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    Unlocking Your Self-Healing Potential: A Journey Back to Health Through Authenticity, Self-determination and Creativity
    Unlocking Your Self-Healing Potential: A Journey Back to Health Through Authenticity, Self-determination and Creativity
    Unlocking Your Self-Healing Potential: A Journey Back to Health Through Authenticity, Self-determination and Creativity
    Ebook261 pages2 hours

    Unlocking Your Self-Healing Potential: A Journey Back to Health Through Authenticity, Self-determination and Creativity

    By Josef Ulrich

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    About this ebook

    Our bodies have an amazing capacity for repair and regeneration, healing a broken ankle or grazed knee. The power to heal exists within all of us, but few people learn how to support it and harness it in our times of greatest need – illness and d

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFloris Books
    Release dateOct 12, 2018
    ISBN9781782505402
    Unlocking Your Self-Healing Potential: A Journey Back to Health Through Authenticity, Self-determination and Creativity
    Author

    Josef Ulrich

    Josef Ulrich is an anthroposophical therapist at the Öschelbronn Clinic in Germany with many years' experience of working with people at different stages of health and illness, in particular those with a cancer diagnosis.

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      Book preview

      Unlocking Your Self-Healing Potential - Josef Ulrich

      Three Guiding Lights

      On this journey towards greater self-healing potential, you will carry a small rucksack containing three helpful guiding lights: your healthy common sense, openness to possibility and also your own inner physician.

      Healthy Common Sense

      Whatever you may have read, heard or seen, whatever you have studied and learned, your true knowledge goes far beyond it. You know a great many things without having studied them – they are simply there for you as inner certainty.

      And when you set out to strengthen your self-healing powers, please always attend to what your healthy common sense is telling you. Try to sense its loving support as you seek to rediscover your potential, your own store of experience, wisdom and knowledge.

      Untreatable versus incurable

      Many of us have an inner sense that the fact an illness is medically untreatable does not inevitably mean that it is incurable. The soundness of this intuition is shown by ‘spontaneous remissions’. These do not happen often, but they do happen. Patients recover even when this outcome was wholly unexpected and remains medically inexplicable.⁴

      Openness

      The second guiding light that will be helpful on your journey is ‘openness to reality’.

      In modern, highly specialised fields of medicine it is easy to find professionals with different points of view, some of whom may think that their perspective is the only correct one. This does not cultivate openness, or insight.

      More than flesh and blood

      Openness involves becoming aware that we human beings are more than a material conglomeration measurable in kilos and centimetres. Being open to reality is to acknowledge that we are more than biochemical processes. If human life were a purely physical, material thing, the placebo effect could not happen, and only a ‘real’ medicine would work.

      I want to invite you to attend to what a quiet voice within may already be telling you, and to be open to the possibility that, more than flesh and blood, you are a being constituted of body, soul and spirit.

      ***

      A story: Paracelsus and the six diagnoses

      Six physicians stand before a corpse and discuss what the patient died of. The first thinks it was the cholera bacillus. The second objects that many have been infected with it but did not die, and says that the main cause of death was the patient’s weak immune system and poor vitality. The third physician says that, knowing the patient to be full of anxiety, she thinks that he attracted the cholera to him, as it were, and so his mental state was the real cause of death. The fourth physician claims to have known the patient even better, and says he was cowardly and lacked courage, was unable to make any decision, and so ultimately his weak ego was responsible for his deterioration. The fifth physician, surveying what all the others have said, decides that taking all these factors together it is clear that it was the patient’s destiny to die, for otherwise all these things would not have conspired against him as they did.

      And now the five physicians turn expectantly to the sixth and ask to hear his opinion.

      Imagine that you are this sixth physician. I invite you to give your opinion. Which of the five others do you think was right? Was it the physical fact of the cholera bacillus, the patient’s poor vitality, his anxious and fragile emotional state, his general lack of resolve, or his destiny?

      The sixth physician was Paracelsus himself. In the story what he says is: ‘Each of you is right in what you affirm, and each of you wrong in what you repudiate!’

      Paracelsus is telling us to maintain openness: do not get tied to a single perspective rejecting all others, as they may have equal validity.⁵

      ***

      The Inner Physician

      The third guiding light is always by your side. This is the ‘inner physician’ in each one of us.

      No one knows as well as you how you are feeling. You know when you are tired or exhausted, hungry or thirsty, happy or unhappy, hopeful or despairing. No one knows as well as you what makes you leap for joy. Only you will fully recall how you immersed yourself body and soul in a particular project or activity, and felt warmly, happily absorbed in it. You are the best expert on yourself, and you know best what does you good and enhances your health. While not a medical professional, you know what suits you, what strengthens you.

      Are you ready not only to attend to the voice of your inner physician but also to act on what it is telling you?

      Don’t be discouraged if you can’t yet answer this question with a clear ‘yes’. Often life has carried us a long way away from dialogue with our inner physician or the habit of perceiving and feeling what we need. But we can learn to attend to this again.

      You Are

      Your place is

      where eyes regard you.

      Where gazes meet

      you come into being.

      You are upheld by a call,

      always the same voice:

      it seems to be a single voice

      with which all call.

      You fell

      but you are not falling now:

      eyes sustain you.

      You are

      because eyes wish you to be:

      they look on you and tell you

      that you are.

      Hilde Domin

      A Starting Point: our Threefold Relationship

      You may be well and reading this book to stay well, or you may be ill and want to activate your self-healing forces to recover your health. Regardless, I’d like to start with a story that I think gives us insight into illness.

