Whent hurricanes Jeanne and Frances hit, two big trees in my yard toppled over, and within days, their leaves, bark and branches showed signs of decline. Without the connection to the earth, trees get sick and die. Same is true for us people. Spiritual wellness means being connected to the source. All things can look good on the surface–our appearance, our status, our relationships– but when we drift too far from our inner feeling core, we get ill. Then all else erodes around us.  To live out of integrity, out of touch or out of reach inevitably adds up to a malaise that easily manifests as physical woe. Healing our inner lives, or spiritual healing, is important because the body follows what is in the heart and mind. Why wait for the tree to collapse to discover the importance of being connected? Heed the warning signs before it’s too late.

At the core we humans are peaceful, happy, and artful–like a free spirited child full of natural curiosity and joie de vivre. As long as we remain aligned with our nature, everything about us shines from that inner light. But when we disconnect from feelings, shroud ourselves in sophisticated “adult” pursuits, we easily get lost, end up making bad choices that serve our limited concepts of reality, and lose sight of the big picture. Uprooted from the ground of our being, we forget our origins, ignore our mortality, and unwittingly find ourselves living an inauthentic life, making huge mistakes with our lifestyle or our morals, or our pursuits.  Unconsciousness leads to error and ill, and that’s why consciousness is the cure; it points to the good and to healing. The truth shall set you free. Anchor that tree before the wind wrecks everything.

Spiritual healing is a reality that can be brought about, and even quickened, and the process starts by telling the truth. There are three levels of truth: the facts, how I feel about the facts, and thirdly, where I stand in relation to the facts. Expressing the truth, especially at the feeling and relational levels brings us closer to a reality aligned with wellness. I’m convinced that being real lies central to healing and getting well. Being true to our real nature means letting go of all the tensions, blocks, and false mind-sets that hinder the natural state. Telling the truth at the deepest levels means confessing, reconciling, expressing remorse, and also forgiving. At Hippocrates we see this sort of transformation in our guests over and over again as they heal their lives. And as “staff”, we know it in our own lives too. As a spiritual community we become intimately involved in each others’ healings, as witnesses, helpers, sympathizers, and friends. We create an atmosphere where being authentic is the norm and is valued. People exhale at Hippocrates. And then of course, we inhale. After the initial discomfort, being real at deep levels feels good–the kind of good that does a body good. It’s not milk; it’s love and being real that do a body good.

A young female Hippocrates guest dealing with cancer changed her self-ingratiating, accommodating style of never complaining or standing up for herself by speaking up to her husband and family about her real needs; after an especially emotional therapy session, she reported an instant 50 percent reduction in her physical pain! Now that’s the mind-body connection! The corporate magnate guest with prostate cancer, who had ignored his children and spouse to make his fortune, finally showed them his remorse, wept his regret, and genuinely reached out to forge new loving connections. He reported a deep sense of relief and renewal. “I feel right in my skin now,” he said. The supermodel who showed up at Hippocrates’ door with eating disorders and a deep-seated sense of isolation realized that although she lived a life of bounty and ease because of her beautiful external appearance, had actually spent most of her years being haughty and distant to people in general, and downright mean to her boyfriends and family. With a little help from the mirroring of others, she came face to face with the inner emptiness of a life devoid of kindness and charity. “I’m really ugly!” she wailed in one therapy session, and her healing then began in earnest.

Let’s talk about prayer for a moment. Years ago, I lived in a rural spiritual community in south Georgia. We tried to live Biblical values. We shared our cars and lawn mowers. We helped our neighbors. We ate meals together. One evening a wandering Christian minstrel family stopped by in their converted Greyhound bus to do a show for us. As they played their guitars and electric piano and sang of faith and prayer, the leader with the microphone shouted out:  “Is there anyone here in need of a healing? Praise Jesus!” The music crescendoed as he made his plea, but nobody spoke up. Being the wise-guy that I am, and wanting to ridicule these troubadours’ provincial simplicity, I stood up and said, “I do.” And they all focused on me, eager to heighten the fervor. I, of course, just hoped to catch them in my net of judgement and sarcasm . “I have a wart right here on my finger,” I proclaimed theatrically, holding up my digit for all to see.  But instead of feeling like fools, they didn’t skip a beat and barraged me with “Thank you, Jesus. Heal this man’s ailment. Thank you, Jesus!” It was over the top. I was embarrassed. For myself. For them.  Later, after the show, I reflected that even though their presentation seemed hokey to me, I couldn’t deny their sincerity, and felt bad about my arrogance and sarcastic tone. I went to bed feeling like an idiot. The next morning I woke up to find no wart. That’s right, the wart was gone. I believe in the power of prayer and loving intent. It’s way bigger than our ideas. Andy’s ego: zero; Andy’s humility: one.

