CONSCIOUSNESS AND
THE HEALING PROCESS
Maureen Redl
The current movement toward integrative medicine, with its mutual respect and
collaboration among Western, Eastern, and shamanic practitioners, is one I applaud. Indeed, I don't believe I would be alive today without having had the benefit of all these methods in my healing beyond metastatic ovarian cancer more than 14 years ago. However, I have a major concern regarding what seems to me to be missing in integrative medicine. We rarely hear anyone speak about consciousness as central to the healing process. The deep knowing in every cell of my body says that it is the changes and development of consciousness itself that is the direct link to our innate, universal, and powerful healing potential proposed in integral health and healing demonstrated throughout this book. In this culture, where we put greater
emphasis on the external than the internal, I realize that going inside ourselves to find healing power is often unfamiliar and difficult. Instead, we tend to search frantically for the "right" practitioner and the "best" treatment. Everything in my experience, however, says that to miss the centrality and extraordinary power of consciousness in the healing process is to miss the most potent medicine we have. Further, the connections between illness, consciousness and the evolution of our potential High Selves may be of even more importance to realize.
This is not intended as a philosophical discussion. Yet in good conscience I can ignore neither the truth of my own direct experiences of the healing process nor my observations with others of the patterns that connect and relate to our larger life process.
In the early '70s I was invited to bring my background in psychology to an interdisciplinary team doing innovative work in sexuality with paraplegics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. I knew almost nothing about paraplegia and looked forward to attending a panel discussion by paraplegics and quadriplegics with their spouses or partners. They were to talk to medical students and faculty about the realities of sexua| relationships when one lives with a wheelchair because of a spinal cord injury. The first person to speak was a good-looking man in his late 20s
who had accidentally been shot in his lower spine when he was 12. After years of wheeling his chair, he had the arms, shoulders, and chest of a football player. His thin, undeveloped legs, however, dangled from the chair, limp and unresponsive. He seemed almost cocky as he surveyed the large audience in the amphitheater. Then in a voice that was both strong and confident, he said, "I want you to know that my accident was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me!" Stunned, I thought, "My God! They're not only crippled, but they're crazy as well!"
How very, very much I had to learn! And how grateful I will always be to that remarkable group of people in wheelchairs and their partners. They taught me that healing may have little or nothing to do with curing physical problems. This helped me to define healing as "a new state of increased well-being that may be physical, emotional, and/or spiritual." Transformed through their responses to injury, they learned to live to their fullest potential. They showed me that
our physical ability or inability does not determine who we truly are. Never again would I equate physical capacity with health or wholeness. Most important, they showed me that for healing to happen, a change of consciousness is more important than a physical cure.
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