      Re-tuning your instrument

      In 1982 I worked in a Swiss clinic specialising in treating patients with cancer. One Sunday morning I happened to turn on the radio in my little office, and heard a broadcast sermon. It was a day of the year the Swiss call ‘Day of the Sick’ and so the minister was talking about disease.

      He spoke about musicians having to regularly re-tune their instrument to be able to produce the right sounds, and he compared this with a period of illness. He said that while ill we have an opportunity to re-tune ourselves. Elaborating further, he described a threefold relationship in which each of us lives.

      Each person, he said, has a relationship firstly with themselves, secondly with their fellow human beings and nature, and thirdly with the heavens, the universe and God. In this perspective, we exist in a three-way relationship. The questions for each of us are: How am I living right now? Am I especially active in one of these relationships? To which do I give most attention? Are all three in balance?

      The minister ended by summing up any period of illness as a time when we can rebalance the three relationships and thus re-tune our ‘instrument’. Illness can be seen as a prompt to reconsider the balance and quality of each of these relationships in our lives.

      ***

      An exercise: the threefold relationship in your life

      Take a sheet of paper and sketch a diagram: a triangle of three equal sides, which takes up as much of the page as possible. Mark the middle of each side and draw lines to connect these mid-points. Now you have four small triangles inside the large one.

      We will return to the triangles soon, but first take some time to think about how you feel right now in your relationship with yourself, with others and with the broader universe or God.

      With yourself

      How is your relationship with yourself at the moment?

      This question brings with it the task of perceiving your own needs – at all levels – and, where appropriate, stating them to the people around you. We need to acknowledge ourselves, to respect and value ourselves, as well as respecting and valuing others. And we need to recognise, respect and broaden our own limitations. For many of us, this can be the hardest of the threefold relationships to make time for. If it helps, consider marking out ‘time for myself’ in your diary or daily timetable.

      With others

      How do you feel in your relationships with those closest to you: your family, friends and colleagues?

      Does anything need to change here? How do you speak to each other? How well do you communicate with each other about what you experience, what you hope for and desire?

      With the universe or God

      And how is your relationship to the heavens (or however you may like to think of this dimension)?

      Have you been able to cultivate and maintain a religious or spiritual aspect to your life? Do you feel a vibrant enthusiasm? Do wonder, gratitude and stillness fill your days with joy?

      Try to immerse yourself in your own sense of these three relationships in your life right now. How easy is it for you to engage with these questions?

      We will return to your diagram and your sense of your threefold relationships shortly.

      ***

      Over the past thirty years I have repeatedly encountered different variations of this threefold picture and I firmly believe it has many insights to offer us.

      The connection with healing potential

      Perhaps you can already sense how our quality of life in these three realms is intimately bound up with our potential for healing. As we recover from an illness, this threefold dialogue must be consciously cultivated. We need to open ourselves time and again to new experiences in these three relationships.

      In which of the three fields would you begin a revived threefold conversation?

      A dialogue with myself

      Most people start with themselves.

      Sometimes patients tell me that their way of life has plunged them into a sense of despair. They can no longer see a way forward and have lost all faith that they might improve their circumstances. Some even say that they no longer want to go on.

      If you have felt similarly, perhaps this book can help you to experience things differently, to discover and develop your own potential, and to value it.

      ***

      Returning to the exercise, label the shape you drew, so that the three small triangles lying at the three angles of the large triangle say: ‘with myself’ in the first, ‘with others’ in the second and ‘with God and/or the universe’ in the third (if neither of these words has meaning for you, use your own word, or perhaps leave that third triangle empty for now). In the central small triangle, write the word ‘I’. Then draw three arrows from the central ‘I’ triangle pointing to the other three triangles.

      Now give a colour to each of these three relationships in your own life.

      How do you experience these triangles? As the diagram stands, does it strike you as an accurate picture of your relationships, or do you feel that some change is needed to make it more genuinely reflective of your current situation? Should one of the triangles be smaller or another larger? How well connected should these triangles appear? Make the changes, so your diagram represents your threefold relationships as you experience them now.

      ***

      Please draw a second diagram now. This one will show the way you would like your threefold relationships to feel. If you prefer, you can draw circles for this one instead of triangles. Give each segment a size and colour and connection to the central ‘I’.

      Once you have drawn the two versions of the diagram, consider how you might actually move from the first representation of how things are to the second, more harmonious picture. Note your thoughts, but for the time being keep this as an open question.

      ***

      This book may provide ways of positively improving each of your threefold relationships. It may help you use a time of illness as a prompt to re-tune your instrument – to re-harmonise your life.

      Keep your diagrams to return to on our journey towards

      understanding what nurtures your healing potential;

      finding a way to integrate these insights into your life, overcoming obstacles;

      and perhaps intuiting the meaning of the illness you have been suffering and the challenge it presents.

      To stand on my own two feet anew,

      to feel alive down to my toes.

      Everywhere a joy in life springs

      and streams sun-like out of me.

      A power of life has awoken

      and connects my love to the world.

      My being wants to unfold:

      let creative strength prevail,

      let love shape my life.

      Sabine Mehne

      What is Health? Where Are We Travelling To?

      In modern medicine, patients are urged to fight their illness. This often leads to them fixating on overcoming it at all costs. If this fails they give up hope. Instead, we would ideally be encouraged to accept our illness as an integral part of our biography, so that we learn not only to fight it, but also to live with it.

      Don’t be swallowed up by medicine

      Medical ethicist Professor Giovanni Maio contrasts an increasingly technical medicine, driven by economic constraints, with a positive picture of patient care in which

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