Psychosomatic Healing

Regarding Fractured Fingers with an Unfractured Mind

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Hello, Dear Readers!

For a few years now I’ve been planning to start posting snippets from my journey of self-healing with alternative medicine, and I had grand intentions of how that series would have a specific beginning and would unfold in chronological order. But life is constantly getting in the way of writing about life. And we live in such a chaotic realm; it's honestly quite challenging to find the time to impose any kind of order in such a world. So instead of beginning at the beginning, I'm going to begin in the middle. Or rather, in the present. In the right now.

Last Friday, I broke my finger--a result of tripping and falling on some very uneven stone steps at my friend's house. (More on that later.) I knew right away that it was broken and that the MacBook I had been carrying without a case--which I had been trying to save--was not.  I'll write more about this when I have two hands to type. Rather than focusing on the HOWs and the WHYs,  I thought I would focus today on just what I'm doing in the aftermath. 

The other day, my Tibetan medicine teacher reminded us that, while Western doctors believe in psychosomatic illness, they don't believe in psychosomatic healing. But I realized I've been doing my own psychosomatic self healing for a long time now. According to the western doctors, I should not be able to walk, given the nature of my disordered spine. But for years I have been visualizing healthy spines. For years I’ve been imagining golden light infusing my entire skeleton. When I'm out hiking, and see a particularly straight and strong tree, I will lean my back against it, pressing my sacrum into the bark, and imagine that my bones are absorbing the strength and straightness and flexibility of a tree. Most of the members of my very intellectual family think that I am completely bonkers. But I'm still walking. And even though my physical spine is quite unlike a healthy spine, my energetic spine is perfect. So now that I've broken a bone in my finger, I am spending a bit of time each day visualizing perfectly healthy hands, and also looking at images of perfect hands. I look at images of anatomical charts and of dancers in flight and of masters in stillness.