Healing Power: Ten Steps to Pain Management and Spiritual Evolution Revised
Introducing the Universal Healing Wheel
by
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CHAPTER TWO INTRODUCTION The purpose of this book is to help people accomplish three important goals: 1. Expand healing power: for body, mind, and soul 2. Become more skillful pain managers: for any pain, problem, disease, or disability 3. Evolve spiritually: feel better, become a better person, and experience higher states of consciousness
To guide the reader toward these goals, the book will outline fifteen proven methods—from ancient wisdom and modern science—designed to help the reader transform any painful problem into a source of strength and peace.
I have been a practicing physician and spiritual seeker for forty years. My medical practice has been in community psychiatry, working with people who have profound and complicated problems: major mental illness, substance abuse, physical illness, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, and broken families. As a spiritual seeker, I have studied and practiced a variety of methods from the world’s great spiritual traditions. In each of these fields—medicine and spirituality—the goal is to expand healing power and eliminate suffering. In the beginning of my career, these two tracks remained separate. Bringing any spiritual teaching into the medical realm was impermissible. There was no scientific proof. It would have been considered inappropriate. This attitude has changed with the advent of mind-body medicine. There is now ample scientific evidence that those with an active spiritual belief system have better outcomes in medicine, surgery, mental health, and addiction. It is now possible to combine the healing principles of both the medical and spiritual fields. To this end, I have developed a ten-step, self-help model that I use myself and teach to my students and patients.
The manual is written for patients, colleagues, and the general public. Specifically, those who may profit from this work are:
1. Healthcare consumers looking for help in managing any painful problem, symptom, disease, or disability 2. Healthcare professionals interested in helping their patients increase their pain management skills and heal (the model supplements the healing practices of all medical specialties, including physical medicine, mental health, substance abuse, and alternative health care) 3. People in crisis struggling with severe problems 4. Beginning or advanced seekers of psychological and spiritual knowledge 5. People who want help with any pain or problem 6. Spiritual counselors and chaplains 7. Yoga teachers and practitioners 8. The intellectually curious
Those who follow the ten steps will learn how to: 1. Expand healing power 2. Become more skillful pain managers 3. Evolve spiritually
We can tap into an expanded reservoir of healing power when we learn how to manage our pain more skillfully. Skillful pain management not only expands our healing power; it also helps us to evolve spiritually. Spiritual qualities such as love, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness grow. We feel better, become better people, and experience higher states of consciousness.
THE INHERENT HEALING WISDOM OF THE BODY To understand healing, let’s start with the intelligent power that operates every cell in the body and see how that relates to current medical practice.
Healing power is unfathomable! To contemplate even a tiny aspect of this Omniscient Power breeds awe and respect. Reflect on its brilliance. A cut heals. In response to bacteria or viruses, the body creates precisely designed antibodies which hunt down and destroy the invaders. The body knows how to transform food into energy and materials for repair of damaged cells. Cells in the body are like construction workers with specialized jobs. Some build. Others tear down. Some transport. Still others eliminate debris.
Every cell in the body forms two thousand proteins per second and sends these proteins where they need to go. The human body has seventy-five trillion such cells working together in near perfect harmony so that we can stand, walk, think, decide, see, hear, touch, taste, feel, love, play, help others, and enjoy beauty. When there is an imbalance disrupting these functions, the intelligent power goes to work to fix it and does so brilliantly. At some point, however, the incomparably wise healing power needs our help.
THE MEDICAL MODEL The wisdom of the body, however brilliant, cannot fix everything on its own. Some pain or problem gets past the body’s inherent protections and breaks through as a symptom that won’t go away. A new lump, an unfamiliar pain, or a lingering discomfort disturbs the routine defenses that give us a feeling of safety.
The flicker of a single thought, such as, “This could be serious!” creates anxiety. An alarm goes off. “Am I okay? Am I safe? Or am I going toward what I fear the most—intense suffering, disability, or even death—with its associated fear of the unknown?”
With symptoms and associated fear in hand, we go to the doctor. The doctor makes a diagnosis and treatment plan, which most often involves the use of medication. The medicine in some way helps the healing power do its work. If it works completely, the symptom, pain, and associated fear are gone. Back in our comfort zone, we feel safe and move on.
But what happens when the symptom persists? We go back to the doctor and place the painful problem and fear back on the table.
