Beth Alderman, Owner, Writer, and Publisher
In 2011, after fifteen years of working as a doctor and medical researcher, and another fifteen of struggling with chronic illness, I began to integrate the piecemeal healing practices I’d learned in the course of my healing journey. I pulled together paradigms and patterns of being and becoming from a wide variety of sources. Gathering practices and possibilities empirically and experientially, and weaving them together according to ecological and theological paradigms of interconnection, I penetrated boundaries that often link healing practices to ideas of identity or worldview, such as spiritual or secular, religious or medical, Eastern or Western, tribal or national, and such like. The end result was The Chronic Illness Owner’s Manual. It worked well for me; I hope it will work as well for you.
The book draws on both my formal and informal studies. The former yielded an AB in Biology, an MD from the University of Chicago, an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Washington, and a decade of teaching and doing multidisciplinary research in clinical and reproductive epidemiology at the University of Colorado Medical School and the University of Washington School of Public Health. Since then, I have informally ventured into Eastern and Western healing practices, theology, psychology, spiritual practices, and world healing. I also spent time in unfamiliar regions and countries, explored old and new paradigm thinking, and experimented with the creative arts. For a long time, the discursive threads of my journey failed to form a pattern.
And then I began to see that in almost all situations, healing and cure are done to the sick by the well, often through complex bureaucratic systems in which decisions are made distantly and, therefore, uniformly and poorly with respect to the individual. In an era of widespread access to education, this approach is neither necessary nor desirable. Infantilizing patients on the one hand, and placing excessive responsibility on doctors on the other, divides the sick from their best source of help: their ingenuity. Likewise, the elaboration and stagnation that dissociates investigators from creativity and divides them from new discoveries also divides the sick from the best source of new knowledge: their unique experience. The ongoing professionalization of healing and cure deepens the shadows that isolate and disempower the sick. Most medical and healing books fail to illuminate or overcome this impediment.
What has been missing from our healing systems is a wisdom text that empowers the sick to overcome barriers of division and dissociation and to transform illness into healing. Such a text can also enable healers and doctors to assist the sick in awakening and developing the healing abilities that transform the predicament of chronic illness, and that are ignored, undervalued, or stamped out by current processes of care. The Chronic Illness Owner’s Manual is one such text. It offers an integrative, comprehensive, and powerful system of self-guided healing for sick people in search of self-transformation. It outlines a customizable process of discovery and development to enable the creation of relief, wellbeing, joy, love, strength, wisdom, and completion.
May you engage its healing journey fully, freely, and creatively. May you be and become healing.
With my partner Edward Boyko and our growing creative team, I am developing Sevenfold Healing SYSTEMS*MEDIA*GUILDS as a business dedicated to the creation and development of new systems of self-transformation, and to the training and certification of practitioners who can aid self-healers in learning to identify and create healing states, and in learning to discern and dissolve any obstacles that they may encounter on the way. My next books will be a non-fiction fertility book and a companion novel intended to support the healing journey of couples who have tried without success to conceive a child.
May your relief, wellbeing, and healing be strong. May your equanimity and resilience become deeper, broader, and greater than you can imagine.
OTHER MEMBERS OF THE GROWING TEAM
New members of the team include Edward Boyko, Medical Consultant; Marjon Floris, Bodyworker; Timothy Malone, Retreat Master, Author, and Practitioner; and Jane Shofer, Bodyworker.