Smoking
More Healing Tales
In June, 2001, I began teaching Therapeutic Touch and mind/body healing to a group of doctors at Cornell University. We met once a week for a period of four weeks. Louise K., a health-care expert who was not a doctor, had chronic back-pain, so I demonstrated the fundamentals of Therapeutic Touch on her, talking the class through the process.
Dr. "Sarah S," an attending physician, had knee-pain. Her knee was not hurting now - it hurt at unexpected times and, at times, did not hurt when she expected it to. She, too, experienced a Therapeutic Touch treatment as she heard me talk my students through what I was doing. "Sarah has already told me everything I need to know to help her heal her knee. As human beings, we must select, i.e., filter experience. You should never lie to the unconscious, but since we need to select anyway, we might as well use this to our advantage. You start with something factual - Sarah's knee sometimes, unexpectedly doesn't hurt! You kind of elongate your factual statement by saying, 'Sometimes Sarah's knee has hurt ... BUT SOMETIMES IT UNEXPECTEDLY DOESN'T HURT.' The thing you want to work with is that her knee knows how to not hurt. It can surprise her and not hurt. Oh, sure, it's not prefect, but ... it's not hurting now, and it was hurting and then stopped hurting, and it can go from hurting to NOT HURTING, and can surprise her by not hurting when she expects it to!"
Then Dr. S. practiced on Dr. Helena G, a fellow. Helena presented the problem of constant fatigue to the point of narcolepsy, and body achiness.
During our second class, Helena reported that on her bus-ride home following the treatment she received from Dr. S., it suddenly came to her that she, herself, was making herself tired, and that she had a choice. She decided to stop making herself tired and following that, her tiredness and body aches left her. Dr. S. reported that when she approached Helena for the treatment, she saw her in a different way from her usual rationalistic way of looking as a doctor, and had the feeling, "I like Helena! I don't want her to be tired!" This attitude exemplifies what T.T. people call being "centered," - your intent, which cannot be observed or measured, is a key part of the healing process. In fact, Dr. S. agreed, it is the main event! Initially skeptical of T.T., following her session with Helena and Helena's report of her break-through, Dr. S. became a "salesperson" for it.
Louise K. was unable to attend our second class, but e-mailed me, "I really have felt more of a profound sense of relaxation in my lower back since the first class. I definitely have noticed a difference. I've also been a meditater for over 25 years, Tibetan Buddhist style."
Following two class-sessions, Sarah reported, with pleased surprise, "My knee is better!" As had been suggested, her knee KNEW how to surprise her! The trick was allowing it to surprise her in a different sort of way.
Helena continued to feel much less tired and achy: she described this as a major change in her life.
During our third session we were joined by another attending doctor as a healee. "Dr. Pratt" had to see a pancreatic cancer patient who was the author of the pediatric text he had studied in medical school. Having to see this dying and revered elder on top of his other daily stresses made him feel, "exhausted, squashed like a banana." He wanted peace and clarity.
Dr. G. and Dr. S. gave Dr. Pratt a Therapeutic Touch treatment. He relaxed visibly during his treatment and after the session he said he felt much better - he was no longer exhausted, and felt the peace and clarity he had wanted. He ran off to see his patient full of the energy he needed.
Dr. Gloria W., another attending physician, had trouble sleeping. Some nights she would toss and turn; more commonly, she would fall asleep at a reasonable hour, but something would wake her up, and then she would not be able to get to sleep again. "She's already told me everything I need to know to help her." The key was that she had the ability to fall asleep at a reasonable hour on most nights, so she already had it within her power, somewhere, to solve her problem. All we had to do was to take this ability and extend it to two places, 1) those nights when she could not fall asleep, and 2) those nights when she would fall asleep easily, but wake up and be unable to get back to sleep. How we did this would require creativity, but the important insight was that she already had the ability she needed; we merely needed to find a way to help her use it.
During our 4th class, Sarah's knee was still better, although she wasn't challenging it with multi-flights of stairs. Gloria reported that she had been falling asleep at a reasonable hour and, when she woke up, she was able to get back to sleep, "but this could be just random chance." She had had trouble the night before, because "I was stupid, and took a two-hour nap."
Dr. W. practiced on me to learn how to feel the "energy field". She had numerous questions and said, "I just wonder if I have anything of value to offer". She could feel warmth and lack of warmth very accurately; that was all she could feel. The idea is to assess the field, and then rebalance it, to make it all a field of warmth. Dr. W. discussed and discussed this before she began the treatment. She pushed some warmth down into a cool spot, and pulled some energy, or warmth, or whatever from somewhere to somewhere else. Sitting by myself to absorb the session, I had a profound catharsis about my mother's illness, simply feeling intense grief about it and realizing that this wanting to cry had been cut-off.
Dr. S. treated Gloria. Dr. S. said, "There's a lot of energy in your hands!" Gloria replied, "You're quite right. They're throbbing!" Dr. S. silently "moved" energy from the hand area to Gloria's shoulder's area. Gloria confirmed afterwards that there was much more energy in her shoulders. They kept "matching" like this and were quite taken with this sort of communication, where Dr. S. would have an impression from the outside that Gloria would confirm from the inside.
