Wellness boosters seek mind-body
unity
By ARTHUR JONES NCR
Staff Hilton Head Island, S.C.
In the darkness the steady, shallow waves that lap the sand
reflected no moon, just starlight. Barely enough light to detect the shadowy
grouping close to the waters edge, five -- maybe six -- figures seated in
a close circle on the sand under their robes and blankets, as still as clay
sculptures.
Spiritual meditation. And, possibly, therapy.
Ten hours away by car, on a cancer floor at the NIH (National
Institutes of Health) in Bethesda in urban Maryland, four patients relax in
musical chairs, high-tech vibro-acoustic chairs that provide
soothing sounds accompanied by a massaging vibration.
Therapy. And, possibly, spiritual meditation.
Increasingly the rigid lines that once confined spiritual
disciplines and medical therapy are blurring. Those attending the ninth annual
National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine
Conference at the Hilton Head resort would be further erasing those lines and
highlighting the points at which spiritual disciplines and health care
intersect.
The connection between spiritual health and physical and emotional
health -- wellness -- is currently grabbing national attention, raising hopes,
some probably illusory.
Could spirituality be health cares savior?
The Washington Times recently asked, and then added, Beliefs
healing power cuts costs, too. The Washington Posts Health
section, slightly more circumspect, though with health costs in mind, wondered,
Can the power of prayer be measured?
Both stories were sparked by a recent survey of 300 HMO executives
presented at a December Harvard Medical School conference on Spirituality
and Healing. Ninety-four percent said medical treatment of sick people
was improved when people believed in personal prayer, meditation and other
spiritual practices.
At Hilton Head, gleeful line dancing was going on inside the
luxury hotel, a dark, looming megalith behind palms illuminated by lighted hot
tubs.
The conference spanned the distance between such sentiments as
time is money and everything in its time and the
parallel -- the distance between sickness and wellness.
One of the presenters, a tall, thin, angular monk in Trappist
habit took the microphone in Ballroom J and attempted to insert Christian
contemplative heritage into the late 20th century equation.
In a world obsessed with time and doing, Cistercian Fr. Thomas
Keating has a simple, single goal. He wants to stop the clock. Have people do
nothing. With God in mind. Keating had focused his talk on the healing
potential of contemplative prayer.
Yale graduate Keating belonged to the OCSO -- Order of Cistercians
of the Strict Observance -- in among the MDs, PhDs, gurus and Zen and Tai Chi
masters. The human family as a whole and individually is very sick,
he would say later, during an interview.
Divine therapy
The Trappist knows the dispiriting effects of personal illness.
For six years, he said, he has been battling chronic fatigue syndrome, an
immunological disorder. Keating was at the conference in part because all
the healing arts are starting points on the spiritual journey -- if the
practitioners choose to use them as such. Healing touches on human energies
from the unconscious. Jesus said, I am the physician -- but because
divine therapy is free we dont value it as much as we should, he
said.
Divine Therapy: the Method, Practice and Understanding of
Centering Prayer was the title of a Keating post-conference workshop that
introduced centering prayer to several hundred attendees.
Most people now know that most of the therapies making headlines
today -- from acupuncture to Tai Chi -- are not recent and are mainline
practice in their cultural homes.
But will anything happen in the foreseeable future to bring these
new therapies into more general practice and prescription?
NCR put that question to another Hilton Head speaker,
Bernie Siegel, a physician and author of Love, Medicine and Miracles; Peace,
Love and Healing; and How to Live Between Office Visits.
Twenty years ago Siegel retired as a practicing surgeon in order
to promote the connection between spiritual health and physical health in the
face of a hostile medical community. He predicts it may take another generation
before the alternative therapies become part of the American
medical mainstream.
Today, he said, medical education is still struggling with these
concepts. Despite article after article, said Siegel, doctors
still wont prescribe (other therapies) because they havent had the
training to do so.
Plus, he continued, health plans have to wake up
to the fact that wellness is cost-effective. Government regulations, the FDA
(Food and Drug Administration) limit us. We need to have more flexibility.
Thats beginning to happen. Two decades ago Siegel wanted music
piped into operating rooms even though the patient was under anesthesia. The
idea was disparaged. Not anymore.
At that time, too, Siegel established Exceptional Cancer Patients,
an individual and group therapy program using patients drawings, dreams,
images and feelings. Carefrontation, he calls it, a safe,
loving, therapeutic confrontation that facilitates personal lifestyle changes,
personal empowerment and healing.
But no one would fund studies of these ideas. Back then, said
Siegel, the National Institutes of Health and the Cancer Society told him,
Youre crazy. This is not something we would be interested in or
give money to.
The only people who wanted to listen to me were the
patients, he said. They were saying, We need your help, and
its important coming from a doctor. I retired from surgery because
I felt I could help most by reaching more health professionals. Now a
significant number of health professionals were among the more than 1,000
attendees at this conference.
Making the connection
One mainstay attendee is George Patrick, National Institutes of
Health chief of recreational therapy. The National Institute for the Clinical
Application of Behavioral Medicine is nine years old -- Patricks first
conference was seven years ago.
