Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 17/46

Healing through Feeling

‘Diagnosis’ in Life Medicine and Life Doctoring does not mean seeking a medical label or ‘cause’ for one’s symptoms. It means getting to know oneself in a new and intimate feeling way (gnosis) through (dia) one’s symptoms.

Illness symptoms not only ‘affect’ one’s life and one’s overall mental, emotional or somatic state. Instead every bodily state or condition in other words, including states of illness – even a minor cold or flu – is not just some ‘physical’ state but is always and at the same time a state of consciousness – and vice versa. It is also a ‘self state’ or ‘body identity‘ – imbuing us with a different sense not just of ‘how’ we feel but of who we are. That is why through giving ourselves time to simply feel our symptoms more intensely rather than less – we can come to experience illness in a new way – not simply as a sign of some possible ‘disease’ but as a way of experiencing ourselves – as a distinct state of consciousness and a distinct self state and sense of self, a different ‘body identity’.

The key to self-healing is to feel and sense the symptoms we experience in a new way – not just as localised physical sensations or mental-emotional states however, but as self-states – as ways of feeling oneself and one’s life. Any symptoms, if fully felt and followed in this way – meditated rather than medicated – will lead inevitably to healing insights into one’s life and to a renewed and transformed sense of self. This is not because we are ‘curing’ ourselves without biomedical treatment, but because it is our very existence – our relation to life – that is what is most essentially calling for healing.

As in the ‘Process-Oriented’ work of Arnold Mindell, ‘healing’ can take the form of actively encouraging the patient to amplify or ‘aggravate’ their felt sensations of pain or discomfort – to feel them more intensely or acutely rather than less. What Mindell found was that this could bring about the release of emotions, mental images and inner comprehensions that expressed the felt meaning of their symptoms. Mindell has applied this method to all types of symptoms, and to all dimensions of the patient’s experience of illness – mental, emotional and somatic.

If a patient fears or wishes for death for example, he might ask them, there and then, to die – thus encouraging them to fearlessly feel and face the ‘death process’. He understood also that for some patients, as in essence it is for all of us, death itself is nothing to be fought against in principle – as biological medicine does – but it is an intrinsic part of life and is invariably a healing in itself i.e. a way of finding life meaning and fulfilment in other dimensions of reality in ways that might be or have become impossible in an individual’s physical life and existence.

Like Life Medicine, Mindell’s work challenges the historic and hitherto unquestioned premise of all forms of medicine – the fundamental belief that its purpose is to treat and if possible ‘cure’ disease and thereby also to prolong physical life and the life of the physical body. Ideas of a ‘life after death‘ are considered to be a mere matter of personal ‘belief’ rather than a scientific question – not surprisingly given that current ‘science’ ignores the fact that the ‘soul’ itself has its own innate bodily form, and that our felt body, as a body of awareness, is indeed also an eternal ‘soul body‘ which, like our dream body, has its source and reality in other dimensions of awareness beyond the ‘physical’. Indeed Mindell speaks of what I term the felt body or ‘lived body‘ – in other words our eternal soul body or body of awareness – as the ‘dreambody‘ or ‘dreaming body’.

This is a significant term for another reason. For it reflects also a deep comprehension that illness and its symptoms emerge in the same way as dreams and their symbols do and that illnesses can in this way be understood as ‘body dreams’ – or ‘body nightmares’. From this point of view it makes no more sense to regard sickness as an ‘unnatural’ deviation from a ‘normal’ state of health than it does to regard dreaming as an unnatural or abnormal disruption of sleep, or to regard nightmares in particular as an ‘unhealthy type’ of dream. The biomedical model of illness on the other hand, based as it is on the premise that illness is a meaningless deviation from health, is as outdated as certain pre-Freudian ‘scientific’ beliefs that dreams are meaningless discharges of neurological energy.

