Being ill has its own imperatives.
You seek urgent relief from your pain and unpleasant symptoms and as your illness drives you to find release, you find yourself in mainstream medical care. In most cases, the care you receive is based on simply eliminating the symptoms through specific treatment or medication and you remain passive without ever playing a meaningful role in your own healing. It is the doctor who diagnoses and informs you what is going on, it is he or she who prescribes what is needed. Nor do you gain any insight into why you are experiencing this particular illness. Often, your symptoms re-occur.
Meeting your Inner Physician
But what if you were to encounter a health practitioner who is so conscious and present for you, who creates such a safe space that it is easy to be open and trusting? And in this space of openness, you effortlessly learn to access hidden regions of the body, mind, soul and spirit, thereby gaining insight into the deeper causes of your physical or emotional discomforts. You will begin to access your inner physician, one who helps you discover powerful resources to manage and even overcome your dysfunctions; you experience a heightened awareness together with your practitioner, enabling a conscious partnership to evolve, creating new possibilities and opportunities for your transformation and healing.
A wonderful ideal but hardly likely?
The birth of PATH
This is the form of medicine and therapy that I am advocating and teaching and one that I have been striving to practice as an integrative medical doctor since 2004. I have chosen to call this emerging form of integrative medicine PATH: Participatory Awareness for Transformational Healing.
PATH is participatory in the sense that practitioner, patient and the therapeutic partnership itself are engaged actively and dynamically in a participatory process that significantly enhances healing and therapeutic outcomes.
It is a methodology that can be acquired by any practitioner engaged in healing activities as well as by every person struggling with the learning curves of life, either through healthy growth or ill-health of any kind whether it be physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. These skills can be learnt easily through individual sessions, interactive workshops and through application in the personal or professional arena, and are currently being taught to both professionals and ordinary people in various countries including South Africa in Cape Town.
Evolving PATH
PATH has evolved out of a number of rich sources that I have been privileged to learn about and train myself in over the more than forty years I have been involved in integrative medicine. In my apprentice years in Switzerland and Germany I was fortunate to meet and study with some of the doctors and pupils who worked with Rudolf Steiner. This gave me deep insight into Steiner’s integrative medical insights and methodologies. Goethe’s science trained me to observe nature in a unique way and to realize that every observation we make outside is an expression of our inner experience. The expressive arts – architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, dance and eurythmy – became other creative sources for this emerging form of medicine. Training in Homeopathy, Naturopathy, Nutritional Science, Acupuncture and Functional Medicine became a part my integrative approach. And then an intensive training in Psychophonetic Counselling provided the tool set and the therapeutic techniques to start counselling patients and bring the sum total of my life experience together in the form which I am presenting now as PATH.
PATH offers a new and revolutionary approach to medicine, public health and healing practice. Whoever can imagine the kind of consultative encounter described above will need no convincing of this statement.