On Christmas Eve, I was listening to my teacher and mentor Rachel Naomi Remen reading her book Kitchen Table Wisdom with my husband Olivier and daughter Siena. The whole rest of the day, I found myself reflecting on miracles—not the shock and awe Jesus kind of miracles or the mysterious, unexplainable healing miracles of Lourdes, but the everyday miracles, when love wins, against all odds. I'd like to tell you a Christmas miracle, a story that is just this kind of everyday miracle, and if it evokes a memory of a miracle story of your own, I’d really love it if you’d share your story in the comments.
Archive for Uncategorized – Page 2
Today is the Winter Solstice and tomorrow is both the full Cold Moon and a meteor shower, so this is an exciting time in the cosmos as the sun begins its return closer to earth and the sky showers us with light on this darkest night of the year. I like to perform solstice rituals, so let me share with you an invitation, in case it resonates. The Winter Solstice is about celebrating our darkness, so take some time to contemplate your own darkness, not as a way to shame yourself, but as a way to illuminate the darkness and shower it with love, compassion, and understanding about why you may have exiled your shadow parts. Use this time to invite them back, to integrate them into your whole being, and love them back to wholeness. I like to light a sun candle—a big white pillar candle that represents the Inner Pilot Light of the world. Then illuminate another candle from the sun candle in the center of a circle. This represents your own unique inner flame. Light some sage or incense and use it for cleansing and also as an offering to the darkness and the returning sun. Allow this candle to illuminate everything that is unlit in you.
For seven years, I’ve been researching what I hope will be a future book—Sacred Medicine. This journey of discovery has landed me with shamans in Peru, Qigong masters from China, kahunas from Hawaii, energy healers in the U.S., and faith healers in Bali. I set off on this Sacred Medicine journey as a naïve, gullible doctor, disillusioned with the limitations and corruption of the conventional medical system and curious about all the unproven, unscientific anecdotes about radical remissions that were happening when patients put their trust in people with alleged spiritual healing power. Much of what I discovered in my research for my book Mind Over Medicine did not meet the criteria I used for that book, which was that I would only make statements I could back up with evidence-based scientific data. I couldn’t ignore all those stories and phenomena I kept bumping into which couldn’t be proved scientifically. For example, what about all those people who went to Brazil and claimed to have miraculous healings from the healer John of God, who allegedly channels dead physicians and performs psychic surgeries reported to cure blindness, resolve chronic pain, cure cancer, and help the crippled walk again? Was this real? And if so, how did it work? Could we learn things from these healers that patients could apply to their own self-healing? Could we teach medical students how to use these techniques to augment conventional medical treatments? Motivated by my inquiries about what really makes the body sick and what really heals, I stumbled around in what I thought was the arena of lightworkers, but all I found for the first three years were people corrupted by the shadow of spiritual power.
We just survived the worst season of California wildfires I can remember after living here over half of my life. While our lives and homes were not in immediate danger as so many others were, we did have to flee the San Francisco Bay Area as smoke evacuees because our air was poisonous, having been rated the most polluted air on the planet until the blessed rains came today. Yes, it’s Thanksgiving, so it’s a time of gratitude anyway, but this year, I feel particularly touched, deep in my heart, for the profound blessing of rain, clean air, the gift of life, and a community that wasn’t devastated as so many are. As apocalyptic natural disasters become the new normal, the need for radical gratitude ramps up. Thank you for this gift of love.
I was raised as a young girl to be a good Methodist. Anger was not an acceptable emotion in my religion or in my family. Neither my father nor my mother expressed healthy anger. Instead, my mother grew resentful from over-giving and her resentment turned sour as passive aggressive pouting and stomping without clear communication. My father would suck it up, suck it up, suck it up, and then, unexpectedly and without warning, he would explode with harsh, terrifying rage. Neither of them were ever violent with us, but nobody ever modeled or tolerated healthy anger. When I expressed appropriate anger as a child, anger that should have protected me, it got shut down. I vividly remember having access to deep rage when I was tiny, but anger did not work to keep me emotionally or physically safe as a toddler, so by the time I was 4 years old, my anger mechanisms had been effectively disabled. I had been successfully domesticated, silenced into submission and ready to be conditioned into a docile, people-pleasing, compliant good Christian girl who would be ripe for tolerating dehumanizing behavior later in life.
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