Quantum
HEALTH
Issue 11 April 2011
the purpose of change and transformation to promote flexibility and survival.
Q
In one of your books, Coyote Wisdom, you wrote that healing stories contain the core values for transformation, and also that they universally contain an element of the marvellous. So two related questions: What are those core values for transformation? Why is the marvellous important to a healing story?
L M-M: One of the things that I’ve learned from indigenous healers is that it’s really a great mystery. To learn to marvel at the workings of the will, including healing. I’ve learned to marvel when people are terribly ill and something happens and they get well. In all of those situations it seems like some kind of transformation occurs, some kind of reconfiguration of the person, of their relationships. It might be their relationship to other people or to the plant kingdom in what they eat, or where they live or with transformation with the spiritual dimension. But when marvellous things happen, transformation is often involved.
I did a study recently about people who come for healing with indigenous healers. We came up with numbers–five numbers, indicating a little, some, moderate, a lot, tremendous–in relation to spiritual transformation; asking, you know, how much did they change, how much did they transform their relationship to the spiritual dimension? And, we found that the more profound the spiritual transformation, the more likely that people had profound physical healing as well. So, to me–you can’t prove cause and effect with such a study–but to me having a really profound story for transformation–or losing the illness, as some of these people had cancer, multiple sclerosis and other serious stuff–there’s something about transformation that is really important to getting well. I mean, if you are sick, you have to stop being the person who is sick and be someone else. That’s a kind of definition of transformation. Everything about you contributed to getting sick and so if you don’t want to be sick, well, you have to become another person. How do you do that? Well, by living a different story.
12 Quantum Health
Q
I’d like to share a story and perhaps you could comment. I met a man recently who had a cancerous tumour on his upper back that was growing into his spine. He was advised to have surgery. He was hesitant to do that, but decided he had no other option. Then before the surgery, he spent some time thinking about the cancer and what could have caused it. And he had an awakening about how filled with grief he was. He is gay and had lost a lot of friends to AIDS. He said he had gone to eleven funerals in quick succession, including his life partner’s funeral. He realised he had been carrying a burden of enormous grief on his back. He was able to feel this grief deeply and release it. And a few days before surgery, when he went in to have the final images taken so the surgeon could be precise in his work, there was no tumour left. It was gone. The doctors had all kinds of explanations but were mostly mystified. But he knew that it was the transformation of his grief that had healed him. He has been cancer free for years now. Emotions can impact us physically. It’s the coyote you talked about. If we aren’t going to pay attention to what’s inside, perhaps our bodies will manifest it outwardly. What’s your take on the interface between the mind and body both in the creation of disease and its healing?
L M-M: Yes, and I think that part of the narrative movement is saying to geneticists that stories are good data… If 100 of us sat down together, we’d all have a story like this. When I lecture, usually half of the audience knows someone who has had a miracle cure–and the other half of the audience is doctors!
What’s so powerful about this kind of story is that it does teach us something about the mind-body connection. The danger in the past with psychosomatic medicine was to leap to conclusions too quickly. You know, someone who heard your story could say well let’s build a grief scale and anybody high on the grief scale should have cancer. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s too unique, too complex, too rich. But what I’ve learned is that if you listen to the stories, put yourself into the story, it all makes sense. I have a colleague at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who wrote a book called Meaning-Full Illness. And he found that if you let people tell their stories, the illness almost always starts to
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