The first four medicines - serenity medicine, story medicine, energy medicine, and lifestyle medicine - build health. The more we actively engage in them throughout our lives, the healthier we will be. The last three medicines - herbal medicine, pharmaceutical medicine, and hi-tech medicine - are life-saving in emergencies, but undermine overall health.
SERENITY MEDICINE
The safest way to heal is to let Nature do the work. This requires nothing from us. And the more nothing we can provide, the more effective serenity medicine is. Unplug the phone, leave the computer turned off, enter the silence, cultivate acceptance, abandon the mind's ceaseless control, and be here now.
STORY MEDICINE
The stories we tell ourselves, according to my mentor Jean Houston, create our lives and thus our health. What are the stories you tell yourself about your life and your health? This is story medicine.
When we seek diagnosis we are looking for story medicine. Different healers offer very different kinds of story medicine. Receiving information from people telling different stories can be very confusing, until we see the sameness in their stories.
I sort story medicine into Scientific, Heroic, and Wise Woman types: something is broken and needs to be fixed (Scientific); something is toxic and needs to be cleansed (Heroic); something lacks nourishment and wants to be whole (Wise Woman).
Story medicine is information medicine. Information alone may be heartless, however. So we open ourselves to wisdom and intuition, to our unreasonable fears and longings, even as we search the internet and seek second opinions in story medicine.
Hands-off diagnosis is much less likely to harm the questioner than - and in skilled hands as good as - x-rays, CAT scans, radioactive tracers, and exploratory surgery.
ENERGY MEDICINE
Chi, ki, veriditas, kundalini, life force, orgone, wankan tanka ... even if we can't measure it or see it, we know there is an energy that animates and heals. Ways to use this energy are as myriad as our ability to imagine.
