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
“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.”
