By Daniel J Benor, MD

The Names that can be given Are not the Absolute Names.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Nameless is the Mother of All Things.
                                                     Lao Tsu

  I find myself in a peculiar position where everything I am going to tell you is inherently wrong. Words and linear language are inadequate to describe the deeper psychological, subtle energy and spiritual experiences in the domains of healing. Even were they adequate, the fact that we will focus in this discussion on sub-sections of the whole will introduce severe distortions into our understanding of the complexities of spiritual healing. For healing, along with everything else in life, is not to be delineated by precise descriptions and definitions. Healing is both/and rather than either/or. Healing is the ability to let out anger and negativity but at the same time to forgive and accept the inevitable frailties of others, and even more difficult, of oneself. Healing is the finding of the quiet and simultaneously of the sublime spiritual song that lies between the notes in the discords and harmonies of existence, in the deep silence of the soul which knows that it IS eternal and that it is loved with an infinitely compassionate, unconditional acceptance that is so blissful as to be painful to the nerve ends that ache for a bit of this painfully sweet balm to assuage the hurts of earthly existence.

  Nevertheless, as linear language is our primary mode of communication, I shall do my best to outline my understanding of how healing works, counterpointing the text with various observations that suggest poetic, humorous, and mythic perspectives that touch on the fringes of that which is beyond words.

  I write from the viewpoint of a healer, medically trained doctor, psychiatric psychotherapist, researcher in healing, and grateful recipient of healing for physical and psychological improvements.

  I believe that life is a lesson chosen before birth by the soul in consultation with very wise advisors. These advisors guide us towards spiritual growth – through the costumes of flesh we put on and the personality roles we assume in each lifetime on the stage of earthly existence. For life is an improvisational drama we choose to live through with other actors who agree to participate in the lessons we all have to learn and to teach. The choreographers for these plays are our higher selves, in continuous consultations with more advanced and refined spiritual advisors — on planes of awareness that we can barely perceive and cannot begin to truly comprehend while we are engaged in the performance.

  Within this framework, life itself is a healing in the progress of the soul towards unity with the All. Not a single bit of life — no event or encounter, no so-called misfortune or episode of ill-health — is a chance occurrence if we are aware and awake to ponder it and to fathom its message.

  Healing is the pursuit of wholeness in body, emotions, mind, relationships (with other people and with Gaia, our planet and everything in the cosmos that is a part of this wondrous stage for our play), and spirit.

  Spiritual healing offers us help in dealing with all levels of our pursuit of wholeness. Often it starts with a focus on our physical selves – with symptoms such as a pain, a malfunction or a physical disease. These are messages from out body that tell us that something is out of harmony inside. Spiritual healing may help us to identify intuitively the causes for physical problems and to restore harmony and health to our bodies. Sometimes spiritual healing alone is sufficient to bring us back to a state of wholeness. At other times healing may be a complement to allopathic medical interventions, to counseling or psychotherapy, or to any of a variety of complementary therapies.

  As I write this, I glance at my left ankle, elevated on two pillows on a chair, in a plaster cast, with the toes wrapped against the chill of winter. The cast protects the marvelous work of the surgeon who screwed the tip of my fibula back to its shaft, holding the ankle bones in place after I fell last week. Self-healing made pain medicine unnecessary in the ten hours prior to surgery.
  I am grateful for the laying-on of hands healings Rita has been giving me, during that I felt intense warmth in the ankle and foot. This eased some of the discomforts of having to elevate the foot constantly.

Spiritual healing can help with psychological problems. Anxieties, fears, and emotions that result from current or past conflicts can be considerably relieved with healing. Healing facilitates the building of rapport between therapist and client, with immediate awareness of care and love that are a part of the experience of giving and receiving healing. The love experienced in healing is a deep, unconditional acceptance that is beyond words.

  Healing can quickly open therapist and client to intuitive awarenesses of underlying psychological problems that may be buried in the unconscious, often brought into consciousness by the unconscious mind through physical and emotional symptoms. Healing facilitates releases of buried emotional hurts. Psychotherapy helps people to integrate the insights and emotional releases derived through healing.

