Self-Healing

Self-Healing is most likely the oldest mode of healing we know as human beings.  We have the innate ability to heal or restore ourselves when listening to the healing voice and power from within.  Many healing modalities are very powerful and allow the clients to attain a sense of greater wholeness or to come a step closer to the ideal state of well-being, in which physical, cognitive, social, emotional, mental, environmental and spiritual functions are integrated.  All healing modalities include some potential for self-healing, acknowledged in conventional medicine as the placebo effect, although they often do not focus on self-healing or do not teach how to incorporate the modality into a personal or professional self-healing practice.  In other words, all methods of healing include a measure of self-healing.

Self-healing can be developed and deepened beyond the automatic, unconscious placebo response.  Self-healing can perhaps be best described as a process that empowers individuals by teaching them how they can deliberately access, activate and enhance their own healing potential.  Each individual can engage in self-healing as it addresses such basic components of life as relaxation, breathing, life-style, attitudes and much more.  By gaining a level of awareness of how to employ self-healing techniques, each person acquires an ever-increasing array of tools useful for active commitment to the process of re-creating their lives.  Self-healing places the emphasis on the client as the agent who gains cognitive, experiential, and practical techniques for daily use that energetically transform spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical imbalances that contribute to disease.  A facilitator for self-healing, who can model and teach one or more healing modalities, serves primarily as an assistant who helps to open doors that permit the clients to explore and remodel their personal and global universe from various perspectives and in varying contexts.  This may lead to a sense of hope, positive development, transcendence of challenges and fulfillment of needs both in a personal and professional context or deeper awareness of the purpose and meaning of life.

The National Institute of Health has published an interesting article with a historical perspective on the connection between “Self-healing, Patents, and Placebos”, from which the following is quoted (www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/emotions/self.html):

You cannot write a prescription without the element of the placebo. A prayer to Jupiter starts the prescription. It carries weight, the weight of two or three thousand years of medicine.

      Eugene F. Dubois
      "The Use of Placebos in Therapy," Cornell Conferences on Therapy, 1946

Representative for Self-Healing - Currently Vacant