Many people ask questions about spirituality when considering healing in the Western medical tradition, the various Eastern medical traditions, and also the healing practices of indigenous people-groups, such as the Native Americans.
In all other healing modalities apart from the Western one, spiritual faith is at the heart of it. We might start to wonder what has happened to our culture. Along with so many other aspects of life, we seem to be the odd one out.
The very interesting documentary, ‘A new Standard of Care: Alternative Cancer therapies’, which is available on its own website anewstandardofcare.com, has a very clear point to make among others: it does not seem possible to heal completely from cancer (without recurrence or metastasis) without spiritual faith of some sort.
It is possible to track the ‘science’ of this and see how hope and belief contribute to alterations in blood chemistry (Bruce Lipton is the guy for that with his book: ‘The Biology of Belief’), but really it may be more helpful to look at life stories and testimony rather than data. Some wonderful stories are included in the book reviewed in my previous blog article: ‘Radical Remission’ by Kelly Turner.
I have also read and reviewed the book ‘Coyote Medicine’ by Lewis Mehl-Madrona in a subsequent blog article.
Certainly my own healing journey has had a significant spiritual dimension. I am a practising Christian, and I was before I had cancer. What cancer taught me was another step in surrender to the God I had already understood and learnt about in my previous faith journey.
I am going to say here (at the risk of some disapproval, possibly) that I think the process of surrender and change that is necessary for whole-self healing is possible in any spiritual worldview. There is far too much evidence of this for me to deny it (especially see Kelly Turner’s book in my ‘book reviews’ article). There are universal laws about the way we are and the way we interact with the unseen, and those are true for everybody. People from many differing spiritual viewpoints can go through the same process, something many Christian believers do not achieve when they get sick, sometimes because they do not look for it, but other times because they are unable or unwilling to dig deep enough and look at the burdens they are carrying unconsciously.
In my own worldview, I do think that Christian faith makes the most sense of the process of surrender and new life. But others might say I was bound to think that! I am very happy to engage with clients’ own spiritual understandings as we work through a process of self-awareness and leaving-behind of coping strategies that are no longer serving them.
I hope you can have a think about your own place in the spiritual world and what you think is real in the spiritual and physical realms as you take your own healing journey.
At the very least, please don’t ignore this. Your life may depend on it!
Lyndsey Simpson, cancer coach and psychotherapist 