My ankle fracture was the result of a slip of my bicycle, crossing an invisible patch of black ice on the road as I came down the hill from my village in rural England. Most people would simply call this an unfortunate accident. I consider it a message from my unconscious mind and higher Self. More accurately, it is a series of messages. First, to slow down from my Type A, driven personality style of pushing to complete the updates for the publication of the revised edition of this book, as I near the signing of the contract with my new publisher. Then, to begin to ask why I haven’t been spending more time meditating and communicating with my inner Self, so that it wouldn’t have to shout at me and trip me up in order to slow me down long enough for me to stop and listen to it. Next, to ask why my unconscious mind would agree to such a drastic communication, when I have generally enjoyed good health most of my life. This is serious business.

  Spiritual healing deals with the biological energy body and is strongly rooted in a systemic approach to problems. For instance, the releases of an energy block in one part of the body free up the flows of energy throughout the entire body. Reductions in emotional tensions are accompanied by reductions in physical tensions. Changes in one member of a family very quickly reverberate with others in the family. In fact, if healing is consciously directed towards tensions between individuals, it can bring about healings in relationships as well as in the individuals involved.

  I return to look at my throbbing foot (raised to a blessedly restful position again after a trip to the bathroom, when it swelled to the painful limits the cast would allow because it is irritated from the traumas of injury and surgery).
  Spiritual healing from Rita, my wife, and absent healing from many other healers continues to help with pain, anxiety and emotional upset during my convalescence.
  I ask myself, “What psychological and relational problems may have contributed to my allowing this “accident” to happen?” This begins to touch upon deeper layers of emotional hurts I have already spent some thirty years exploring through various psychotherapies. It resonates with a broken ankle at age 3 when I was left alone with friends by my mother while she attended some summer courses. It reverberates with the hurts of several sprained ankles along the way thereafter that — the last during a rough patch in my life when I felt lonely and abandoned and had no one to turn to, ending up swallowing many of my hurt and angry feelings. It was no coincidence that this current fracture occurred on the very day that Rita and my stepdaughter, Elizabeth, flew off to a week’s holiday in the Caribbean. So I have much to chew over and journal — awaiting the return of my Jungian therapist from her honeymoon holiday in India.
  This raises all sorts of issues concerning my relationship with Rita, as well as other, unresolved dependency issues from my childhood relationships with my parents. I am certain that a part of my ankle’s healing will involve insights into these issues.

  Spiritual healing opens people to intuitive, mystical and spiritual awarenesses. These are areas that our materialistic and reductionistic western society have largely rejected from the mainstream of accepted culture. Scientific methodology insists on measurable phenomena and therefore has difficulty in knowing how to address the subjective. inner awarenesses of spiritual healing. Easier to reject these than to question the basic axioms of conventional science. Easier to distance ourselves from that which makes us uncomfortable than to delve into why we feel uncomfortable.

  Healers often introduce cosmologies of astrology, numerology, tarot or other forms of divination, and explanations including religion, reincarnation and the like. Such cosmologies reframe people’s problems, putting them in contexts much broader than their immediate hurts and illnesses. Hope is introduced because the passage of time brings new figures and relationships into the equations of numerology and planetary positions. Religion and reincarnation turn disasters into challenges to one’s faith and spiritual growth.

  In my practice of psychotherapy I introduce as many ways as I can for people to view their problems from new perspectives. I find Transactional Analysis, Parent Effectiveness Training and a wide variety of books (I call this bibliotherapy) helpful for cognitive reassessment of problems and searches for new solutions. Gestalt therapy, dream analysis, hypnotherapy and analysis of transference and counter-transference bring in the emotional awarenesses needed for resolution of problems. Group, marital and family therapies, with systemic and paradoxical approaches, help with interpersonal relationships. Relaxation, meditation, breathing, imagery, and spiritual healing help to integrate physical, psychological and relational difficulties. Selected reading, prayer, a variety of meditations, energy medicine exercises and healing introduce spiritual dimensions to the therapy.

