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“I feel like I’m losing my soul”,
was the lament echoed by medical students that I would meet in
classes and conferences around the country. These bright, caring,
articulate
young people, so full of hope for healing and ideals for the practice
of medicine, were feeling essential parts of themselves being shut
down. As someone who had been a cancer patient, and a medical educator
in the halls of hospitals, it seemed so clear that medical education
should be an experience that nurtured and awakened the soul as
one trained for a lifetime of being a healer. In response to the students, we began with a
series of retreats, including “Nature, Spirit, and Healing” and “The
Sacred Contract: The Doctor, the Patient, and the Soul”, ultimately
creating “The Global Medicine Education Foundation”,
which sponsors a month-long residential rotation as a way of bringing
groups of medical students together to explore building community
around issues of personal transformation, spiritual growth, and exploration
of the larger question, “What is Healing?”. We encourage
the forum of “open inquiry”, where questions are more
important than answers, support authenticity and trust in relationships,
and honor our “wounds” as healers. From this place we
all grow to embrace healing as a journey, and the role of “Healer” as
one we all share equally with our patients.
The Global Medicine Education Foundation was
established to create a model for education in medicine and health
care that would encourage
a “healing life”. In response to the growing needs of
health care providers, medical students, and physicians to lead healthy,
whole lives, we develop educational environments that balance intellectual
quest, experiential learning , and personal transformation.
Our philosophy reinforces the connection between
spirituality and healing. We reconnect our spiritual lives with
our day-to-day lives,
creating a bridge between the Inner and the Outer journey. We examine
what “wellness” means in our own lives, and how we can
weave together the best pattern of well-being for ourselves, as we
endeavor to assist others in achieving their own.
We promote continued inquiry into the nature
of “healing” as
it is perceived and demonstrated across disciplines, and cross-cultural
perspectives that have been practiced for centuries. We balance “science” and “spirit” as
right and left hands working together to help us merge knowledge
and wisdom into the art of healing.
In addition, we create a template for becoming more whole human
beings and compassionate health care providers through the process
of self-inquiry and commitment to ongoing personal development and
the relationships we share. Together we build a healing community,
co-created by faculty and students, based on trust, understanding,
learning, mutual respect, and spiritual awakening.
The Global Medicine Education Student Program is a month-long
residential elective offered to fourth year medical students from
the U.S. and
Canada, accredited by the University of Florida and hosted at the
Institute of Noetic Sciences’ 200 acre retreat site in Petaluma,
California. Students apply by answering questions regarding why they
feel drawn to take this elective, how they see themselves practicing
medicine in the future, and what is their vision for the future of
medicine. Only twenty-four students are selected from some of the
finest students from around the country. These students are dedicated
not only to personal transformation but to changing the nature of
how medicine is practiced and healing understood.
Spiritual exploration and personal transformation
are the cornerstones of this elective, even as the students examine
their own wounds and
the strength and understanding that can come from them. The concept
of the “Shaman as the Wounded Healer” is one theme of
spiritual metaphor that is drawn into the experience of initiation
as a healer. All spiritual paths, religious traditions, and personal
beliefs are honored in our “Circle of Healers”. Class
starts every day with “morning circle”, where the students
take turns leading the group is some form of meditative practice,
chanting, and discussion of dreams. Attention is given to self-reflection,
and journaling is encouraged, as well as the sharing of insights
and new awareness. There is guided imagery and visualization to access
the “Inner Realms”. And there is opportunity to discuss
and process what is “awakened”.
Students explore the concept of their “Sacred Contract”,
which is the spiritual commitment they have made to themselves, their
own life, and the relationship with their patients and loved ones,
as well as the greater community. They look at the ways in which
they feel they are in alignment with their spiritual commitment and
what they might change or do differently. They explore the beliefs
that serve their lives and the ones that don’t serve them.
They listen to one another from a place of deep compassion, and learn
what it feels like to be accepted for who they truly are, perhaps
for the first time. This is the healing that we all seek.
