What Are We Really Talking about Here?

Defining "Consciousness" and "Healing."

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserves your love and affection.

— Buddha

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

— Henry Miller

One evening years ago, near the end of a stress class I was teaching, one of the attendees, an artist with both words and paint, sat back in her chair, surveyed the room, and observed, "We all have our own stuff that we're working on, and we all have our own ways of doing that work, but we're all really doing the same thing: we're all just learning how to love better." She really hit the nail on the head, and the class sat there for a moment contemplating the truth of what she had just said.

What if she, Buddha, and Henry Miller are all correct? How can you put it all together? How can you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you deserve your own love? How can you connect with your deep, inner wisdom and let it help you navigate the winding passages of your life and show you how to meet whatever comes in your path with courage, competence, and confidence? How do you learn to love better?

In other words, how do you learn to heal? These and similar questions have pervaded my entire professional life. And I've been incredibly blessed to have had thousands of wonderful and amazing teachers, in the guise of my patients, helping me explore them. I'd like to share with you what I've learned in order to provide some possible answers.

How do I heal? This is a specific case of a more general question: how do I change? You need a way to make changes in yourself that works. The only changes you can make in yourself that last are those that allow you to become more of who you already are: your true, authentic self. Any other changes require ongoing effort to sustain them, which puts you at risk of fatigue or getting distracted and falling off the wagon. Practicing the seven tools of healing gives you a dependable, workable way to bring your true, authentic self to the surface without having to force anything. In other words, practicing the seven tools shows you how to effect genuine, lasting change in your life. There is no wagon to fall off of.

If you are experiencing any challenges anywhere in your life — with your health, in your relationships, in your career, with addictions — the information in this book will help you.

You have answers and possibilities within you that, could you access them, would astound you. Practicing the seven tools of healing will give you the skills you need to access those answers. It will give you the skills you need to bring forth and live as your true, authentic self to improve your physical health, your emotional health, and your relationships. It will help you find your right livelihood, to do with your life what you really came here to do: to live a life that pleases your soul. It will deepen and strengthen your connection to spirit, whatever that means to you personally. Practicing the seven tools of healing will give you the skills you need to be able to see the truth of what you are experiencing in your life, access your own inner guidance, trust it, and know how to act on it. All of this is healing. All of this I have witnessed in my patients.

What are we really talking about when we talk about health and healing? I made the mistake early in my career of just assuming I knew what healing was. Once I realized my mistake and started searching for a universal, concise, practical, actionable definition, I was amazed by the difficulty of the challenge. But the search was worth it because it transformed my thinking about health and healing, how I practice medicine, and how I live my life. Striving for clarity is worth it. In that spirit, I would like to define two words before we get started with the seven tools: "healing," because that's what this book is about and "Consciousness" because there is great confusion about this concept yet healing makes no sense without it.

We can look at the world in several different ways. Some promote healing; others promote suffering. I recommend that you try adopting a worldview that promotes healing. One such worldview that allows for real, lasting, deep healing sees Consciousness as primary. That means that Consciousness comes before matter and energy.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

— Max Planck

Unfortunately, in English we use the word consciousness to refer to two very different concepts. One meaning, which I will denote with a small "c", refers to that usual state of awareness of ourselves and the surroundings in which most of us spend most of our waking hours. This is in contrast to being asleep or in a coma (although it has been recently discovered through PET and functional MRI scans that some people who appear to be in a coma are, in fact, conscious). The other meaning for consciousness, which I will denote from now on with a capital "C," refers to the Consciousness out of which all of the universe was created, the Consciousness that the Hindus refer to as Brahman or Purusha, that the Judeo-Christian traditions refer to as God, that the Lakota refer to as Wakan Tanka, and that Max Planck saw as fundamental to understanding quantum mechanics. These are just a few examples. Similar concepts of a singular Consciousness as the creator of, or contained within, all of creation can be found in different traditions all over the world and down through time.

When we work with healing, we work in depth with Consciousness. Consciousness follows basic laws similarly to the way nature follows basic laws. We need to put the laws of Consciousness next to the laws of nature if we want to get a more complete understanding of how healing works. The laws of Consciousness, as I've been able to discern them so far, will be presented throughout the book.

As a human, you are not only self-conscious; but you can also access universal Consciousness. You are simultaneously a unique individual...