Spiritual healing means waking up to the big picture. And being gracious about it. Lord knows, we could beat ourselves up forever for all the mistakes we’ve made and pain we’ve caused, and maybe on some level, our unconsciousness deserves that. But isn’t it more refreshing to see Scrooge transformed from being mean, self-absorbed, and greedy, rather than punished for it? I say ignorance is its own punishment. I say we’ve all already done our time. Let’s let this bird that was made to fly, fly, and help each other fly free too.  Let’s unleash our hearts to do what they were meant to do: to focus in on life, without distractions or the blinders of too much ego, and manifest, through simple gestures in everyday life, our deepest intent to help and to heal ourselves and the world. Let’s get on with the innate kindness of life, and evoke bountiful health because it’s our birthright. Spiritual healing isn’t reserved for the saints. It doesn’t mean asking for or expecting special favors from life, but is more like accepting an inheritance from loving parents.  Spiritual healing means saying yes to nature, and yes to our selves as part of nature. Spiritual healing means looking Life in the eye and expressing please and thank you from the deepest regions of the heart.   Spiritual healing means reconnecting our roots to the source within and finally, finally receiving the goods.

©2004 Andy Bernay-Roman

Which way do you see her twirling, and on which foot?

The foot you see her twirling on is the hemisphere of your brain through which you are perceiving this image. Left foot=left brain. See if you can make her change direction!

In Food We Trust

People from around the world and all walks of life arrive at Hippocrates on their quests for better nutrition and health, and bring with them with the whole range of food- and eating-related issues.  After years and years of personal and professional contact with thousands of guests, I finally understand something: people come here not only to change what they eat, but to change their relationship with food. Not so easy, I say. It takes a good degree of soul searching and effort to make fundamental lifestyle changes, and that’s why Hippocrates provides psychological and emotional support services as a core part of the program. For one thing, we recognize that eating is not a neutral event. Nobody just ingests fuel like a robot with no feeling. No. Eating is up there as the most highly emotionally charged human activity, linked deeply with memories of family, love, comforting, good times (sometimes bad times), and comes with deeply ingrained patterns, beliefs, and habits.  In food we trust and find feelings of soothing and comfort. And abundance. I feel the love just walking through the food line at Hippocrates, dining with friends, or when I visit a local green market, or even at health food stores! I love food! Most of us do.

In the Beginning

Our first experience of food predates our mouth. We feel it umbilically, viscerally, and even at a cellular level. Our deepest sense of well-being springs directly from our actual level of nutrition, which by the way, sums up the wholesome goal of a good relationship with food: the primal reality of super well-being through super nutrition. Then we’re born and encounter food in a whole new sensual and distinctly oral way (remember Freud’s oral phase of development?), infused with closeness and caring. Our parents celebrate our eating because they want us to thrive and grow. They do their best. As babies we know hunger, and don’t like it. It gnaws at us and makes us cry. Parents feed us to make us not cry, and that’s where all the food-as-comforting patterns originate. Food is nurturing. Clearly food is love. Food makes us feel better when we feel bad.

Conditioning, Trauma,  and History

Not just childhood experiences and habits influence our relationship with food. My late mother, for instance, was a Holocaust survivor. Hiding in basements, living every day in dread of being discovered, facing food shortages–all totally altered her relationship with food. Long after the War, she simply couldn’t throw old food away, out of a learned sense of scarcity. She kept her pantry and refrigerators stuffed, and also consistently prepared way too much for every meal. For her, feeding her family was a powerful act to ensure their survival. Eating and feeding, for her, equalled being safe and being loved, and were driven by ghosts of fear and lack.

Everybody has a history with food. It doesn’t have to take a Holocaust or a Depression or personal trauma to trigger a lifelong food addiction or even bad food habits. Unlike other things people get hooked on to deal with stress, food really is a daily friend, helping us bond with others and providing pleasure when we’re alone. We all share a universal secret conclusion that food is love, and we look to it for fulfillment. We use food to comfort ourselves, to cheer ourselves up, to drown out negativity or overwhelm. We embrace and yearn for food like our lover. We live to eat, and thereby worship food as our god. We eat what our culture says to eat, and thereby feel one with our people and heritage. You might say, “what’s wrong with all that? Food is here, we’re here, why not just enjoy it and use it however we can?” Just as with any conditioning, habitual ways of thinking, behaving, and even believing, can turn into the most insidious obstacles to outcomes that are good for us, and to our very freedom as persons. I want to have my habits and beliefs and not be had by them. I choose to be the driver and not the driven. I want my choices to center on what’s best for my true welfare. If some old ways of relating to food get in the way of that, then those things must go. I don’t want to use food to cover up insecurities or feelings of unfulfillment, or even spiritual emptiness. I want to face anything and everything in life, unburdened by old habits, even the ones that seemingly or actually make me more comfortable. I need to relocate myself psychologically and emotionally, or re-center myself to have a more authentic, healthy relationship with food. For my mother, as for all of us, the hero’s journey means facing our fears, doubts, lacks, losses, and defenses, and then taking the next right step.

