The American philosopher William James once wrote, "The deepest thing in our nature is the region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our faiths and fears." This could not be more true when it comes to the art of healing physical illness. When we get sick, faith and fear confront each other, again and again. By choosing faith, even if it’s a gamble, we may emerge triumphant, and yet entirely surprised by the actual journey we took. Here, the stories of four healers and physicians who themselves were faced with illness, sometimes catastrophic, in their own lives. In order to recover, they each had to wager on faith and take a path in life they had never planned. Some got well physically, others spiritually, but in the end, each became wiser and more tender through the experience... Larry Dossey: The Wounded Healer "I have often thought that ‘healthy healer’ is an oxymoron," says bestselling author Larry Dossey, M.D. "The wound teaches compassion, the benchmark against which all physicians should be judged. The wound itself may heal, but the poison remains, forcing one to always remember the wisdom that was hard-won." Dossey speaks from experience. His path into alternative medicine began when, as a young doctor, he used biofeedback to eliminate his own debilitating migraines. "The headaches began in the eighth grade," recalls Dossey, "and were so horrendous that I used to pound my head with my fist to try and get them to stop. They were accompanied by vomiting and partial blindness." Neurologists and pharmaceuticals were of no help, but with biofeedback they magically melted away. Not surprisingly, Dossey opened one of the first biofeedback clinics in Texas, where he lived at the time. "The whole experience was a source of tremendous insight into the mind-body connection."
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