On the academic level, there are lectures and
readings as well as experiential learning concerning the nature
of healing as it is practiced
through various disciplines. There is also the exploration of the
place where Science and Spirituality meet, “where the two worlds
touch”, and where there are both the “differences” and
the merging. Students participate in research studies on “Biofields” and “Distant
Healing” with researchers Marilyn Schlitz and Dean Radin at
IONS. Throughout the month they live within a model of wholeness
and wellness as daily practice. They emerge with a sense of more
connectedness to themselves, to one another, and to the world around
them, whether it be nature, or the global community they hope to
serve as physicians.
For medicine serves healing. It is not “healing”. Healing
happens uniquely through each and every individual. The course of
healing is the mystery to which we look for answers to who we are
and what are our innate and greatest possibilities. How does one
forge a healing alliance with one’s own spiritual self, and
with the powerful resilience of the human spirit? For where the sacred
is honored between patient and physician, healing takes place both
ways.
“Awakening the Soul of Medicine” is
about the reclamation of spirit into the medical profession. It
is a humble inquiry into
the sacred self, the inner life of the physician in service to Divine
Spirit. As part of medical education it is an exploration of personal
experiences and reflections on the role that spirituality plays in
the life of a doctor and in their efforts to heal. Is there a place
where science ends and spirit begins? Or if we look long enough and
deep enough do the edges blur and they become one and the same? Ultimately,
it is an attempt to reconstruct the bridge between our physical world
and the realm of soul in the healing art we call medicine.
There was a time when to be a healer meant to have a special relationship
with the spiritual world. To walk the sacred circle and traverse
the bridge between the worlds of Divine Spirit and flesh. Only those
who demonstrated healing skills through their knowledge of both the
physical and spiritual worlds would have been acknowledged as a true
healer. An embodiment of this image in western culture was Jesus,
whose touch or mere presence was said to transmit a divine healing
energy to others. Spirit could transform flesh. What is superstition,
and what is faith? And what is the mystery of healing beyond our
rationale mind to comprehend that has marked the boundaries of healing,
and its evolution into modern medicine?
Modern physicians are trained in the most current methodologies
and modern theories of science. They learn advanced technology and
study the latest research. Often, from the time they enter medical
school until the time they enter into practice, a minimum of seven
years, theories and treatments that were once accepted, even lauded,
are challenged or replaced by something completely different. Science
and medicine, are, like human consciousness, progressively evolving
.
Somewhere in the uncharted territory between “hard” science
and elusive “spirit” lies the realm of “healing” where
most physicians walk, however warily. In western medicine what is
known to be “scientific fact”, i.e. that which can be
understood or explained by research via the rationale mind, is held
as the gold standard by which all experience is to be measured, evaluated,
and acted upon.
But what if in the life or practice of the physician there comes
an experience, or several experiences, that defy the rationale mind
and break the boundaries of the comfort zone of scientific explanation.
What then? Does the good physician discount them, dismiss them, secret
them away, or open the door to the unthinkable, the wild possibility
that there may be another realm of experience that lies beyond our
physical and mental reality?
Spirituality is not so much about religious ritual
or practice, but about one’s own personal relationship inwardly with that
which may be unseen, unnamable, even unknowable, yet ever present
as a force in our lives. A physician may have been raised with certain
religious beliefs, or may have adopted a personal spiritual view
as they progressed through life and into their practice. But often
that religious or spiritual portion is left at the church or temple
door and doesn’t enter the hallowed halls of the hospital.
Some may argue that it is the physicians’ role
to simply treat the body, and leave the spirit or soul to the clergy
or social workers;
a concept that grew out of the turf deal struck by Descartes with
the Roman Catholic Church so that the dissection of corpses could
be performed for anatomical inquiry and the furthering of medical
knowledge. From that time on physicians were relegated to the physical
aspects of healing, as if one could neatly separate the body from
the soul of a person with a stroke of political expediency.
And as for the physician, could he neatly check his soul at the
door as he donned his white coat to see his patients, pretending
that there was nothing of spirit that entered with him into the places
of healing?
