Serving Clients From Both Sides: The Line Between Science and Wu-Wu.
Unlike those of traditional modern medicine, I don’t know what inspired most of my colleagues to seek out a new age spiritual path to becoming a healer of one sort or another, but new ideas improve the quality of our work. Some practitioners start off in the field of allopathic medicine and move towards a spiritual side once they’ve had an experience themselves. Others, have that experience first and start off on the New Age practitioner path, only to realize they’d like a more thorough explanation than that it has something to do with the cosmos.
What’s truly unfortunate is that energy medicine, bioenergetics, spiritual counseling, Reiki, Hakomi…(the list goes on) supports people in ways that modern medicine just can’t, but it’s rarely given any priority or funding towards assisting the suffering. And modern medicine demands a mastery of diagnostics which many new age-ish practitioners simply don’t have. Acupuncture, colonic irrigation, hypnotherapy, somatic experiencing, craniosacral therapy, and various types of body work end up somewhere inbetween these two extreme sides of the spectrum.
My concept of a medical utopia is both of those working in conjunction (and of course covered by insurance) as the research is funded, so that we can find more scientific magic. I have seen facilities such as these that exist in this country, but they’re few and far between. There’s so much we have left to explore and it’s for this reason that one school of thought can’t overpower the other.
Imagine if your energy healer could show you the improvement in your white blood cell count over the last two weeks and demonstrate with the proper technology that a breathing technique lowers your blood pressure. Or how about if your MD could place her/his hands on your tumors and help you feel the anger pent up within them and release some of the trauma which hinders your recovery, all the while presenting the alternative and allopathic options. I realize it’s an unrealistic ideal to be commonplace, yet the reality is often a healer telling us to consult our spiritual animal or a doctor shaming us into taking toxic pharmaceuticals. Wouldn’t you prefer more educated and openminded options and explanations on both fronts?
Both sides owe it to each other, to science, to research, to their colleagues, and most importantly, to their patients/clients to entertain what either side has to offer. This is our only hope for the evolution of medicine. Intuition is an actual human quality that can be learned, expanded, and improved upon while we all know chemistry/biology/physiology to be real. As one of my teachers put it “I realize some of you don’t believe in past lives, but if you close yourself to the possibility, you close yourself off from inspiration.” Whether or not my past lives were real or accurately described to me, I did feel an energetic charge while being told about them during one of my first sessions ever with an “energy healer.”
Rather than contemplating past lives and spirit guides, however, I find my time is better spent studying the clumps of glands along the vegus nerve which just happen to be in the same place as the chakras. Or the way that the trauma of a pregnant woman manifested itself in the embryological development of her grown son. And while I’m exploring meditations which help my clients get in touch with their autonomic nervous systems, it can’t hurt to know if energy comes in from the sky or the ground. Doctors and New Age healers, please keep me up to date with your findings because just like the rest of us, I want know whatever I can about this world if it benefits myself or my neighbor.
