By Joseph Sharp
Note: This article was adapted from Chapter 3, "Taking Another Look, ": from Joseph Sharp's unpublished manuscript LIVING OUR DYING: A Way to the Sacred in Everyday Life. As with all journey's the spiritual path is constantly asking us to "take another look" at our presumptions. Joseph writes, "During this time of spiritual opening, practice and exploration, where we once took for granted as black-and white will often become shades of gray. Many of the old priorities, values, rules, and guidelines, begin to shift."
It was during my work with the Healing Circle in Dallas that I began to question the way I looked at healing vs. dying. I'd been facilitating our healing group for a couple of months. Between thirty and seventy people attended each week. Maybe two-thirds were diagnosed with HIV or AIDS. The other third included everything from leukemia to loneliness. We'd begun the group in the height of the New Age self-healing movement and used many of its principals and tools; speaking only in positive terms, declaring affirmations as to how "perfect," whole and complete" we each already were, doing guided visualizations and meditations, and teaching that "all forms of physical disease are outward manifestations of inner thoughts." I knew that my thoughts affected my body to some extent: I'd experienced it first hand. So it wasn't too far fetched for me to make the leap from the hopelessness of traditional medicine ("you've got three years to live, Joseph, and there's nothing we can do") to the positivism of the New Age movement (there are no 100% fatal diseases; all diseases are just an outward manifestation of an inner thought, and a thought can be changed"). I believed I'd found "The Answer." Salvation was at hand, and the key was within my own mind. So desperate was my need not to die, I embraced the reasoning without hesitation or question. I needed some control over my life, and New Age positivism provided me with just that. To hell with what any doctors say, I can heal myself.
This worked for a while. Like I said, it was a good place to grab hold of some much-needed self-empowerment. But such a simplistic, black-and-white way of looking at life's experience goes only so far before it collapses in upon itself. After a few months at the Healing Circle, I began to notice how people used these very same beliefs and principles to guilt themselves when their bodies did not "outwardly manifest" the desired healing. So-called "spiritual counselors," who I knew and had once respected, were telling friends of mine who were not getting physically better that the growing illness was their own fault; they obviously weren't thinking pure and positive enough thoughts. More than a few people came to me in shame and disgrace, thinking themselves to be failures as their diseases progressed. What has once been a momentous point of empowerment in my life had become a shaming, pointing finger, self-righteous as any I'd ever experienced.
I remember one striking experience that occurred when I was a chaplain at Parkland. The chaplain on duty in the Emergency Room paged me, and when I returned her call, she asked, "Could you please come down here? I've got a patient who wants me to do something called and "Inner Guide" visualization and I don't have the slightest idea what she means. I thought you would know." (Such was my reputation at the hospital.) When I arrived at the E.R., I found a New Ager in tears. She's been admitted for colon cancer. The doctors at the hospital outpatient cancer clinic had found that her tumor was not responding to chemotherapy. Instead, it was growing rapidly. They'd decided she needed surgery as soon as possible and sent her to the E.R. for emergency admittance into the hospital. She had come to the clinic for a routine check-up on her healing progress and ended up being prepped for the operating table instead. Understandably, she was emotionally wrecked. But-and here's the most amazing thing - she wasn't distraught because of the cancer itself and its implications (that fear would come later, of course). She was devastated because she had "failed" at thinking positively enough.
She begged me for help in reaching her Inner Guide since she didn't know what to do and had no where else to turn. After directing her along a basic Inner Guide visualization (and not really to her satisfaction either - no direct magical answer to her dilemma was forthcoming), I did a bit of probing. "Do you belong to any support group," I asked. She told me she did, but then confessed she couldn't count on anyone from her group showing up at the hospital. "It's a positive thinking group. And I'm such a failure at trying to think positive thoughts. They'll all know that now, for sure. None of them will ever come here. To come to the hospital is to let in negative energy, you know.
This form of spiritual guilt is more commonplace than might be suspected and it's certainly not limited to New Age spirituality. It is quite prevalent in many fundamentalist Christian circles and also found in some eastern traditions, especially in regards to taking pain medications. The basic guilt involves a misunderstanding that disease or any painful manifestation within the human body is caused by a spiritual weakness or deficiency on the sick person's behalf- as if the spiritually fit should equal the physically fit. One would think that a good look at the long list of holy men and women who were plagued with physical pains and illnesses throughout their lives (and deaths) would rebut this shaky theory, but amazingly this in not so. It seems to defy common sense. Clearly, another look is in order. In his book on the power of prayer in medicine, Healing Words, physician Larry Dossey addresses this issue directly:
Plants, animals, birds, and fishes get sick, just as we do. In many instances they develop illnesses quite similar to our own, including cancer, arthritis, and bacterial and viral infections. They run headlong into accidents and trauma, and they too have the problems of old age and senility. Yet when animals or plants get sick, we take a different attitude toward them. We do not judge or blame them. We do not say that a tree is less a tree because it develops cancer or is infested with borers. It is not a dog's "fault" that it develops hip dysplasia, and a cat is not innately defective be because it comes down with feline leukemia. In nature the occurrence of disease is considered a part of the natural order, not a sign of ethical, moral or spiritual weakness.We are part of nature no less than other creatures. The kindness, forgiveness, and gentleness we extend to them when they develop disease could well be extended to ourselves.