Doctors do all they can within the constraints of the medical model, but some illness is chronic and there will always be residual symptoms, pain, and fear. Well-intentioned doctors and patients, looking together for pain relief and healing, often get caught up in unhealthy polypharmacy.
Alternatively, the physician knows the limitations of the medical model and does not continue to prescribe medications. In this scenario, the patient is left with unmanageable suffering and may as a result resort to unhealthy painkilling devices such as substance use, codependency, and a variety of other addictions that only lead to more trouble. Enter integrative, mind-body medicine.
INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE The medical model has great power, but, alone, it can be reductionist, focusing on symptom management without getting to the root cause of disease and healing. Integrative medicine includes biological, psychological, social, and spiritual aspects. We can look for the root cause of disease and healing in each of these four domains.
Integrative medicine looks at the whole person. You still go to your doctor and get your medication but now you will learn how to heal yourself in the psychological, social, and spiritual realms.
Integrative medicine defines four evidence-based healing universes: 1. Biological: a healthy body free of pain (this includes traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine) 2. Psychological: a strong, positive, calm, focused, resilient mind ready for solving problems and shaping meaning 3. Social: giving and receiving love and engaging in constructive, meaningful activities 4. Spiritual: finding meaning and purpose, your higher self, and your place in the world
For complete healing and skillful pain management, we need comprehensive treatment planning with interventions in all four zones.
MIND-BODY MEDICINE The Spiritual Aspect of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
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About the Book
With the advent of mind-body medicine, it is now possible to combine the healing principles of both the medical and spiritual fields. To this end, Dr. Phil Shapiro has developed a ten-step, self-help model that he uses himself and teaches to his students and patients. After you have received your medication, surgery, or natural remedy and you are still in pain, there are a variety of psychosocial and spiritual methods that can help you manage that pain skillfully. The ten-step model described in this book is a composite of healing principles and methods extracted from the great wisdom traditions and organized into cognitive-behavioral practices. These techniques are designed to help the reader accomplish three goals: 1. Expand healing power: for body, mind, and soul 2. Become more skillful pain managers: for any pain, problem, disease, or disability 3. Evolve spiritually: feel better, become a better person, and experience higher states of consciousness To take advantage of the healing principles embedded in the religions, we need to solve the problem of toxic language and traumatic religious history. There is a way to do this. We can design healing models that serve people of all persuasions: Baptists, Sufis, ethical humanists, scientific atheists, true believers, true non-believers—all of us have the same magnificent healing power in every cell of our bodies, and we know how to make it grow. The ten steps do not declare answers to life’s big questions, such as why we are born, why there is so much suffering and evil, whether there is a God, and where we go after death. However, we can apply the wealth of healing wisdom in the great faith traditions to help us manage our pain and heal. This book is written for atheists, agnostics, religious or spiritual persons. Anyone can play in the expanded field of healing power.
About the Author
Dr. Phil Shapiro is a psychiatrist and devotee of yoga-meditation with an interest in the magnificent intelligent healing power as an antidote to the brutal realities of life. He has had a 40-year career as a clinician, teacher, and administrator in public psychiatry. Work has taken him from the inner city to the Alaska bush, from holistic to addiction medicine, and from the boardroom to the streets.
In 1974, he worked in one of the first interdisciplinary holistic clinics in New York City. In l983, he became the Director of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities for the State of Alaska. Following that, he was the Chief Medical Officer at Oregon State Hospital and then Clinical Director of Forensic Psychiatry at Western State Hospital. He has been a surveyor, reviewing quality of care in hospitals and clinics throughout the country. For the past eighteen years, he has worked in community mental health centers.
??Dr. Shapiro received his medical degree in l969 from the University of Illinois Medical School, where he was a member of the medical honorary society, Alpha Omega Alpha.He trained in psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Downstate and Kings County Hospital in New York City and received a masters degree in public health from Columbia University. Dr. Shapiro has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University and is currently an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Oregon Health and Sciences University.
While he has studied the nature of disease and healing with many of the masters of psychiatry, psychology, and spirituality, his greatest teachers have been his patients who carry the devastating aspects of life: racism, poverty, mental and physical illness, homelessness, child sex abuse, rape, domestic violence, and addiction. These courageous people and the mean streets they walk continue to be his teachers of the brutal realities of life.
Dr. Shapiro lives in Portland, Oregon happily married to Sharon Whitney, author and playwright. They have two sons and five grandchildren. He works for a community mental health center where his understanding of suffering and the magnificence of the healing power continue to evolve.