by Sonya Weir in 1998
Common Ground November
Confronting Pain Takes Courage
For those trained to think in polarities, the distance between the practice of conventional family medicine and a doctor sitting in a circle of colleagues with a talking stick to debrief a client's healing process, is inestimable. Such, however, is the nature of polarized thinking. It creates situations of opposites and precludes any possibility of integration. Historically, Eastern and Western healing modalities have been viewed as discrete entities. With more and more people seeking healing on a holistic level, there has been a growing disillusionment with standard medicine and a recognition that healing practice must embody aspects of both traditional and complementary medicine to be effective. In Braving the Void, Dr. Michael Greenwood shares his personal journey of integration and new passageways of healing.
For seventeen years, the author practiced conventional family medicine, fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming a physician. Throughout those years, he became increasingly aware that there was something vital missing in the traditional "Aesculapian authority" model which assumes that the doctor always knows best. Too often, he found himself prescribing medication to a patient for a recurring malady and, although the symptoms were masked temporarily, he felt there had to be something else going on. Blindly following doctor's orders did not seem to facilitate a patient's return to overall health and he became deeply interested in seeking out a more holistic approach to helping people heal. He eschews the idea of "the magic bullet...I now question the validity of intervention and no longer believe that diagnosis, as such has much value in chronic illness."
Robert Bly stated that everyone has a wound, and through our wounds our greatest gift can be realized. For healers outside the Western medical model, the concept of the "wounded healer" is very familiar. At 22 years old, while still a medical student, Dr. Greenwood had a motorcycle accident that left him with chronic physical pain, he states that "no event could have been more meaningful in the context of my life, given that I now work wholly with the sort of chronic conditions with which the accident left me." His wound had become his gift, with the accident having laid an early foundation for his forays into alternative medicine. It also formed the basis for his belief that "to deal with another's wounding adequately, a practitioner must be fully aware of her own personal wound and how it manifests.
An integration of body, mind and spirit in the healing process is widely embraced by other cultures. Yet Western medicine ignores our minds and spirits are part of bodily health and illness.
For over ten years, Dr. Michael Greenwood has been Medical Director at the Victoria Pain Clinic. His practice is devoted to patients with chronic illness and treatments encompass acupuncture, bodywork, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Ayurveda. He has developed a number of techniques which integrate body, mind and spirit and through being helped to enter "the void" patients revisit earlier physical traumas in a safe setting. In case after case, patients arrive at a level of understanding as to why and how pain has been stored in their bodies and how energy has been blocked. If we hold that "physical pain can become a screen for emotional pain which is too difficult to grapple with," it makes sense that confronting those emotional issues will inevitably lead to wholeness.
Braving the Void is an intriguing, thought provoking work and comes highly recommended by this reader. Authored by a man who spent many years practicing conventional medicine, he braved his own void coming to terms with his own healing and ultimately became a "wounded healer" to many. He speaks from personal experience and therein lies his power. "Somewhere along the line, we become the architects of our experience, and by loitering in our own story we perpetuate any illness we might have...there comes a time when we must get into the body if we want to heal the body."
Sonya Weir: