To Be Known

"Health is the functional result of a living system'sfull engagement and participation in the process ofcontinuous creation for the purpose of self-revelationand self-affirmation. It is not the absence of illness."(P. Donovan & H. Joinerbey: "The Face of Consciousness")

"The good physician treats the disease; the greatphysician treats the patient who has the disease"(Sir William Osler)

The Real Medicine

I have worked as a professional health care provider for morethan forty years immersed in the intimate, sacred space oftherapeutic relationship with my patients. Over this time, Ihave learned a lot and have become acutely aware of an importantpersonal truth: Patients do not come to the doctor solely to becured; they come to be Known. The "real medicine" that healseach one of us on the deepest of levels is not found in a pill, a food,or an exercise alone. It is found in the discovery of ourselves. Weare healed in the realization of who we are and why we are here.

For us to taste this real medicine of self-discovery, we areinvited to risk our life for a fuller life. To experience its potency andmagic, we must be willing to slay dragons and apply penetratingand purposeful introspection to our daily life so that we canacknowledge and bless our successes and failures. To be healedby this medicine is to experience our life as a revelation of itselfbecause this medicine is one that is fashioned of self-revelation andself-transformation. Its actions are facilitated by our struggle togrow, evolve and self-affirm against the incessant drag of entropyand transform into a fuller realization of our self through thedisintegrating trend of death and chaos we call illness.

Through my decades of patient care I have come to understandtrue healing to be a creative act of self-discovery and self-transformationmade possible only by the transformative journeyillness provides us. The 20th century philosopher and theologian,Paul Tillich tells us, "Healing is not healing, without the essentialpossibility and existential reality of illness." I agree. Withoutillness, our healing could not happen. Illness makes our healingpossible. It allows for the "essential possibility and existentialreality" of our healing. I have witnessed that healing open mypatients up to a greater emergence and awareness of themselvesand the world around them. Further, our life is what providesus with the fertile soil for our healing to occur out of which ourultimate and full life story then emerges as its own revelation.

Illness as Healing

Any one of us taking the time to truly look at ourselves canreadily see that our lives are a continuous experience of birth,death, and rebirth. I like to refer to this triumvirate of experiencesas continuous creation. Through continuous creation, our lifecontinually and creatively affirms and reaffirms itself repeatedlyagainst the unremitting drag of ennui, stagnation, and sameness.It continuously reaffirms itself against the continuous demandsof death looming always in the shadows of our life. As our life'sarchitect, we are expected to endlessly create newness out of thearchaic, novelty out of uniformity. We are always in a constantcreative flux of change. As the Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aureliushas instructed, "Unceasingly contemplate the generation of allthings through change, and accustom thyself to the thoughtthat the nature of the universe delights above all in changingthe things that exist and making new ones of the same pattern.For everything that exists, is the seed of that which shall comefrom it." Thus, we bear within ourselves the continual, eternalregeneration of the seed of our new life.

It is said, the only constant is change. The change requiredfor our life's continuous creation and renewal of itself isself-transformation, hopefully a transformative change wehave consciously acknowledged and chosen. Death is thetransformational agent hidden within change. All life withinthe Creation requires of itself this transformational death for itsrebirth, continuance and evolution just as all healing requires thedisruptive dynamic of illness for its realization and fulfillment.When we think of it, death and illness are necessary catalystsin our lives; they provide us with the motivational constructs totransform, grow, adapt, and evolve. Through illness, death, andrebirth our life becomes a revelation of itself, a continuous yetfuller recreation of itself. As Pierre Teillard de Chardin wouldtell us, we continuously move toward the Omega Point. Healing,when we choose to pursue it, is always a transformational eventand our life is a continuous series of these events. As we live, weare healed. The more fully we live our lives, the more completelywe are healed. Healing, therefore, is an agent of our individualself-realization that transports us into a greater level of wholeness,integration, and completion.

Chaos and Change

Chaos, as described in the new theories of complexity andchaos, is the harbinger of change. It is the bringer of chanceand opportunity. It heralds the beginning of the transformativeprocess through death into new life and healing. As such; it is aninescapable reality of life yet, it is a necessary and welcome realitywhich beckons us toward growth, fulfillment, and ever expandingpossibilities for healing. Chaos is found everywhere in natureas life struggles to survive and evolve against the disintegratingtrend of entropy. To paraphrase N. Hall in Exploring Chaos, chaosstimulates the generation of new manifestations of complexity anddiversity from tiny stimuli allowing us to evolve. It deconstructsthe existing order of our life, so the new, more complex, and moreself-affirming order of a new "I" can emerge reconstructed fromthe ashes of the old "I." As Nobel Prize-winning physicist, ErwinSchrodinger describes, "At every step, on every day of our life, asit were, something of the shape that we possessed until then has tochange, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by somethingnew." So, functioning as the transformative or chaotic elementin our healing, illness is the root of our healing's creativity, theessence of our healing's beauty, and the purpose of our healing'sliberation.

With this in mind, we might want to think much morecarefully about the ramifications of completely removing orsuppressing illness as it is addressed in our present healthcaresystem. The journey through our illness may be precisely thevery experiential journey we need to realize our healing and tobecome something greater, to realize ourselves more fully. Afterall, we don't "get" cancer. We are not healthy one day and thenget cancer the next day. Cancer, like any illness, is a process. We"become" our cancer over time as it becomes an expression of us.We "are" the cancer we manifest. Our cancer arises out of ourown tissue and cellular make up. To rid...