This site is dedicated to my belief that healing is wholeness--with or without cure--and it happens through daily life, minute by minute, hour by hour. Healing can't be found through abstractions, be they scientific or alternative. Healing isn't found through contrived separations of "mind" or "body" or "spirit". It is not found in over-intellectualized discussions that build a plexi-glass bubble between our thoughts, our feelings and our general living in this world.
Much to my amazement, I am half-way through my 7th decade and healthy (aside from inheriting my grandmother's arthritis). This is despite being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes on Pearl Harbor Day, 1957--two months before my 8th birthday. The medical times of the 1950s were primitive for kids with diabetes. Though Boston's Joslin Clinic was a beacon of hope and positive attitude, death rates were still high and longevity limited. Pep talks of my upcoming long and healthy life ("...if you take care of yourself...") were belied by somber faces and my mother's poorly disguised terror every time she scoured my arm with alcohol-soaked cotton before my insulin shot.
20th Century Medicine teaches us that we live either in the land of the sick or the land of the well, but never both at once. That December I was relegated to the land of the sick over a matter of weeks. Medicine's goal has been to return sick people to the land of the well. In this language, the words "cured" and "healed" are synonymous. The first years of my diabetes, I strived to "pass"--denying any limitations. I desperately wanted to believe I was "normal" (I felt normal), but I secretly felt like a great pretender. It led to willful, stubborn over achievement and outbursts of self righteous anger. Medical school reinforced this effort to "pass", since all I was taught about diabetes was a script of decay, decline and untimely death. I was healthy, by the way, and I now see that my angry, stubborn determination to be perceived that way created a destiny fueled by my behavior and belief. I am healthy. Yet it has taken decades to see that belief, lifestyle, physiology and spirit have all conspired to bring this reality. It has taken decades for me to see that there is no such thing as a mutually exclusive land of the sick and land of the well--and that healing has nothing to do with cure.
My hope that here, on this site, I can help bring the forces of body, mind and spirit together to affirm myself and others; to affirm healthy bodily function, emotional well being and spiritual wellness. Applied science through western medicine is my foundation. I've added other avenues over the years: meditation, mindfulness, the biology of belief, attunement with others through listening and sharing. All of these have recently been given the stamp of legitimacy by conventional science (especially neuroscience, endocrinology and immunology).
I now have the time and perspective to begin a new path: a calling to articulate in the language of memoir, stories and science a meaningful definition of healing.