"The word heal comes from the Old English haelan and means not simply “to cure” but “to make whole.” The concept is very far from the idea of “cure” in the military metaphor, with its associated ideas of divide and conquer."
~Norman Doidge
I heard Norman Doidge on a Guardian podcast, and knew I had to read his book, The Brain's Way of Healing. As a companion, I'm also reading Bessel Van Der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score. Taken together, they are powerful medicine in dealing with illness, trauma, and perhaps more importantly, in reintegrating our thoughts about the system that is our inextricably connected body and mind. Each book goes to great lengths to present the science that supports true healing in people; the science that intuitive healers have employed for all of human history, but which was sacrificed to more aggressive methods over the last century.
The most magical moments occur when we are at the intersection of nascent human understanding and those things we know intuitively and instinctively, but have never been able to parse or prove. As if Robert Frost's two roads come back to meet each other again, many miles on, in a concurrence of possibility.
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