Tuesday, August 25, 2009
A colleague of mine who I respect HUGELY remarked the other day that I must be a very optimistic person, given the types of people I work with and the small increments of improvement that generally occur in such cases. Part of what gives me room for that perhaps, is the fact that I do not work in a setting where I have to use clinical standards to measure "progress" or lack thereof. I don't think of my approach as optimistic, but I do know there is a dynamic process in nature and accompanying movement of energies. I also know that what is meaningful to a person and gives them the strength to go on is not always definable or measurable in a way that western medicine acknowledges, or has time for in most settings.
My teachers often said that true listening is healing. This I firmly believe. The placebo effect researchers see when people have symptomatic improvement just from visiting the doctor is a small part of this. If our medical provision included more actual listening, the placebo effect might be seen to ultimately turn into healing. We all need a witness, in other words. Someone to be in the now with us, hear us, not intervene in that moment but just listen. And, someone to touch us with gentleness; someone to hold our hand for a moment, and, I suppose, accept us as we are in that moment.
We can see how this works, perhaps, in our own daily experiences. Suppose we have a pain somewhere. If we resist that pain, go against it, it worsens. If we can take the time to slow down and listen to it, sometimes it dissipates just from that attention. More often of course we just get a better sense of what would help and we can do that, which in addition to making us feel better in terms of the pain is also kind of empowering (although that word is overused), because it gives us some space and some room inside, and in that space change can occur and pain can be relieved.
Another element of this is giving up judging things. We can't say, for example, well, you've made SOME progress but not enough and we don't have any more time for this. As a practitioner I really can't know which small thing will make a tremendous difference for a client. I just know that such things are possible. For someone who has a chronic, serious condition, attention to those possibilities can make progress happen. Patience has to be an element in every treatment. Everyone can feel better, even if their presenting situation may not be amenable to complete change.
Kelley Rico is a trained herbalist and aromatherapist, and a Certified Flower Essence and Jin Shin Jyutsu® Practitioner.