Spiritual Healing & the Modern Science

By Sakshi Shree

The day will come when the doctor will ask the patient, “what about your religion? How much does it mean to you? So prophesied Frank Sladen in the early days of the 20th century. That day has now come. He could have used the word spirituality but probably being a doctor he thought both are the same. Dr. Sladen was not a quack. He was the Chief of Medical Service at Henry Ford General Hospital, Detroit. The relationship between health and religion is real and established now. An editorial in the British Medical Journal says: “There is no tissue in the human body wholly removed from the influence of the spirit.” Spiritual healing too believes that the key to good health is your mind and spirit.

Spiritual healing, sometimes also called intercessory prayer or psychic healing, has long been an object of scorn. It was considered an irrational, illegitimate thing. While the advocates of alternative healing say that doctors have lost the power to heal patients.

But after a long and bitter struggle, the views of skeptics and advocates are finally converging. In the practice of medicine, it is expressed by the psychosomatic approach of pathology and therapy. While the spiritual healers have come to accept that it is not a substitute for the doctor’s treatment or a surgeon’s skill. Spiritual healing works on the psychic body or Pranic Energy. Spiritual healing can reach the parts that medicine and surgeries cannot as it works simultaneously on all those levels.

And what does spiritual healing says about the roots of illness and the solution it offers?

According to the principles of spiritual healing, at the roots of most chronic physical, mental, and emotional illnesses is a basic wound: a lurking spiritual malady. Illnesses are diseases of the mental, emotional, or spiritual bodies, which if left unheeded, manifest in the physical as an illness.

Ayurveda also said the same thing long ago. An important goal of Ayurveda is to identify the ideal state of balance of a person and offer solutions using diet, herbs, music, massage treatments, and meditation to restore the body’s balance.

Spiritual healing occurs as we begin to consciously reconnect with our essential being – the wise, loving, powerful, creative entity that we are at our core.

Since the Divine is the source of our energy (our life force), when we are alienated from it, we experience numerous illnesses that manifest in endless forms. And the purpose of the treatment is to help us reconnect with our Divine inner Center – to point the way back to Wholeness.

That’s why vaidyas in Vedic times used to examine the individual as a whole and not just his disease. They took careful note of the patient’s innate physiology, mental state, and other factors such as age, food habits, and season of occurrence of disease. Similar to a modern physician, the vaidyas conducted a thorough examination using both direct perception (pratyaksa) and inference (anumana).

Ayurvedic preceptors conceived the role of a physician as much more than mere treatment of diseases. He was to help an individual reach the ultimate spiritual goal of self-realization, which would not be possible without a sound body and sound mind. Therefore, an adept Ayurvedic physician was supposed to involve himself in an exclusive study of philosophical topics.

Thankfully spiritual healing is coming to the mainstream again. New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences is introducing it in its departments. Companies across the USA are using it to manage their human resources better. Unfortunately, in India-the mother of spiritual healing, it started late. Here, the modern wave of rigorous and sustained scientific studies in spiritual healing started in the early 1970s after it was demonstrated that Indian holy men could achieve seemingly impossible feats using meditation: they could lower their heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, and oxygen consumption capacity and shift their brain waves to semi-dream-like states at will. The mystics’ achievements were soon duplicated in the laboratory with techniques like bio-feedback or muscle relaxation exercises. Researchers now conclude that the mind is like a storehouse that is connected to the body through a bridge called the brain.

This is a remarkable time in human history—never before have so many world views, belief systems, and ways of engaging reality come into contact. On the other hand, through the Internet, awareness of the world’s wisdom and spiritual traditions has expanded: we now have access to practices that were once isolated in the Himalayas or deep in the Amazon and available only to a very small group of adepts. Today, we are experiencing a convergence of these different ways of knowing, science on one hand and diverse religious, spiritual, and cultural traditions on the other. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of medicine. While advancement in medical science is a boon to humanity, the role of spiritual healing can’t be underestimated. Both can walk together.

About Sakshi Shree: A life coach & a spiritual master, Sakshi Shree is the brain & soul behind Science Divine Foundation – The Science of Divine Living. He is the new-age spiritual master who doesn’t forbid people from enjoying the materialistic comforts of life that they have worked hard for. Instead, he brings achievable means and ways to attain enlightenment and experience spirituality. You can visit www.sciencedivine.org to know more about him.