HEALING DISRUPTED LIVES
DISRUPTED LIVES:
Chaos Theory and the Healing Process

The Role and Value of Journey Work in the Process of Recovery
by Iona Miller, Asklepia Foundation, 2003

1). Disruption and Continuity;
2). Healing Words: "Metaphors Be with You";
3). The Healing Power of Narrative History;
4). Soul Support: Healing the Disordered Bodymind;
5). Character: Have Some, Don't Just Be One;
6). Conclusions and Directions

Abstract: Our life journey is an unpredictable series of chaotic twists and turns which mold our lives, despite our best intentions and plans, as we wend our way toward our certain end. The 'journey' is a core guiding metaphor for our multifarious experiences. It is a poetic journey of self-discovery. Chaos theory provides a natural yet scientific metaphor of this complex trajectory of emergent order from disorder, the complex dance at the edge of chaos.

Process-oriented therapies help us not only recover but make sense of our feelings and experiences by evoking our story, a meaningful narrative of our unique course. It is a combination of subjective healing fiction and our objective history, but expresses the reality of our psyche -- our embodied soul.

Even if many have embarked on a similar quest, each of us makes this dramatic voyage of discovery for ourselves -- we become our own Columbus of the soul, going where we do not know. It leads into the unknown where fearsome dragons (pain, suffering, loss, grief, illness, emotional devastation, mortality, our own personal demons) await to devour us. How we navigate those turbulent seas or traverse that undiscovered country is crucial to our wholeness and well-being...even as old explorers heading for the shores of death.

If metaphor is central to embodied experience, we can find healing meaning embodied in our personal tales, which speak from the soul of the resilience of human spirit.

Efforts to control a chronic condition are rooted in two ideas: that people can control their environment and that people should take responsibility for their health. The notion that chronic illness can be controlled is common in U.S. medical practice, whereas discussion of the limits of control are uncommon. Often couched in terms of illness management in both the medical and social science literature, control over the condition reflects interpretations of Western Cartesian philosophy, which, in contemporary thought, has been interpreted as mind over matter.

The responsibility people feel for controlling their chronic illnesses and the efforts they make to overcome the constraints such control places on everyday life affect self-perceptions and alter as the illness waxes and wanes. . .embodied knowledge is assaulted by the ethos of rational determinism. The imposition of another type of order [leaves us] without meaning in [our] lives.
The close relationship between embodied knowledge and meaning is thus relegated to a subsidiary position, while control over the body becomes preeminent. Metaphor is central to embodied experience. -- Gay Becker, 1997

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INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE
* BOOK HEARTSTRINGS: NONLOCAL HEALING is both a co-authored book and series of articles in the works with a Miami Psychiatrist, Neurologist and distance healer, Marshall F. Gilula, M.D. Groundbreaking Experiments with quantum biofeedback software and hardware.
http://heartstringsbook.50megs.com
http://cyberdoctv.com

http://CyberdocTV.com is a web-based healthcare information delivery system that focuses on and teaches both high-level wellness and safety science. The system is intended to be modular and to feature blogging on wellness and safety science, a fully interactive website, and daily 3-hour commercial free webcasting of both wellness and safety science information. The project will yield monthly durable products in CD-R and DVD format over the first three years.

The CyberDoc series is based on a science fiction program, DR TOMORROW, employing a storyline about a renegade healing machine from 30,000 years in the future that returns to Earth of the 21st century to help correct the entropy imbalance of a universe that is rapidly worsening and becoming dangerously unstable. DR TOMORROW as a musical group is actually a human/computer interface.