Feeling a sense of sadness about Dr. W.'s doubt about having anything of value to offer in the healing language we were learning, I told them about my catharsis, offering her some feedback that she did have something valuable to offer me, through this sort of healing.
Dr. S. began to use Therapeutic Touch with an in-patient who was very difficult to handle and who gave her and the hospital staff fits. "Dr. A.," a fellow who had considered attending our classes but had not found time, observed this interchange and said to me, "It worked. The patient calmed down."
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Another Therapeutic Touch class taught at Cornell University included Dr. Polly P, a physician, who wanted to learn Therapeutic Touch for when she had children, Peter G., an informatics expert who also studied martial arts and wanted to learn to use T.T. with his family, and Glenda R., a biostatistician who is also a practitioner of African dance.
They learned different aspects of Therapeutic Touch, including "centering," "assessing," and "treating".
Centering
Centering has to do with your intent to help and heal: I explain it as eliminating other interests for a set period of time. You will become much more "at one with," or completely focused on, helping and healing the healee. During the assessment and treatment, you move your hands in a downward, rhythmic motion perhaps an inch or two away from the person's body, sensing, "cues" in the "energy field." For example, the field might feel smooth and even until you get to a certain area, and then you might experience it as swirling around. It might be cool in one part and warm in another. During the treatment, you might then smooth out the swirls, or move some warmth into the cool area until the field is balanced.
We talked about centering for a long time, and especially about using the person's energy, not your own. To teach the art of centering, I presented an exercise wherein there were two people, one whom you liked and one you did not. Your intent to heal should be the same. There might be a bum on the street with body sores who disgusted you, but you would place that disgust aside except in that it might be of use to help the man. The sores might disgust you so that you might wish them to get better.
If you were a "ladies man," for example, centering would be to focus in on healing until your intent towards a beautiful woman and an ugly, cantankerous old man would be about the same: to help and heal. You would not be expected to maintain this intent 24 hours a day - at other times you might be intent on eating, having fun, relaxing, winning a handball game, making money, pursuing sex - so having a limited time to act out of a sense of infinite compassion expressed by this healing intent was crucial. A Therapeutic Touch treatment is generally about ten or fifteen minutes.
Glenda was so sensitive that when Dr. P. was assessing her, Glenda's head started to hurt and then her knee started to hurt. Dr. P. threw up her hands and said, "Goddamn it, I'm no good at this!" Since her focus had now strayed from the healee to herself, and how SHE was performing, which sometimes happens, she now needed to reaffirm her intention to help and heal, and then allow her hands to find a way to pass through Glenda's energy field without hurting her.
Dr. P. was now able to pass her hands through Glenda's field without causing her pain. She felt differences in hot and cold, and some prickles. When Glenda worked on Dr. P., Glenda's hands immediately began to hurt. I suggested that she back away and reaffirm her intent not to hurt. Dr. P.'s head began to hurt. I suggested that Glenda find a way to pass her hands through the field without hurting them. Glenda found that she could do this, and Dr. P.'s head felt better, and some back-pain lessened. I suggested that the sensitivity in Glenda's hands could be used to help other people heal: by finding ways to use her hands so that they didn't hurt, she would find ways to help the person heal.
Dr. P.'s back felt better and Glenda's sinuses were now better.
Asssessing
During session two, Dr. P. and Peter G. gave me a treatment for my hip, which was in a long recovery process from a mysterious injury. This recovery could be measured by things I could do without pain. At one point, for example, I could not shovel snow, or carry a box of file folders in front of me down a hallway without my hip buckling in pain. After physical therapy, I could perform these tasks, although there was still much to work on, because there were other things I could not do. For example, I could not roll over on my side in bed and lie there for a minute without warning twinges in my hips beginning. This annoyed me, because sometimes my stomach felt immensely comfortable to lie that way.
After Dr. P. and Peter assessed me, Peter said that he had felt nothing in my energy field, and wondered what strategy to take during the treatment. I said that I could offer him one or, if he preferred, I would trust him to think of one himself. He decided to come up with one on his own.
The Treatment
After the treatment, he told me that his strategy had been to pass his hands through the field and leave it alone. The Chinese have a term, "Wu-wei," which means, "not doing," as opposed to "doing nothing". This strategy of Wu-wei on Peter's part, combined with what his partner, Dr. P. did, turned out to be effective communication on the unconscious level. The night following that session, I rolled over on my side in bed and, to my surprise, was able to stay there as long as I liked. Never again was my hip troubled when my body lay in this position.
A key teaching of Therapeutic Touch is not to slip into fantasy. You do not want to be focused on success or results, but you want to be guided by feedback. Following my hip's successful retrieval of one more activity of daily living, I was able to inform my students that they were now healers!
After our classes, Dr. P. told me she wrote in her journal, "I want to be a healer."