He chronicles the changes in the group and in public and
professional perspectives on the connection between spirituality and healing.
First, the understanding of the mind-body relationship is
becoming more scientific. There is a growing database, said Patrick,
and the information presented here now is much more empirical and
scientific, whereas it was conceptual, anecdotal and philosophical in the
past.
Patrick pointed to the conferences two enormous workbooks.
Some presentations have no data whatsoever; others are based on facts and
studies -- and the percentage of those gets higher each year.
Societys perceptions are changing, too. If it happens
on TV its real in our society, said Patrick. The Bill Moyers
PBS series, the letters, the follow-ups -- that helped. Material comes out in
the New England Journal of Medicine -- about cancer survivors living
five times longer than expected because of group support, meditation
instruction and the like. Thats on TV the next day, and three months
later youll see follow-up stories.
The medical professions changes can be tracked through
Patricks own efforts. In his National Institutes of Health office, with
photographs showing him in his motorcycling heyday, he explained that when he
arrived at NIH 10 years ago people didnt mind you working with
patients, explaining about complementary medicine (Patricks phrase for
alternative therapies), but they didnt want it up on bulletin
boards.
Now the bulletin boards near the chapel advise that Dr. Ge offers
Tai Chi to patients and their visitors, that education and treatment groups
include the art of relaxation, healthy cooking,
personal fitness, look good, feel better, and
animal-assisted therapy.
The board declares that the Rehabilitation Medical
Department mission is to improve the quality of life for clinical center
patients and participate in research.
Patrick explains it this way.
Patient comfort is not just pillows. Of patients, the
Ph.D. therapist said, some keep busy, some escape -- watching videos,
some like to talk, socialize; some seek information (they can go online into
the worlds leading medical libraries for information on their illness and
treatment). And close to 70 percent of our patients are using alternative
medicine in some form before they come here. Thats big numbers.
While NIH is regarded by some as a last hope -- this is a research
center for experimental medicines, drugs and procedures -- Patrick counters
that these patients are volunteering themselves in the best sense,
volunteering their body, their time -- sometimes up against a relatively finite
lifeline -- to help us learn more about the disease. Yes they may benefit, but
again they may not be the person to benefit. It might be someone two years from
now. These kinds of people are very aggressive in finding out whats
available. Even the government is catching on. Congress created and
financed NIHs Office of Alternative Medicine, which is already holding
medical seminars on acupuncture and non-pharmacological pain relief.
Patrick favors the new relaxation chairs -- he tries to get a few
minutes in them himself at midday. He approaches them scientifically. We
know theyre effective, but we dont know how much is due to the
music, how much to the vibration and how much to the placebo effect.
Studies are underway. And dont knock the placebo effect. Studies suggest
the placebo effect is between 30 and 50 percent effective, which raises again
the fact that the mind and the inner spirit, that hope and conviction have
curative powers.
Intimacy with God
Another point, too, is that when the medical shares the podium
with the spiritual -- as at Hilton Head -- it is not just the healing arts that
are redefining themselves. The spiritual, too, has been metamorphosing, which
is what Keatings work, contemplative prayer, is all about.
Intimacy with God is whats missing in everybodys
(religious) education. In returning that dimension of life to people as a
conscious experience, said Trappist Keating, health in the deepest
sense of the word becomes possible. Keating expands that beyond the
purely medical to the extremely personal: You can take an
antibiotic to get over an illness, he said, but youll never
be happy unless you change the roots of the tendency to find substitutes
for God.
Almost two decades ago, Keating and fellow Trappists Fr. William
Meninger and Fr. Basil Pennington began reaching back into Christianitys
and their own contemplative and monastic traditions in an attempt to restore
the spiritual dimension in everyday life. They reached back, too, into the
works and world of the mystics and saints -- St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of
the Cross, St. Francis de Sales -- and they were also influenced by meetings
with Eastern spiritual teachers establishing themselves in the United States in
the 1970s.
The phrase that emerged to describe their immediate goal was
centering prayer, but that easy description belies what in fact is
taking place -- the transformation of the ancient contemplative monastic
heritage into something readily accessible to all on a daily basis (see
accompanying story).
Keating explains its promise and utility. Without the
interior source of union with God that comes through the development of
contemplative prayer, he said, we wont be able to maintain
our strength of commitment in the face of the enormous difficulties of
ministering to one another today.
The point of the centering prayer, for Keating, is not just to
show us how to pray, but how to live.
The medical world is beginning to listen -- at least 19 of the
nations 126 medical schools now teach future doctors about the role of
religion in health care. That reflects, said Dr. David Larson, National
Institute for Health Research president, a significant movement within
academic medicine to train future physicians in the treatment of the whole
person -- body, mind and spirit.
Not everyone can spend hours at the waters edge. But as
NIHs relaxation chairs, Keatings retreats, individual prayer
moments and ancient therapy routines suggest, help and health is at hand. And
much of it is spiritual.
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