Environmental health & healer heal thyself!

How does it affect us? How do we affect it? What can we do to improve it with the healing arts?

Thank you for creating this lovely little pod! 2007 will be a year in which i will be more of a consumer of H.A. than a provider. I am intent on being healed through soem powerful healers that help my body adn mind to help itself into restored balance…Time for this healer to heal thyself! How about you?

Please allow me the plug of a related new pod by fellow Zaadster Keith called MCS, (multiple chemical sensitivity) that i just joined. Would love it if we could cross post or have ya'll join us there. Meanwhile it is my intention to return here to reflect on my own questions and connect with you all about the healing arts!

May the healing arts prosper in 2007.
Happy New Year, all!

Mary

Re: Environmental health & healer heal thyself!

This is one, huge topic, so I'll give it some time. Please remember, this is one man's experience who offers no solutions, but only another angle for you to consider.

I've had a few years of intimate experience with environmental illness. Not on the afflicted end but on the partnered side. Especially having come up from allopathic medicine, it was an incredibly challenging time.

In the 1980's, even the broad category of environmental illness had yet to be defined as such so there were all these people with all these signs and symptoms that didn't fit into any medical boxes. In the effort to categorize what was happening, physicians (especially) kept trying to fit square blocks into round holes resulting in many many people being essentially betrayed by the medical profession. In my experience, that betrayal was the result of the tendency of medical practitioners to say, “Once we give it a name, we can cure it.” They couldn't. That's not a whole lot different than it is today.

I can't tell you how many dead end roads we went down, how many quacks we encountered and how much disappointment we met along the way. I can also attest to the strain it puts on the relationship, ultimately suffocating ours.

For what it's worth, during that time, I ran into a study that said almost 80% of relationships affected by “chronic” illness fail. That was actually an important part of my recovery from the experience. To understand that even if the illness doesn't seem real – to anyone, and that is part of the pain because, so often, the afflicted doesn't believe it him or herself – the strain is – to everyone.

After that relationship broke up, I found myself tending fire for a traditional Native American medicine family doing sacred healing ceremonies (Yuwipi) on the Pine Ridge Reservation (SD). There was an article published in a magazine that spoke of the favorable affects that the ceremony had on such terminal illnesses as cancer and AIDS. That summer, over six-hundred people came from all over the world to be treated by the Tunkasilas (Spirit Grandfather helpers who work THROUGH the Yuwipi Man).

Something very interesting happened during those times. Many, many people came to the Rez to be healed from illness in that broad category. A theme arose, for anyone who came for healing, and especially for those with terminal diseases who had no where else to turn. It was this: the Spirit world, just like the Doctor can prescribe this or that or the other thing but this is not about finding the magic bullet, this is about changing your life, especially your attitude and approach to it.

An integral part of this was the directive to spend time in prayer and contemplation in the natural environment. To “meet” the true environment, spend time with it, establish a relationship with it and find the guidance that lives there, AND inside you.

To my astonishment, Spirit would sometimes “tell” the Yuwipi man, who had little, if any, knowledge of the specifics of each person's illness, that the problem did not lie in any physical cause, but had to do directly with the person's will to live. In some cases, Spirit would say, in essence, “Instruct the family to help ease the patient over to the next plane.”

In other cases still, Spirit would identify certain family members as the roots of many of the problems because of their controlling tendencies that stripped the afflicted individual of their own control of their health and well-being.

But, most of all, the focus was taken off of any sort of specific approach or treatment and put on what I recognize now as complete presence in the moment and a focus on the life that is now rather than the specific affliction and its specific cures. One year after the healing ceremony, recipients are asked to come back to the Rez for a “Wopila”, Thank You ceremony. Those who returned, to a one, came back with a year's experience in moving their concerns from the specifics of the affliction to the act of living in the moment. A common theme of their experience was once they became more open to the life that is, doors opened in front of them that led them to other doors that eventually helped them to turn the corner.

Recovery from any sort of trauma is just this: a gradual lessening of focus on the trauma and an increasing focus on the act of living.

This is how I would like to see the focus of this pod manifest. This is not about dis-ease or therapies or even healing, per se. It is about people finding their strengths as healers by living fully the life they've been asked to live.

Russel J.,
a firetender

More on “Healer Heal Thyself”, later.

