|
Letter from the Staff
Welcome to our December newsletter! We've been busily adding new features to the website and juggling the last minute flurry for meaningful holiday gifts. We have a few exciting new workshops coming in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.
We are very excited about our special holiday gift for everyone! Check out the "Animal Totems" link on the left hand side of the home page.
At this beautiful holiday time of year, the staff at whisperingtree.net sincerely wish all of you a happy and healthy Holiday and a New Year filled with blessings for you and yours.
Healing Connections
Mention spirituality in conversation and you can almost feel the immediate bracing, the letting out of breath, and the occasional rolling of the eyes that venturing onto this topic elicits. Immediately, there is a subtle categorization and sorting process as your listeners attempt to figure out where in the spectrum you fall between fanatic and new age voyager. As with most things, the truth of it tends to lie somewhere in the middle.
The fields of complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine use the term spirituality to incorporate the view of working with the body-mind-spirit connection in order to drive healing and wholeness. In this context, spirituality is considered a key element in achieving results in overall health and wellness and recovery from illness.
Many of us don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about spirituality outside of church. We have a tendency to equate it with our particular form of religious practice. But it is so much broader than that. There is a distinction between spirituality and religion as some of the studies performed by Marsolf and Mickley in the late 1990’s demonstrated. Their research findings point to worthwhile areas of consideration for additional research. For example, meaning of life, or life purpose, values or the standards and ethics that one holds, transcendence, connecting and becoming.
Various pilot studies examining spirituality and its role in healthcare have been sponsored by large health institutions and major hospitals. The Center on Health Disparities Research, part of a partnership program with Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University School of Nursing, has several studies of interest in this area, one such study is “Substance Abuse and/or Spirituality with Recovery as the Outcomes.”
In the 1990's, emerging studies did find consistent relationships between religious variables and physical, mental, and substance use disorders (Miller & Thoreson 2003). Since then, the field has matured and there is now recognition that the term spirituality, religion, or religiousness are really multidimensional complex phenomena. Although there is some preliminary work in this area, there is a need for a greater understanding of the dimensions of religiousness/or spirituality that appear to be related to substance abuse recovery … Spirituality is an aspect of nursing that is critical in providing holistic care (Martsolf & Mickley 1998). This particular study will attempt to more clearly illuminate how spirituality is related to quality of life, affective states, and recovery in substance abusing patients.
It is important to highlight the fact that a variety of complementary and alternative healing techniques incorporate the body-mind-spirit connection in practice, and does not require that either the practitioner or client share a common religious profile. For the agnostic, focusing on the scientific aspects of a given complementary practice helps provide a mechanism to understand and conceptualize the approach.
For the religious person, the spiritual element of the practice in question can be experienced within the context of the individual’s personal spiritual path. Each experience is highly personal and there is no single manner in which the benefits and the experience may manifest. It is such an important aspect of health and healing that we need to gravitate towards a more integrated view of how healing occurs.
In his book “Healing from the Heart: A Leading Heart Surgeon Explores the Power of Complementary Medicine,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, Director of the Complementary Care Center at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, and a renowned cardiovascular surgeon, talks about his experiences and results in blending traditional treatments with complementary and alternative practices. The difference he has observed in his patients have resulted in his exploring further into these areas.
He is not alone. We are seeing more and more information available about scientific studies and the integration of these healing practices into standard medical treatments. Dr. Daniel Benor has written a number of books which discuss the scientific validation of spiritual healing. His encyclopedic volume 1, “Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution” is a good place to start. You may also check out his workshops for more in-depth information at wholistichealingresearch.com.
At whisperingtree.net, we are focused on supporting personal spiritual exploration and growth. If you would like to submit an article, please contact us at whisperingtree.net.
Sources
1. Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, www.son.jhmi.edu
2. en.wikipedia.org
|
