Musings on healing and well-being

Below is a small collection of quotes on healing. I found all of them in the book I first quote from below by Donald Epstein: Somato Respiratory Integration Workbook. I’ve found the book very helpful in that it seems to articulate what I’ve been developing for myself as a mode of healing my body/mind. It serves as a form of validation for my own intuition as well as offering suggestions for structuring such intuition.

Illness is a lack of wellness. Wellness is the experience of vitality, a desire to participate fully in life, take chances, and have an internal state of well-being. When ill, a person checks out of her participation in life, resists change, is concerned about ones circumstances, and often her mortality. Illness does not have to be associated with the presence of any disease. Wellness does not have to be associated with the elimination or reduction of disease. Healing…is associated with a shift from illness to wellness and from wellness to greater wellness.

Naturally, when experiencing wellness, the body’s physiology is liberated to more effectively negotiate disease and challenging environmental and life circumstances. By not trying to battle disease, control anything, or return to any previous state, and instead attempting to advance wellness, the healing forces, the spirit of life, and the biochemistry that supports healing is greatly enabled to work more effectively. — Donald Epstein, from Somato Respiratory Integration Workbook

and

Healing is basically the result of putting right our wrong relations to our body, to other people…and to our own complicated minds, with their emotions and instincts at war with one another and not properly understood and accepted by what we call “I” or “me.” The process is one of reorganization, reintegration of things which have come apart. — Laurence J. Bendit, MD from The Spirit in Health and Disease

and

Healing may be defined as a miraculous unfolding of consciousness for one’s being in the world. We learn who we are, what and who really matter to us, how to express ourselves fully and openly. Ultimately, the healing journey leads to an intimate union with God through the experience of the flow of God’s spirit within. It is a slow, arduous passage, unique for each individual, filled with danger and risk, triumph and joy, and finally, peace, trust, awe, reverence, love, tenderness. — George L. Hogben, MD