Re: Environmental health & healer heal thyself!

Yes my friend I agree with you.Here is a real small example and I have many more.
        

One day my son Brian told me that one of his friends he used to work with was sick with Parkinson's disease at 34 years old. The doctor told him that he would not live long. For some reason, the doctor thought that because he was so young that he might only live six months. My son said, “Daddy, you need to go and lay hands on Bob.” He had told Bob that he thought I could help him.

I tried to call Bob and set up an appointment with him, but we never did connect. One day my other son, Don Don, said, “You need to go see Bob.” I told him I didn't know where he lived and was unable to reach him. My son said, “Let's go now,” so Don Don and his friend Kevin and I went to Bob's apartment. Bob had been taking medicine the doctor gave him, and he said he was a lot better than he had been. His hand and forearm would shake all the time and his head would jerk every now and then. I said, “Bob, you're not doing good. God didn't make you like this.” He sat down in a chair and I put my hands on his shoulders and spoke a few minutes. Bob could feel heat going through his body. I became still for a few more minutes. I could see Bob's hand shaking and then at once it just stopped. Kevin and my son noticed it at the same time. I remember the look on their faces. A few more minutes went by and Bob spoke and said, “I felt something move between my shoulder blades and pop, and then my hand stopped shaking.” Bob's head stopped jerking too, and he was very happy. It's been over two years since I have seen Bob, but my sons have seen him and there is nothing wrong with him.  Your friend, Don

Re: Environmental health & healer heal thyself!

Would you be willing to share with us, Bob, how the life you lived before you began having healing energy move through you contributed to opening up those channels? What sensitivities did your life's circumstances grant you that helped you to mobilize your compassion in a healing way?

Mahalo (“Thank You!” in Hawaiian. I'm not Hawaiian, but I sure do appreciate that the people have made sure that the language is very much alive here.)

Russ

Re: Environmental health & healer heal thyself!

Russ,
Yes I would like to share with everyone. There are no specific sensitivities that came from my life circumstances that I know of. For 18 years I was married to a woman who was depressed and very sickly, continually in and out of hospitals. At 40 years old I was diagnosed with manic depression and was homicidal suicidal. After getting on medication I realized I had been like this all my life, it only got worse and I couldn't cover it up any more. Drugs, alcohol, sex, money, nothing covered it up for me. It was in prison when I realized I had been in my own personal prison all my life, covered up with everyone's false beliefs. So having freed myself from the prison I was in all my life, I realize that nearly everyone is in their own personal prison and so my compassion extends to all those who have covered themselves up with false beliefs that were handed down to them. I hope this answers your question. Your friend Don

Re: Environmental health & healer heal thyself!

Don (and please forgive me for calling you Bob before!) something you brought up is so important to the topic of healing, it deserves its own thread. In fact, I'm gonna start it, so check out Moments of Compassion; Lifetimes of Healing

Re: Environmental health & healer heal thyself!

       Russ,
              I thought you would see that, you are forgiven. :-) We have to be careful with this forgiveness, I think many people mistake it for the word  ” FIRE….”
                                            Your friend, Don

Re: Environmental health & healer heal thyself!

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to get the word out to health care practitioners who are concerned about the impact of the enviornment on medical practice and the impact of medicine on the environment (an often under-discussed topic).   Any help you can provide is appreciated.

Helping to create leaders for Sustainable Medical practices is the focus of the Teleosis Institute and their Green Health Care Online program (see http://www.teleosis.org/ghcp.php for details). 

I'm trying to help this non-profit find health care practitioners who would be interested in this 8 week online course, which starts Jan. 14, 2008.  The course is available flexibly on the schedule of the practitioner and covers some pretty important topics:

Week 1: Leadership and Green Health Care

Week 2: Integral Theory and Medicine

Week 3: Ecological Literacy

Week 4: Sustainability

Week 5: Creating a Sustainable Medicine

Week 6: Precautionary Principle and Wellness

Week 7: Biological Systems and Stressors

Week 8: Green Pharmacy

Furthermore, they get access to an audit of their practice for Green health care practices.

If you have pointers or ideas on how to reach health care practioners and connect them to this important topic, please post a response or send me a note!

Thanks!
Skip (Aikido Traveler)

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