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The Big Questions
As soon as I got to the counter, a smile of recognition spread across her face. It turned out that I had operated on her mother many years ago. We had such a wonderful time talking and she thanked me for helping her mother to heal. She wasn’t referring to the surgery or the chemotherapy. She was talking about her mother’s life. Imagine that. It wasn’t about her physical body or the disease; it was about the things that made her mother’s life meaningful. When I left there, I felt so good. Our meeting had not been an accident or by chance. It was a gift. There are no coincidences. What led me to a new understanding of the nature of life, stems not from my beliefs but from my personal experience and my work with patients and their families. My attitude of keeping an open mind allowed me to gain much more from my experiences and become a better healer than those in the profession who say they can’t accept what they can’t understand or explain. If we don’t seek knowledge, we don’t learn. So I never stopped asking the important questions. The questions we must ask are: How does the invisible become visible? What part of our being still sees when we leave our physical body in a near-death experience? How do we intuitively know what plans our unconscious mind is creating? How do clairvoyants and psychics communicate with people and animals, whether distant or dead? How does the community of cells in the body speak to the conscious mind about its needs and health? And what is the language of creation and the soul? The invisible I talk about is what lies within our physical, mental, emotional, and psychic body. Most of us become aware of our inner harmony or disharmony through moods, feelings, and symptoms, and we rely on medical examinations and lab tests to know what is happening inside the body. But imagine if we were able to know before a physical affliction or emotional breakdown awakened us. How much healthier we would be and how much fuller our lives would become. Because of physicians’ limited medical training, rarely do we have the option to learn about the true cause of disease. And yet it is possible to prevent disease and emotional breakdown. If we take the lid off our unconscious, we can be guided by a deeper knowing. The practices and techniques of going within allow us to communicate with and learn from the greater intelligence, whether we choose to do so through spontaneous drawings, dreams, meditation, breath work, or any number of practices that place us within the healing realm of our inner wisdom. Communication with the greater intelligence is not only possible, but it also happens all the time whether we are aware of it, and tuned into it, or not. The same intelligence that allows cells to communicate inside the human body is inherent in all life forms. It is characterized by its fluidity and moves with both intention and abandon, crossing all barriers of matter, time, and space. It serves us in ways that often seem like coincidence. Unexplained happenings, healings, and lifesaving or comforting messages appear just at the moment you need them, as happened to me yesterday, when my wait to renew my driver’s license was cut short and ended with the gift of gratitude. To be receptive to this communication, whether it comes to you through symbols or words, you must quiet your mind, like a still pond, with no turbulence to obscure its reflections. Today was a good example. I’m the caregiver for my wife, Bobbie, who has been living with multiple sclerosis for several decades. There are days when I have my hands so full of caregiving and other responsibilities that everything seems overwhelming. It’s a challenge sometimes to love my fate and learn the lesson of compassion. While devoting most of my life to healing people, I have encouraged them to care for themselves as well as they do for others. But living the sermon can be hard to do when you’re providing longterm care for someone you love. It’s easy to forget that you too have needs. This morning, I took the dogs for a walk in the cemetery near our house. Rarely do I meet anybody there, unless it’s the anniversary of somebody’s death or a funeral. Because the cemetery is so peaceful, I can let the dogs run around. For me, it’s like a walking meditation. Today the dogs discovered something on the ground, not close to a grave, but lying beside the road. I went over and picked it up. It was a tiny white teddy bear with the message Love Me on its chest. The bear was as clean and unmarked as if it had just come off the store shelf. I looked around the cemetery; there wasn’t a person in sight. I read the words again out loud: Love Me. I felt as if somebody had put it there knowing that this was the message I needed. It was such a gift. I put the bear in my pocket and took it home. Apparent coincidences like this one happen exactly when they are most needed. When you allow yourself quiet moments, you increase the opportunity to receive messages of love and support. The language of creation and the soul is expressed in many ways, sometimes in a subtle whisper, other times spoken so clearly, it is difficult to doubt, let alone ignore. I used to be a skeptic because I didn’t know any better. I wasn’t trained to look through any other lens. But over time, I learned to open my mind to other kinds of communication and possibilities. I have had an animal intuitive locate our lost cat in Connecticut while she sat in California. I have had a near-death experience and, through this, learned that we are more than our bodies. I have had past-life experiences and had messages from dead patients delivered to me through mediums. I have even heard the voices of the dead speak to me. I did not seek any of these experiences, but I have lived them. Rather than deny the reality of these occurrences on the basis that I could not understand them, I sought, like astronomers and physicists, to accept what I experienced, explore the invisible, and communicate with it. The psychotherapist Ernest Rossi has observed that “our daily and hourly life experiences, sensations, thoughts, images, emotions and behavior can modulate gene expression and neurogenesis in ways that actually can change the physical structure and functioning of our brain.” What he meant is that your mind is like a remote control with an infinite number of channels to choose from (the greater consciousness), and your body is like the TV screen that plays whichever channels you tune in to. If you limit yourself to the channels accepted by your peers, your life will be all about staying within the boundaries of their discipline, and your measure of success will be based on the amount of recognition you have achieved. In other words, if you pay attention to the money channel rather than the spiritual channel, your life becomes all about material things, and your measure of success is based on what you have accumulated. If you pay attention to the spiritual channel, your life then focuses on improving the world, and your measure of success is based on what you have done to enhance life. You are no longer governed by social, political, and religious rules and regulations. Your life, which was God’s gift to you, becomes your gift to God through your actions. Excerpted from the book The Art of Healing © 2013 by Bernie S. Siegel, MD. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.NewWorldLibrary.com
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Yesterday I went to get
my driver’s license
renewed. I anticipated
the usual long wait, but soon
after I arrived, a woman at
the counter called my number.
Many of these people
had waited much longer than
I had; it had to be somebody
else’s turn. But she called out
my number a second time, so
I went up.