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The Miracle of Peacefulness
by Lewis Mehl-Madrona M.D., Ph.D.
 The
people who consult me are often desperately scared. An illness threatens the
length and quality of their lives. They want to be well. They want to be cured.
They want a miracle.
Unfortunately, miracles cannot be guaranteed or produced on demand. What is
more certain is our ability to cultivate a sense of peacefulness and meaning
even in the face of illness. This is miraculous in itself given today's world
and medical culture. So many people sit namelessly, faceless and alone, on
nursing home floors, passing the time before death.
We typically feel blamed for causing our illness, for we know on some level
that we have contributed to our getting sick, if only by being in the wrong
place at the wrong time. We sense that how we have lived has had some impact,
whether through our lack of caring for ourselves, the diet we have followed, or
the resentment we have never given away. We have some deeper subliminal sense
that our illness somehow relates to the way we live. We have some awareness,
however unconscious, that the illness makes sense in the context of our
relationships and the choices we have made, or that our families have made for
us. Regardless of how often doctors and others reassure us that the illness is
entirely accidental, that sense of blame does not go away. We have an intuitive
awareness that we and the illness are related, and that illnesses are not
random. This awareness is implicit within Native American medicine and
spirituality.
Buddhists call this awareness an appreciation of the causes and conditions of
an illness. What torments us and causes us to feel worse about ourselves is the
widespread Western European belief in the power of the individual.
Native cultures teach that the individual does not have the power to get well
or sick all on her own, because illness occurs through participation in a life
of many constraints. We are born into families with particular beliefs,
cultures, values, and habits. These patterns are embedded in our identities.
Only through later personal growth activities or therapy do we become
sufficiently aware to change these patterns. We tend to think, relate, live, and
feel the way our families do.
Beyond this, families are embedded in communities and cultures. Families do
not consciously choose their values, beliefs, patterns of relating, and habits.
The culture expresses itself through the family.
The New Age idea that "you caused your cancer, now fix it" doesn't work to
promote healing. If, as Native philosophy teaches, cancer arises from every
aspect of our being -- including family, community, spirit, emotions,
relationships, genetics, diet, and environmental exposure -- how can anyone say
that one person could cause such an event? I struggle to help people understand
that they did the best possible given their resources and beliefs. With rare
exceptions, people are always trying to do their best. Limitations come from how
we were raised, our economic and political environments, and our continuing
relationships, including those to our families and our cultures. Even life's
mistakes can be viewed as unsuccessful or partially successful attempts at
self-healing.
When a healing elder said, "Every thought is a prayer, and every prayer is
answered," he meant to call our attention to the many prayers that are made each
moment by each person. Many are contradictory. Two football teams pray for
victory; only one can win. How is this negotiated?
To my academic friends I joke that God must be a parallel-processing,
neural-network computer. This refers to the way that these devices separate,
integrate, and respond to contradictory input. Many philosophers, including
Native Americans, speculate that our thoughts create our reality. The Native
perspective is that the Universe (Creator, God, or other name) must negotiate
these thoughts to produce what we see before us. To illustrate, one elder told
the story of a community praying for jobs. A power plant was built upriver and
people began to get sick from the pollution. The prayers for jobs had been
answered, but at a cost.
I help people see that the world is too big and too complex for them to
single-handedly cause their illnesses. We may have been taught to want something
(like jobs) without understanding the consequences (such as pollution and
illness). We may have no choice but to participate in a society that exposes us
to toxic wastes in the name of corporate profit. The ways of relating that we
have learned from our families may have the side effect of eventually
suppressing our immune systems. But we didn't know this consciously. These
processes were not under our control.
The healing journey often involves our becoming more aware of those processes
that contribute to the illness. Why? To change what we can change! To accept
response-ability -- the sense that we can respond to and change relationships and
habits, even economic and political ones.
Therefore a healing journey must begin by addressing the blame a person feels
for his role -- real or imagined in getting sick. This sense of blame opposes the
sense of peacefulness that is necessary for a cure. The sense of peacefulness is
what one person called the greatest benefit of working with me. It must solidly
exist regardless of what the actual medical outcome will be.
The problem of self-blame is rampant in our culture. Doctors ask me if I
don't encourage people to feel worse if they don't get well. I respond that my
first task is to help them abandon the concept of blame. I aim to nurture
compassion and loving-kindness. I understand that people are always doing the
best they can, given what they have learned (their beliefs and experiences) and
what resources are available to them (their income, social class, education). No
one would intentionally give herself cancer. No one would purposefully give
herself AIDS. No one would press a button to destroy his kidneys, except for the
most desperately suicidal, and even those people are still doing their best
given their beliefs and resources.
People do not make mistakes; they make unsuccessful attempts to heal. Even
the antisocial criminal is struggling, however unconsciously to heal some aspect
of his or her life, perhaps to steal back the love he or she was never given.
An example brings these concepts alive within a unique human being and shows
some of the ways I help people find peacefulness.
Ursula was a forty-seven-year-old woman healing uterine fibroids and migraine
headaches. Through our work together her fibroids had dramatically shrunk and
her headaches were almost gone. Then she came to one session very different,
feeling drained and wanting to give up. Suddenly she was having fantasies of
dying in her sleep. During the preceding week Ursula sixteen-year-old daughter
had spent a night of intense retching after getting terribly drunk at her
birthday party. Ursula son had been arrested for assault. One of her
psychotherapy clients had killed himself. Her boyfriend had declared his
inability to make a commitment because she was too old for him. Business was
falling off and she was worried about money. A client had bounced a large check
on her and hadn't yet replaced it. Ursula felt as if she was coming down with a
major sinus infection, or at least a bad cold.
Ursula looked absolutely drained. I suggested she lie down with her head to
the north so that her brain was closer to wisdom (wisdom is a quality of North
on the medicine wheel). Next I did energy and bodywork with her. Energy healing
is hard to describe, and some readers will doubt its very existence, imagining
that my mind fabricates the sensations of moving my hands through and above
another person's energy field. But science is catching up with this therapy, and
studies are starting to demonstrate the validity of this phenomenon.
Nevertheless, for our purposes in this book, the validity of these studies isn't
as important as how people respond to the process of therapy.
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