  I am slowly, ever so slowly, adjusting to my frustrations at having to slow down and accommodate to this ankle. I am grateful for the time I now have for meditation and contemplation. I am pleased for the time it is giving me to read several remarkable books that have been beckoning to me from my “to read” shelf for several months, including The Alchemy of Healing, by Edward Whitmont, a remarkable Jungian homeopath, several excursions into the Kalahari with Laurens van der Post, and assorted books on angels for a chapter in volume III, dealing with spiritual aspects of Healing Research.
  Most of all, I am grateful for the deeper insights into feelings of hurt from very, very early in life. I begin to touch the edges of a hurt that is beyond verbalizing, because it started before I had words to describe or the concepts to understand it. This is a hurt of knowing there was no one around who was sensitive to my needs, an ache so deep that it is beyond screaming out that I FEEL I AM ALONE ON THIS EARTH IN A VULNERABLE CHILD BODY, WITH NO ONE TO LISTEN TO MY WORRIES AND FEARS, NO ONE TO COMFORT ME PROPERLY.
  This was the very early beginning of a determination to stand on my own. And now I have been forced for three weeks to lie helplessly in bed with my foot elevated to keep it from swelling, and to be dependent on Rita and some kind friends and neighbors to bring me the necessities of life so that I can keep my foot up and free of swelling. At age 54, for the first prolonged time in my life, I am learning to ask others to help me – rather than be stoically independent in order to avoid any chance of disappointment, with reawakening of the earlier feelings of having no one there for me.

Carl Jung had the wisdom to put much of this very simply. He pointed out that all of us have aspects of ourselves that are strongly developed and more within our conscious awareness. We also have polar aspects of ourselves that are very weakly developed and more within our unconscious awareness. For instance, we might be strong in thinking, in which case we are likely to be weak in expressing and dealing with our feelings; or we might have highly developed intuitional inner senses, in which case our polar aspect of outer senses might be weakly developed. Our weaker, unconscious aspects exist in what Jung termed our inner shadow. One of the greatest challenges and lessons in life is to bring the light of conscious awareness into the shadow. Because it is an unknown to us, we tend to fear and avoid the shadow. On an individual as well as on a collective basis, a deepening awareness of our shadow is one of the most important healings we can bring to our lives. When we ignore our shadow sides we do so at our peril (as I am learning with my ankle) Jungian approaches to this challenge are through psychoanalysis, with a focus on dreams and drawings that reflect not only the individual unconscious but also a person’s connection with the collective unconscious of all of creation. Marvelous as Jungian analysis can be, most Jungians stop short of involvement with energy sensing and healing awareness.

  Even if we take all of the above and hold it in a collective, simultaneous awareness, this description doesn’t begin to touch upon the complexities of the entire picture as a whole. Our individual life dramas are merely sub-plots in a cosmic epic of such vast proportions that we are each as a single sub-atomic particle in an atom in a protein in a cell in an organ in a creature of which we are an intimate part but of whose life and purpose we cannot begin to have even the dimmest awareness. One of this creatures’ smaller sub-cellular organelles is the planet earth, that we are beginning to appreciate again as Gaia. We are doing well if we simply recognize our relationship to a something that we appreciate is vastly greater than ourselves, and seek to communicate with it through our higher Self — in respectful relationships with nature, in meditation, prayer and the like.

  I have touched on psychic and spiritual awarenesses that can extend our perceptions well beyond the stage of our life, into the domains of the invisible choreographers and of the Producer. We are told by psychics, healers, meditators and mystics that the pursuit of this awareness is the most satisfying and rewarding of all human endeavors. I begin to believe this through my personal experiences, not just through intellectual awarenesses from lessons taught by experienced Masters of meditation, healing, prayer and religious practices.

  When we engage in these awarenesses we begin to feel our participation in the All. The feeling of this connection transcends logical reason. It brings one into conscious connection with something that is intuitively felt to be the Self or higher self or core or whatever other inadequate name we give to this inner aspect of ourselves that connects us to the All.
…The world we live in is experienced and “created” in terms of the relationship between our minds and the universal information bank of the world mind. Our position in the world is not determined only by our conscious and unconscious volition, perception, feeling and rational understanding. It is determined also by our active relation to the cosmic “world awareness.” To this “world awareness” we relate as to an a priori potential, and unconscious superconsciousness.
  The practical implications of this reciprocal relationship are staggering. They amount to nothing less than a new, all-encompassing ecology of everyday life, for science, for the healing arts, and for social ordering. We cannot structure our lives solely by the wishes and hopes of our rational understanding. We are cells and partial functions of that universal mind substance. We are mind interacting with Mind, cells interacting with and dependent on organism.
      Edward C. Whitmont, The Alchemy of Healing:
      Psyche and Soma, Berkeley, CA: Homeopathic Educational Services/ North Atlantic Books 1993.

