Healers & Healing

The core teaching of the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta, as espoused by Shankara, is that All is One, there is no not-One.

It is only what he called illusion that prevents us Knowing this Basic Truth, and living accordingly.

This illusion, and all the countless ones superimposed on it, arising out of it, are

It was the example of Dr. Leadley, my invalid grandmother’s general practioner, that determined me to be a doctor, to be like him.

She was a cardiac cripple living in a constant state of borderline heart failure. What could he do in terms of modern medicine? Merely adjust her digitalis dosage. But

Empathy: to feel the suffering.
Sympathy: to take it on.

A healer must always be empathetic, but never sympathetic, for then he is as disempowered as the sufferer.

To empathize is to become one with the sufferer.
To sympathize is to become the sufferer.

A sympathetic surgeon who cries as he cuts the patient’s skin would be useless. On the

It’s said that the basic intention behind all spiritual endeavors is reconciliation with God.

I can’t directly reconcile you with God – but I can with your mother.

And to us all, our mother is God – as God on earth.  For she was, and still is, our holiest intimation of the Divine.

The way to God is

Our word physician is from the Greek phusis: physics and physical things. So a physician is concerned with the physical body, the physique.

When I worked in the chronic back wards of a large mental hospital, I had more than two hundred highly disturbed and disintegrated patients whom I was supposed to treat. But how? What could I do over and above the usual tranquilizers? I knew all the patients by name and spoke to as many as

Some years ago I was vacationing on a tropical island paradise. I soon became bored – as is always the case when I am not in the healing mode. So I volunteered to do some work in the island’s cottage hospital. The doctor was delighted when I told him that I had been a psychiatrist, and took me

1. The particular modality employed with any sufferer at any moment is utterly unimportant.

2. Basic to the healing is helping the sufferer to find his Soul, and thus reduce his life’s anguish, by first finding his mother’s Soul; by coming to Know her as the Mother of Love.

3. It

The word healer comes from the Indo-European root kallo, meaning whole. If the healer reverences the sufferer’s deep drive for Wholeness, and if all of his Self is at the service of all the Powers within the sufferer yearning to be expressed, then he is a True Healer.

A

So many people complain, “But I did the affirmation. I can’t understand why the problem is still there!” If the affirmation is performed in a desultory manner, the effect will be quite short-lived—in fact, it may not even transpire. We must remember that it is not the repeating of