ARCHIVE for Wednesday 30th January 2002 - Healing

We all have the ability to cure ourselves. It is widely believed that we all have the power to heal others too - but most people fail to recognise it. Over 50 years ago Dr Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and medical missionary, famously summed it up: "The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work."

The healing energy that empowers our inner doctor has been recognised for centuries. The Chinese called it ‘chi’, the Japanese ‘ki’, the Indian ‘prana’ and now some call it ‘Reiki’.

The Christian tradition of cure by ‘the laying on of hands’ dates back over 2,000 years to a Jewish sect called the Essenes.

Dietary choice is another way to regulate our own health, according to the ‘you are what you eat’ philosophy. Diets have helped many suffering from acute illnesses such as cancer.

The effect of emotions, particularly anger, on illness is also well documented. And stress is recognised to be as harmful as smoking. But Dr Daniel Goleman, author of ‘Emotional Intelligence’, believes that our ability to cure ourselves lies somewhere between the extremes of believing that our emotions have nothing to do with our health and that we can cure ourselves of any malady.

Over the coming weeks we will be exploring the many self-healing methods, including diet and other alternative therapies.

Next week we will investigate Reiki.

Mark Winter