Approaches to Healing: Practical and Numinous

It's not news that health care in America is in crisis. Budget meisters tout financial solutions, while complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners of all sorts continue to show these systems of healing to be more cost effective and often more able to successfully treat a wide range of chronic illnesses. Two thirds of Americans use the services of some form of CAM clinician.

Everyone is seeking practical answers. And being practical is smart, certainly. There's lots we can do to in terms of practical preventive approaches, and lifestyle choices, and good selection of well trained clinicians of all types.

But by itself, the practical is never the whole answer. And we risk missing other catalysts to healing when we neglect to also seek a numinous approach.

What is the numinous and how can it be an approach to healing? The numinous is the sense of the presence of --- or of being in contact or connection with --- the magical sacred, the mysterious source, that which inspires awe and ecstacy and reverence by its very nature.

As an approach healing, the numinous simply calls for us to suspend our disbelief, and by doing so, to allow for transformation. Healing comes in many forms, some of which may be disguised to fool us into thinking that nothing has been cured at all.

But cure is not the same things as healing, or transformation. Cure without healing is a bandaid. Transformation without healing, I dare to suggest, is never possible.

If this is true, I know the evidence-based empiricists will be asking: how can we operationalize the numinous into a systematic approach? First, by not trying to shoehorn it into the model of the practical.

But mostly, by becoming ever more conscious of the sensory qualities we feel when having experiences of awe, ecstacy and reverence. By being as open as possible, as often as we can, to the mysterious magical sacredness all around us. By being willing to be touched by the numinous forces that are present in every moment if we can learn to become conscious of them.

Dr Deah's Musings
Copyright 2005-2006 by Liminal Realities
a personal growth education venture
Deah Curry PhD, publisher
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