The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Kenneth A. Bryson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University College of Cape Breton. He teaches courses on spirituality/religion and health. He has published several books on death and dying and is series editor of the Value Inquiry Book Series (VIBS) special series in
Philosophy and Religion.  

Abstract

Spiritual Welding 101 is about basic spirituality and healing. Illness is a division between mind and body. The person who is ill does not function as a dynamic unit. That person is broken. Medicine can fix the pieces, but spiritual welding puts Humpty Dumpty back together again. An apprentice must first learn the basics of welding, what pieces go where and why.  

Key words: assessment, curing, disease, dualism, healing, illness, mind-body, person-making,  phenomenology, spirituality, welding.

Introduction

The distinction between healing and curing is important. When medicine focuses on the physical person, the goal is to cure disease, but when medicine focuses on the whole person, the goal is to heal as well as to cure. Healing enlists all components of a person’s life, the environmental and the social, as well as the biological and the psychological. Dave Hilton, past associate director of the Christian Medical Commission at the World Council of Churches, tells this story about coming to understand the difference;^[i] 

One day a young boy (from the Seminole tribe in Florida) was brought to a clinic after falling from his bike and breaking an ankle. Hilton says he set the ankle, put a cast on it and sent the boy home. Later in the day he went to talk to the medicine man of the village who told Hilton that he had just come from visiting the boy with the broken ankle. The medicine man explained that he asked the boy the reason he broke his ankle. The boy responded that he did not know the reason. After talking for some time the medicine man asked the boy how he was getting along with his mother ... every part of the universe is represented by a part of the body. The left ankle for the Seminole, is the female. The Doctor had cured the boy but the Seminole healed him (1: 19).      

The goal of the paper is to provide an inclusive healing model. In 1999, I developed a distinction between being human and being a person that I think can be used successfully to identify the place of spirituality in holistic healing.^[ii] That model is used here because it provides a practical way of identifying the effects of spirituality in action. Spirituality is an integral component of holistic healing. The complementarity of curing and healing, illness and disease, body and mind is possible because we are dynamic units of inner self, body, other persons, and the environment. Another word for the inner self is spirit. Spirit is an aspect of mind. When the mind seeks knowledge, it is called the intellect. When the mind hungers for God, the Sacred or a Higher Power, it is called spirit. The spiritual drive is a force within psyche that cannot be silenced. The feeling of emptiness expressed in our day is a ‘soul sickness’. This suggests that the spirit is not fed, or is fed in negative ways. We are broken people, in a state of disunity looking to be whole. Illness and disease provide instances of mind-body disunity. But spirituality animates the desire to be whole. Feeding the desire material values  leads to addictions, and division (illness, and possibly disease). Addictions inhibit holistic growth. Feeding the desire positive spiritual values leads to unity, compassion, and good health. Religion used to function as healing tool, though in our day of secular humanism, it  has lost some of the appeal it once had. Still, the thirst and search for spiritual connectors is ongoing. We need to fill the void created by the loss of a religious connection. But like babies of old frowning at the horrid taste of castor oil, we squirm and reluctantly swallow our connectors. The right-brain spiritual connectors are forced fed into the bellies of left-brain brats. Our secular priests, spiritual leaders, swamis and gurus tell us spiritual values are good for us, but subjective values have to be welded onto the left-brain. We are on left-brain diets, and our spiritual anaemia worsens. But spiritual hunger is relentless, ever pressing ahead even if for artificial fixes.                                                                                       

In the beginning, we knew all about the connection between mind and body, unity and health. Medicine was not only about curing but also about healing and feeling good. Women already know this. They are the original healers. They know all about birthing, feeding, nurturing, and death. At one point in our history, things took a turn for the worse as we equated feeling good with having material things. We turned towards aggression and war to keep our material things. Paternalism, war, and the Church ran women out of the healing business. Our relationships with other persons and nature, as well as our peace of mind, took a turn for the worse. The Inquisition and Rationalism moved us forward. We tortured nature for her secrets, and used other human beings as a means to our thirst for control. Gradually, the belief in the power of religion, God, human nature, and global ethics were deconstructed. Henceforth we would design nature to our specifications, drugs for feeling good, and a God made in our image and likeness. But the triumphs of science also knew failures because violence, poverty, hunger, rape, and injustice keep escalating. We can no longer ignore the divisiveness of naturalism.     

Return of the Spiritual

Viktor Frankl’s (1984) Man’s Search for Meaning^[iii] has had a powerful influence on reversing mind-body dualism. As a prisoner in Germany’s concentration camps he saw the spiritual value of suffering. Those who survived the death camps were not necessarily the physically strong—since many of them simply gave up and died—but the ones who believed in the spiritual dimension of life.  They had a will to live that would not be crushed. They had hope and hope is a prelude to action. In our day, research into the ways of hope centres on neurotransmitters—chemical substances made by the brain and other organs that transmit nerve impulses. Neurotransmitters bridge the mind-body gap as they run back and forth between the brain and the nervous system telling every organ inside us everything about us. No emotion, thought, intuition, desire, memory, dream, experience goes unnoticed by the whole person. Norman Cousins, (1990) makes the point:^[iv]

The immune system is a mirror to life, responding to its joys and anguish, its exuberance and boredom, its laughter and tears, its excitement and depression, its problem and prospects. Scarcely anything that enters the mind doesn’t find its way into the workings of the body. Indeed the connection between what we think and how we feel is perhaps the most dramatic documentation of the fact that mind and body are not separate entities but part of a fully integrated system (p. 72).