space of compassion with an open heart, we are able to help our patients start to access this truth within them; with gentle coaching, we can help them acknowledge it instead of ignore it. Helping them to begin to pay attention to true feelings, thoughts or desires is a significant step in this process of awareness.
Acceptance of Reality
In an extension of lying to ourselves, it's also easy to paint a different picture of what our reality actually is, how we are feeling and our reactions to it. By accepting reality – thoughts, feelings, pain and all – we have the opportunity to learn through it, transcend it and begin to find peace with a different perspective.
Helping our patients come down from the fantasy about a situation or illness is essential to help move through it. While miracles do happen, ignoring a real problem or wishing it away doesn't promote ownership of one's own opportunity for healing and growth, and ignores a vital step in the healing process.
Holding Compassion
As a practitioner and a patient, compassion is one of the most useful tools we have. It allows us to simply allow what is, and when we do this we stop resisting and start letting in. Compassion isn't just being nice or warmhearted; compassion is holding your space while allowing another to have their reality. It's not about changing anything, it's about staying true to you, while letting others have their own experience.
When we turn this practice inward, it's about staying present in the face of something that causes pain or that we dislike. By not giving up ourselves or our space to a problem, we are able to be fully present with it and effective in addressing it.
Finding purpose in pain is not an easy process, but it is a rewarding one. It will leave patients feeling empowered, as opposed to victimized by their diseases and problems; and is a catalyst for instigating the process of true, multi-dimensional healing of all aspects of being.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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