  Carers must be aware that they are not just there to be healers to those who come for their help. Clients are sent by the choreographers of life’s dramas to teach therapists lessons as well. If the lessons are not picked up the first time then a second and third client with a similar problem will be sent. Doctors, psychotherapists, healers and other carers often comment on the ‘coincidences’ of clusters of clients arriving with the same or similar problems. Such synchronicities are cosmic itches that invite us to scratch below the surface occurrences to get to the organic roots behind them, to bring our attention to lessons we are needing to learn ourselves, and to open our awareness to how we are a part of an All that is far vaster than our little selves.

  When the teacher is ready, the right client arrives to further the teacher’s education
                                        D.B.

  With true spirituality, all of life is a spiritual experience, every little bit of it. The spirituality is in how we fetch the wood and carry the water, in the awareness and intentionality that we bring to each task and relationship. This spiritual awakeness may be simple to describe but it is most difficult to learn to practice. It can be earned through the disciplines of meditation and prayer, and may be a legacy from near-death and mystical experiences. It comes with being a human being rather than a human doing. Laurens van der Post (The Voice of the Thunder, London: Penguin 1994) has captured its essence beautifully in his descriptions of the Kalahari Bushman, who in the 1950s was sadly losing it as his stone age culture was being eroded by modern civilization:

  The bows he now made were just for sale; but the one I first saw was a bow not only for enabling him to feed himself and his group but also an image of his urge to procreate and create beyond himself — the badge of the hunter on the spoor of meaning that leads to the self.

Resources on spiritual healing

Benor, Daniel J, Healing Research: Volume I, (Popular edition)
Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution , Bellmawr, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications 2007  (Orig. 2001)
   Healers describe their work, research in parapsychology as a context for understanding healing, brief summaries of 191 randomized controlled studies, pilot studies.    

Benor, Daniel J, Healing Research: Volume I, (Professional Supplement)
Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution ,
Southfield, MI: Vision Publications, 2001.
  Only the annotated, critiqued 191 randomized controlled studies and the pilot studies – described in much greater detail, including statistical information.     

Resources for exploring messages from your body
WHEE: Whole Health – Easily and Effectively®
AKA
Wholistic Hybrid derived from EMDR and EFT
  Potent self-healing method for releasing emotional and physical stress, pains, residues of traumas
  Workbook    WHEE for pain     Articles    

Resources for explaining the mind-body connection
 Benor, Daniel J. Healing Research, Volume II: (Professional edition)
Consciousness, Bioenergy and Healing , Bellmawr, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications 2004.  
  Thorough review of research validating the efficacy of self-healing, wholistic complementary/ alternative medicine (CAM), biological  energies, and environmental interactions with bioenergies.
  “Book of the Year” award – The Scientific and Medical Network, UK
 
Benor, Daniel J. Healing Research, Volume II: (Popular edition)
How Can I Heal What Hurts?   Wholistic Healing and Bioenergies,Bellmawr, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications 2005  
  Popular edition Explains self-healing, wholistic complementary/ alternative medicine (CAM) and bioenergies, and discusses ways in which you can heal yourself.
    
Develop and deepen your intuition and personal spirituality
Healing Research, V. 3
   Personal Spirituality: Science, Spirit and the Eternal Soul , Bellmawr, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications (November 2006)
   
  Reaching Higher and Deeper
Workbook for Healing Research, Volume 3: Personal Spirituality :
   Bellmawr, NJ: Wholistic Healing Publications 2007

You may reproduce this article if you include the following credits and email contact
Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher. This excerpt from Benor, Daniel, Healing Research, Volume I, Chapter 1 (revised edition), Southfield, Michigan: Vision Publications (in press) was also published in Human Potential (UK), Summer 1996, 13-16.
Copyright © Daniel J. Benor, M.D. 1996     P.O. Box 76 Bellmawr, NJ 08099
http://www.WholisticHealingResearch.com     [email protected]