The Sevenfold Healing System for Chronic Illness
Chronic Illness has no cure. If it did, we would be well by now. Chronic illness may confuse or overwhelm us with obstacles such as pain, loss, and isolation. Friends, family, and society may be unwilling or unable to offer relief, wellbeing, or healing, or may meet our predicament with pity, cold charity, abandonment, or hatred.
As we adjust to illness, we realize that we can help ourselves even when our difficulties confound our awareness and understanding. We can do this by actively seeking relief, wellbeing, healing and cure. We can guide ourselve with the aid of Sevenfold Healing Systems that integrates wisdom from ancient and modern traditions around the globe to create a new paradigm of the body and an innovative system of comprehensive, self-guided healing.
The sevenfold healing system for chronic illness features working questions and meditative exercises that enhance relaxation, attention, and concentration, and enable recovery from modern predicaments that may compromise inborn healing systems, such as energy imbalances resulting from adrenaline addiction and mental fragmentation by overtaxing work and overstimulating media. Because sevenfold healing process enable the sick to guide their personal search for healing and cure, sevenfold healing supports the grass roots revitalization and resacralization of mainstream global medicine.
The Sevenfold Body
The Sevenfold Healing Systems is based on a model of the body that includes seven levels derived from Eastern and Western sources such as allopathy, medical anthropology, Daoism, and Buddhism. It enables us to: open to healing through our consciousness, understanding, perceptions, sensations, energy, flesh, and interbeing; to guide the healing integration of our sevenfold body; and to recreate our states of being and becoming. Because we can use the method to eliminate obstacles to inner harmony, and because healing on one level catalyzes healing on all levels, this method is synergistic as well as integrative, strong, and comprehensive.
Sevenfold Healing
Sevenfold Healing is self-guided. As such, it enhances and utilizes skills such as awareness, self-reliance, personal responsibility, strength, and equanimity. It also enables us to enhance our inborn healing systems even when our carers and systems of care are unwilling or unable to aid us. If we like, we can use it to share our gifts, our life experience, and our healing transformation with others, and with the web of life. This system is laid out in our foundational wisdom healing text, The Chronic Illness Owner’s Manual.
Sevenfold Healing in The Big Picture
Sevenfold Healing is based on the enablement of grass roots healing activism in the context of a big picture view of nature and culture. This big picture can inform healing through the unhealed and healed aspects of our past, the latter of which offer the greatest chance for innovation in the healing and curative arts. By studying the history of chronic illness, allopathy, spiritual healing, ecology, and public health, we can take heart from our gains, note our errors, and transform our illness experience into the fundamental strengths that will underpin our healing and cure.
The Unhealed Aspect
When we are ill, we may become aware that others wish us to get well and get on with meeting their expectations, or to die and get out of the way. We may react to these unpleasant reactions with shock, sorrow, or shame that worsen our plight. We may enter into voluntary or enforced isolation, or fall into a downward spiral propelled by forces that act from without and from within. When we look at history and psychology, we see that this automatic tendency to react to illness with hatred has created both tenacious ignorance and canny cures.
In the early Middle Ages in the West, nuns created hospitals to care for the sick and poor. On visiting the L’Hôtel-Dieu in Beane in 1980, I read that the building stood testament to the barbarous ignorance of the past because nuns accepted death from illness as the will of God. On talking with a nun, I heard that nuns established hospitals to practice caritas, that is, a form of love called altruism or compassion. This discrepancy reveals the unhealed and healed aspect of hospitals today, that is, the good and bad effected by the well in their efforts to aid the sick and themselves in the context of current concepts and power structures. In our post-industrial era, we attempt to control our destiny by using technology to make war on disease, often at the expense of the sick. We are most pleased with our healing efforts when they sustain our habits of mind and behavior (for more information, see the Wikipedia entry on L’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris). This favors the status quo, especially in the context of high-inertia, complex systems.
When those we love are ill, we may respond differently. Since the advent of our species, we have tried without stinting to preserve the lives of our children, and to protect and rescue them when they become ill. This parentalism still shapes our intimate care of the sick for both good and ill. Paternal love, when combined with wisdom, creates and exercises strength that enables us to face hard realities, and to attempt to alter them. It is an important force for the creation of new cures. It is also subject to the weaknesses of men, or, to use Daoist language, to a lack of yan energy. When the strength of yan is missing, it is simulated by aggression, which leads us to try to dominate disease through hierarchy, competition, or predation that take the form of declaring war on disease. When we attack illness, and invoke romantic notions of battle, we may treat the sick as collateral damage, or as guinea pigs. Likewise, we may attempt to heal the sick by invoking maternal love that enables us to continue loving the sick even when death is inevitable. If our maternal or yin energies are unbalanced, fears of insecurity, discontinuity, and unpredictability may overtake us. We may foster dependence and allow the appearance of security to blind us, as when the welfare state creates care bureaucracies that prevent healing transformation. Parentalism, too, favors the status quo.