About three months after we began the Healing Circle, one of our regular attendees died of AIDS. Many of us opened our hearts, some of us cried. But there was a definite undercurrent of "Well, if Jamie had only thought positively enough.." And I knew something was terribly wrong. I, and those core supporters of the group, had to take another look at what we were participating, teaching, and believing. Our first "another look" had brought us to reject the doomsday prophecy of modern medicine and to hurriedly embrace the positive outlook of "mind over matter" metaphysics. For those of us who were willing to take yet another look (and another and another), we found that we needed to develop a continual willingness to change. A lot of resistance arose from the group as a whole. Many people did not want to look beyond the "love and light, all is perfect" mentality. Within several months our weekly group numbered around a dozen. But number were never a goal, personal growth and healing was. And we were healing. We were continually taking
another look.
Our guided visualizations began to move away from outward physical healing and started emphasizing inner peace. We left behind "prosperity consciousness" for conscious living" and eventually, "conscious dying." Our reading list no longer included the works of pop New Age self-healing authors, but instead, conscious dying advocates like Steven Levine. Bit by bit, the crystals that once adorned the center of the Healing Circle were replaced by more candles, or the names of friends who had died, or various sacred objects from different spiritual traditions- someone's family Bible, a statue of the Buddha, a bird's feather. The Healing Circle was maturing, as was our definition of healing.
For me personally, what began as "I do not want to die" and then progressed to "I want to heal my body" was changing too. I was finding that the basic idea of who I am was expanding. I was healing an emotional self and learning to forgive grievances held deep within the secret, protected wrong doings of childhood, forgiving my family and friends, and so growing emotionally and psychologically. In short, I was healing a love deficiency, not an immune deficiency. A relational self, and emotional self, a spiritual self- was healing into an awareness of a "whole self" that was much more encompassing that the limited identity of my physical body.
Healing no longer meant what it used to. Then, just when I thought I had healing figured out to be some "whole life healing," I took yet another look. This during my chaplaincy work with AIDS patients at Parkland. And this time, healing cracked wide open beyond any of previous definitions. I began to sense that healing was as much bigger game than I previously thought. Healing was about God! My whole life was part of some inexplicable Greater Healing. I began to suspect that birth was a healing and - this was very radical to mea the time - so was death. With my extensive patient contacts at Parkland, I experienced firsthand how a person can literally heal into death. A year earlier, had anyone told me that healing and dying could be the same thing, I'd have laughed aloud. In the old way of looking at death, death is heading's opposite and enemy. But as I took another look from my growing and awakening perspective, death revealed itself to be an integral even essential part of true healing.
Conscious dying advocate Steven Levine begins his book Healing Into Life and Death with a story about a cancer patient, Robin who after years of steady focus on healing her cancer, had finally became overwhelmed by the intense pain of her disease. And so she asked, "Should I stop trying to heal and just let myself die?" He writes:
Her question penetrated my body and froze my mind in place. I looked into her eyes; unable to respond from anything I knew or had ever experienced.
Clearly it was a question only the heart could answer. And my heart, knowing deeper, whispered, "The real question is, "Where is healing to be found?" It is the question life asks itself:
What is completion?"
As healing became more of an investigation than a preconception, Robin's pain began to diminish. The deeper she explored her process, asking, "At what level is healing to be found?", the less her original question about life as opposed to death arouse. A few weeks into this process, Robin requested a healing circle. Several well-known healers came to form a circle about her ant to channel into her body whatever energy might serve to heal. There was a powerful laying-on of hands. AS few friends, observing from just outside the circle, said the energy was quite palpable. There was no question about the "presence of healing" in the room.
A week later Robin discovered thirty new tumors on her scalp and back and told me, "The healing worked, my heart has never felt more open, and its seems the disease is coming to completion."
Indeed, it seemed "the healing had worked." In the weeks before she died, she spoke of experiencing a sense of wholeness she had never known.2
Probably the greatest misconception we have about death and dying is that they somehow represent failure. I think we all feel this to some degree. I now I did (and still do at times-if I'm honest). It takes courage to take another look at death and not see it as failure, but instead to witness a healing process that journeys beyond the body, beyond the physical life and death. That courage of taking another look is at the heart of living our dying. And it is a way of looking at death that can't be faked or adopted as merely an intellectual understanding. We have to come to feel it in our inner most beings, in our bones. We must take another look at healing and dying to see them not as opposites, but as interrelated events along an ongoing process toward greater growth and learning. It is the work of a lifetime.
©Joseph Sharp
1. Larry Dossey, Healing Words (Harper San Francisco, 1994) 17.
2. Steven Levine, Healing Into Life and Death, (New York: Anchor Books, 1987) 1-2.
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