Mystery marks the boundaries of what we have yet to know. It is
the beckoning doorway of our new understanding and untapped potential.
It is the ever expanding road in front of us that we must follow
precisely because there is no end. Mystery inspires and lures us
out of the commonplace and complacency, and awakens in us the quest
for more.
Mystery intrigues and compels precisely because
there are no answers. We must have mystery before we can have mastery.
And given my choice
I would rather live with mystery than have everything known and explained.
Because mystery assures me that what I don’t know is the starting
point. And that there are ever infinite possibilities of beginnings.
And that I am somehow a part of something even more wonderful than
I can comprehend.
In my experience, there are numerous medical
students and physicians who have had experiences that might be
termed “mystical” or “spiritual”,
but have rarely shared them, for a variety of reasons; often fear
of professional ridicule, or confusion as to where these experiences
fit into their scientific training. Given the opportunity, the permission,
to tell their own stories, and then to explore their significance,
pushes back the horizons of the unknown, establishes a new medical
model of healing, one that includes the most important quotient – “Spirit”.
The term “Spirit” being defined by every individual according
to their own belief or understanding.
In the years that I have been teaching medical
students, I have been made acutely aware of their great hunger
and need for a spiritual
dimension to their training. I couldn’t help but feel that
training for service in healing should be about deepening one’s
connection with Soul. Our goal in teaching these medical students
became focused on opening the windows of possibility regarding the
unseen dimension to the universe, that was an integral, if often
unacknowledged part of our existence, which had a significant hand
in healing. And the more we open to it, the more we acknowledge it,
the more we can become co-workers with this force, call it God, Love,
or Spirit, which is the essence of all life, and thus the power within
and through which all healing occurs.
Our vision is a transformation of medical education, and hence the
physicians of the future; physicians who are in touch with their
own souls so that they may more readily connect with the souls of
their patients. There is a sacred bond that occurs when patient and
physician join together for the purpose of seeking healing, a mutual
inquiry into the nature of why illness has occurred and what we need
to learn to move beyond it. Physicians struggle with many of the
same questions and spiritual issues that their patients do. Together,
doctor and patient may unleash the human potential for healing.
There is a need to bring spiritual dialogue out
into the open, between doctor and doctor, as well as between doctor
and patient. Most patients,
especially those facing serious or life-threatening illness, address
spiritual concerns in their lives, and even begin to ask questions
that search their souls. It is natural for people in times of crises,
or even just in ongoing long term relationships with their physician,
to want to talk about these issues. Many people would welcome seeing
the side of medicine that is open to spiritual inquiry and expanding
the limits of our current understanding. This would further enhance
the relationship between patient and doctor, and possibly the potential
for healing. For those in the practice of medicine, it is extraordinary
to be allowed the opportunity to express and explore dimensions of
healing which break open the perimeters of the medical model, and
venture into the realm of “mystery” or what we have yet
to understand or explain. Perhaps this is the cutting edge where
our knowledge ends and wisdom begins.
Most of all, to look at the spiritual side of healing, acknowledging
that both patient and physician are souls sharing a journey in the
discovery of healing, is to bring us closer to uncovering the unlimited
Divine Spirit that we all share, and create a new model of medicine;
healing from the Soul.
So we are pushing back, or possibly even breaking down, the walls
of our established perimeters for medical education, in an effort
to offer a larger room in which to learn, a place where not only
the intellect is fed, but the Inner Life of the physician is brought
forth as an essential foundation for the practice of medicine, the
healing of the body, and the awakening of the Soul.
“This program is a midwife for the transformation of medicine.”~
Student participant
This article was published in the Spring 2003 issue of The Institute
for the Scientific Study of Subtle Energy Medicine.
Pali Delevitt,
PhD.(c) is Executive Director of The Global Medicine Education Foundation, which offers programs for medical students,
physicians, and other health care professionals in spiritual transformation,
community building, and the creation of healing environments. For
more information or to contact Pali at cpali@earthlink.net.
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