Power structures and parentalism have taught us to create top-down systems by which we have the opportunity to respond well to disasters. We can rescue many lives from death due to injury or acute illness. We can prevent illness and death through vaccination and dietary supplementation. Unfortunately, we support the sick to feed the egos or the wallets of the well rather than to express abundant compassion. We create intentional disasters that are as great as, or greater than, those that we heal. We destroy each other with unprecedented ease, and carelessly poison the web of life to which we all belong. We end lives more effectively and efficiently than we heal them.
More saliently, power and paternalism create the expectation that others should take responsibility for our illness. It encourages helpless dependence. If we accept this, we may overlook or relinquish opportunities to increase our understanding. We may accept carers and systems of care that worsen our state. We may try to meet the expectations of people who put their notions and their systems before our urgent needs. We may become objects of care. If we ignore our experience to be good sports, or to please others, we will give up the chance to change, and to heal.
If we look within, we will discover the same processes in our psyches. If we are insightful, we will detect fear and anger, and our efforts to reassure ourselves that we are safe, and that bad things cannot happen to us. We will catch our minds trying to rationalize our illness and to control our destiny through habits of denial, blame, or shame. We may even help society to punish or ostracize us. We may be willing to work against our objective reality in order to support the status quo, or to be good team players. To free ourselves of prevailing psychodynamic processes, and to support our own healing transformation, we can learn to recognize and to reside in the healed aspects of the past and the present.
The Healed Aspect
Life is dangerous and unpredictable. With the tools of science, we have observed disease and devised ways to stop its spread. Having learned that exile fails to limit the spread of disease, we have ended the practice of abandoning lepers to colonies where they descended into despair and depravity before dying. Few people contract leprosy nowadays, and those that do can be cured. Maternal and infant death rates have plummeted in many countries. Diseases that were recently uniformly fatal such as insulin-dependent diabetes can now be treated effectively. New illnesses such as AIDS continue to arise, and to be countered with new treatments. We have even cured our entire species of an ancient scourge: smallpox.
With the tools of social organization, we have done even more to overcome disease and improve health. Many of us are so privileged, and so unaware of our privilege, that we take for granted or resent hard won gains such as the widespread availability of safe drinking water, sewage treatment, vaccination programs, and screening programs. We are so fortunate that we expect to be cured of all ills, including the new diseases that are always emerging, and that call us to new levels of understanding of our bodies and their ailments.
Emerging Healing Processes
All around the globe, modern systems of care are converging with ancient healing lineages, including pre-industrial allopathy in countries that maintain the continuity of the wisdom created by Hippocrates and Maimonides. Everywhere, we have an unprecedented opportunity to learn from the fullness of human history, and to choose and weave together processes that can heal ailments old and new. As new illnesses emerge, possibly as a result of global warming or our careless sterilization of the web of life, we have the chance to experience an extraordinary array of healing possibilities, and to test their value today.
The Unhealed Aspect
With the rise of what William James called the religions of healthy mindedness, we have found ways to change our habits of thinking and feeling so as to enhance our health. At times, we demand too much of these methods, and retreat into denial. In our rush to create whatever reality our ego desires, we take the easy road of healing the well and deny or blame the sick.
In the monetary economy, chronic illness is a nearly inexhaustible source of profit; cure costs money, and yields non-monetary benefits such as relief, wellbeing, and healing. These benefits can only be measured by what people are willing to pay, which may have only a loose connection to healing. Again, we retreat into denial of illness so as to take the easy road of healing well people. The well can earn money, and are willing to spend it on services such as relaxing massages that offset harmful working conditions. We choose the appearance of healing rather than true healing.
The Healed Aspect
As our conceptual frameworks widen to encompass a new synthesis of decades of analytic thinking, we are becoming aware of interbeing, that is, our interconnection with the web of life and with all of creation. In ecology, genetics, economics, and other fields, we are becoming aware that sustainability cannot be achieved automatically, or in the context of economic cycles of boom and bust. We are learning that by increasing our conscious understanding of interdependence, we can anticipate and create necessary change. We can enhance life on earth rather than do battle with it.
With the advent of the information economy, we are beginning to understand that when we divide a problem from its solution, we cut off the information that is required for wise action. If we look closely, we will see that the sick know what went wrong in their lives, and what is helping them to heal individually and collectively. They have the information that matters for healing at all levels, and the ability to act on that information directly. This will enable a level of human wellbeing through efficiency and sufficiency that is as yet beyond the horizon of our imaginings.
The global confluence of modern medicine and ancient healing lineages is enabling us to heal our flesh and to heal on other levels as well. As we use ancient spiritual practices to enhance our perceptions, understanding and awareness, we create the opportunity to use information with a fuller awareness, and so to discover and counter the origins of chronic illness. We can learn to distinguish motion from action, biobabble from useful insights, and effective and efficient treatments from drug dependence and other harmful habits that prevent our healing. We can more wisely delve into our past to look for clues, explore the benefits of various healing modalities, and take wise action together to improve our lot. We can stop ailing and start healing.