Life Medicine, on the other hand does not see dreams as a mere function or by-product of some organ of the physical body such as the brain. Instead, as we have seen, it understands the so-called ‘physical’ body as but an externally perceived portion of our lived body as a whole – our soul. This is essentially a subjective body or body of feeling awareness – and one whose field of awareness transcends the boundaries of the flesh to embrace our entire life world and everything we experience within it. It is this ‘soul body’ that we also experience directly both in our dreams and after death. It expresses itself in and as our entire waking and dream environment. The terms ‘dream body‘ or ‘dreaming body’ thus points to a fundamental truth – namely that we do not first ‘have’ a physical body – one which we then come to feel and experience subjectively and through which we experience a world – but rather dream our perception of the waking world and body a portion of ourselves within it in the same way that we do in the dream world itself.

Yet in broader terms, neither consciousness nor the body are something ‘in’ the world. Instead both worlds and bodies exist within consciousness, our entire experienced or lived world itself being itself our larger body or ‘lived body’.

This body is composed essentially of patterned tones and qualities of feeling awareness which both body and dream themselves into different worlds and dimensions of our lived experience.

Dreaming on the one hand, and what Heidegger called bodying on the other, are thus intimately connected. In dreaming we body our feeling awareness in non-physical forms. Conversely, in waking life we ‘dream’ that feeling awareness into what then appears from the outside as our human physical form. Yet our ‘felt body‘ – our subjective feeling awareness of this ‘physical’ body is in reality a distinct body of awareness in its own right – a ‘soul body‘ that we both manifest physically and also give manifold form to in our dreams. Hence the type of connections between dream symbols and physical symptoms that Freud was aware of and that revealed themselves in the following example of what Mindell calls ‘healing through feeling’ – a basic and innate capacity of our feeling awareness or ‘soul’ and its body.

Case Example 1

from Working with the Dreaming Body by Arnold Mindell:

“A patient with whom I was working was dying of stomach cancer. He was lying in the hospital bed, groaning and moaning in pain. Have you ever seen someone who is dying? It was really quite sad and terrifying. They flip quickly between trance states, ordinary consciousness and extreme pain. Once, when he was able to speak, he told me that the tumour in his stomach was unbearably painful. I had had an idea that we should focus on his proprioception, that is, his experience of the pain, so I told him that since he’d already been operated on unsuccessfully, we might try something new. He agreed, and so I suggested that he try to make the pain even worse.

He said he knew exactly how he could do that and told me that the pain felt like something in his stomach trying to break out. If he helped it break out, he said, the pain worsened. He lay on his back and started to increase the pressure in his stomach. He pushed his stomach out and kept pushing and pressing and exaggerating the pain until he felt as if he were going to explode. Suddenly, at the height of his pain, he said ‘Oh, Arny, I just want to explode!’ At that point he switched out of his body experience and began to talk to me. He told me that he needed to explode and asked if I would help him to do so. ‘My problem’, he said, ‘is that I’ve never expressed myself sufficiently, and even when I do it’s never enough.’

This problem is an ordinary, psychological problem that appears in many cases, but with him it became somatised and was pressing him now, urgently expressing itself in the form of a tumour. That was the end of our physical work together. He lay back and felt much better. Though he had been given only a short time to live and had been on the verge of death, his condition improved and he was discharged from the hospital. I went to see him afterwards very often, and every time he ‘exploded’ with me. He’d make noises, shout and scream, with absolutely no encouragement on my part.

… It was then also that I discovered the vital link between dreams and body symptoms. Shortly before he had entered the hospital, the patient dreamed that he an incurable disease and that the medicine for it was like a bomb. When I asked him about the bomb he made a very emotional sound and cried like a bomb dropping in the air, ‘it goes up in the air and spins around sshhhss … pfftfff.’ At that moment I knew that the cancer was the bomb in his dream … his body was literally exploding with pent-up expression. In this way his pain became his own medicine …

In a flash I discovered that there must be something like a dreambody, an entity which is both dream and body at once … The way I discovered the concept of the dreambody was through what I called amplification. I amplified my client’s body, or proprioceptive experience and I amplified the exploding process which was mirrored in his dream.”