Thursday, October 25, 2018

It Begins With a Call (Part 19): Healing, Ourselves and the World


Everything changes.  Indeed.  We went to meet our new (potential) primary care doctor.  She came recommended by our wonderful previous doc who was quitting medicine for the time being.  

There’s something disquieting about sitting in those small, white rooms with their “beds” covered with stiff white paper and metal attachments, and with nothing beautiful to look at.  I thought this doc was okay – a bit hard to tell on a first meeting.  She was basically business-like until I asked her about acupuncture, in which I’d heard she had training.  That got her animated.  But I can’t say I felt totally comfortable, either there or with her.  It’s that western medicine thing again. I’ve been desperately trying to get my blood sugar numbers down into the normal range by eating a low carb – no sugar diet.  She told me that the way to get it down to normal is to exercise for thirty minutes five days a week.  That’s something I’d never heard before and is more than I’ve been doing.  Sigh.  I can up my swimming from 25 minutes to 30 and add in two more days of something.

I left the clinic with an odd mix of feelings – that the new doc was probably fine, but that I felt not quite comfortable with her.  Western medicine facilities are impersonal.  What I’m really looking for is personal.

I’m tired of all the specialists who seem to see you as just one organ or system, divorced from the others.  The doctors, even the compassionate and well-intentioned ones, are ruled by the bean counters and insurance companies.  Our western clinics are not designed to make you feel welcome or cared for.  Just play the game by their rules and you’ll be just fine.  Right.  I would soon come to hear at the intensive, confirming my feelings and thoughts:  “A practitioner needs to hear your story and not just give a predetermined prescription.”

The upshot?  We went back to another doctor we liked who had moved to another medical group.  She’s still very much an allopathic doc, but a caring and open person who is willing to consider alternative modalities.

What is healing? 

According to Deena Metzger, what is happening in our bodies and what is happening to the earth are very much the same.  She says:
             It is no accident that so many illnesses that we are suffering at this time
             in history are analogous to social and global ills, and so in treating the
             individual we are being trained and called to bring healing to the society
             at large. (“Can the World Mend in this Body?” in Dark Matter #6, May, 2018).

The article goes on to say:
Healing is not necessarily restoring the original condition. It is not returning to paradise. Healing is helping to align the individual with the trajectory of the soul. Healing is the field of beauty through which the details of the larger purpose of an individual’s current life in relationship to his//her own history, ancestors, spirits, the present, the future, and global healing are revealed and enacted. 

This certainly makes sense in light of what I have been exploring and writing about.

My SoulCollage® card for Deena Metzger

The earth is full of brokenness.  I am full of brokenness.  What does that mean?  Can we heal our private and personal selves apart from healing the earth?  I certainly have no answers, only questions.  But maybe the fact that I have felt ill and longed for healing implies something greater than me and my body’s troubles.  Maybe something more or greater is required, not just for the individual, but for the collective.

I defer to Deena, who knows more about this than I do.  She says she had to learn that “… healing the world would be the most direct way of healing myself.”  

I’m not sure how to even begin to heal the world, even a little bit.

One more bit of Deena wisdom:  I developed a mantra: Heal the life and the life will heal you.”

No comments:

Post a Comment