Hippocrates Blues about Greens

There’s nothing like whisking a person out of familiar surroundings and habits to rile things up inside. When guests first arrive at Hippocrates, they greet the food with a mixture of excitement and dread. “This is not what I’m used to,” they moan. Most people in our culture know vegetables mainly as side-dishes, so even the newly arrived guests who like salads, raise an eyebrow at the dinner spread. Many of them go through a period of deprivation, focusing on and even dreaming about all the foods they can no longer have. Like an addict going through withdrawal, they detox their way forward, bitching, fighting and fussing. They struggle and complain. Some-times out loud, sometimes quietly.  At their most vulnerable, they yearn for the good-old-days of carefree, unconscious eating. We help them move forward in their healing process with several powerful tools: 1. group support, 2. one-on-one counseling, and 3. lots of classes on right living and right eating, all of which help instill a new way of approaching and framing the whole nutri-tion and eating thing. From old school to new school.

I have two bits of advice for you when you’re in that phase of “recovery”: Hang in there, and duke it out. The fog will lift. The light will triumph. Embrace the growing pains as best you can. Feel it and heal it.  The healthy turning point is closer than you think. The body will recognize well-being when it experiences it. Do the right thing till it does. The path of superior nutrition, inner cleansing, and no more junk is the super highway to health.  It’s so fantastic to finally feel good! Hang in there and your mind will no longer be dominated by a deprivation mind-set, but rather by one of self-care, self-nurturing, and self-loving. Trust me, it will naturally emerge. Have faith in the process and in yourself. You can do it. It happens here at Hippocrates all the time.

The single key to unlock this transformation is learning to treasure your self. Once that preciousness dawns in awareness, treating the body with proper respect and awe comes naturally. Good food choices come easy. Hang in there, because it can happen for you too.

Life 101: Feed Yourself With Love

OK, one last thing: Food isn’t love, and can never substitute for love.  Love is love, a matter of the heart that can’t and shouldn’t be pinned down into anything outside the heart’s do-main.  When we know real love, we can release food to just be food, and be way more objective about it. When we know real love, we take ourselves off the hook, and become free to feed ourselves with love.  Love is love, and food is food. When we mix the two unconsciously, the fulfillment of both eludes us. When we truly know the difference, we get to have both. Enjoy the love! Enjoy your food!

There’s a fine line between perception and imagination because we don’t just see things as they are, but rather we see things as we are.  If our imagination is limited or absent, so are we. As a psychotherapist I use the power of imagination to help my client shift into new perceptions. Bending things is the name of the game.  Just like massage is manipulation of soft tissue for a good outcome, psychotherapy is a benevolent intervention that challenges the brain-locks of the person to help them get unstuck. I use imagination to stretch perceptions and rock the boat. “What if you had a magic wand, and could change things in your favor?” Or: “What would you say and do in this situation if you could be completely uninhibited without regard to consequences?” Or: “If you could travel back into time and find yourself as a kid, what do you see?”  Just like clay–our memories and perceptions harden if not handled regularly. Bend them, keep them warm and pliable, create with them, and above all, beware of neglecting them or making them into assumptions.

No intellectual insight, idea, theory, or “understanding” alone ever liberates a person from mental or emotional suffering.  It takes passion, wonder, inspiration—the stuff of a vivid imagination–to overcome habits of pain and deprivation.

And let’s face it: our history is imagination. It’s not the facts that count, but how we hold them. Our past is a story imprinted with emotional charge. And so it takes emotional charge to bring about change. That life-affirming oomph comes from deep feeling, even when it’s painful. My therapy style is to help a person connect with the feeling level, and then rewrite, or re-imagine the whole story–to put a new frame around a familiar picture. Because even an outstanding work of art in a frame made out of dried cow manure might make a person conclude: “this picture stinks”. My job is to remind you that it’s not the painting that stinks, just the frame. You, in essence, are a masterpiece!

So, what deep feelings am I talking about? The ones already in there, often the feelings of a child that got tucked away into shadows. The ones hidden from consciousness. The unpleasant, painful ones. Or, there’s also the potential feelings, a person’s yet untapped capacity to love, for instance, dormant like an unsprouted seed, that get awakened by the heart’s desire and inspiration. We tend to call them the “bad” feelings and the “good” ones. But they are certainly not the neutral ones.

Deep feelings fuel real change, because only in a deep feeling state do we clearly see what is right and what is wrong for our well-being, and sense our true destiny stir within. That’s what makes feelings dangerous and why we often avoid them; they are to the lazy, unimaginative, self-protective, status quo ego, like oxygen is to anaerobic bacteria. Their very presence breaks the stranglehold of conceptual routine unconscious living, and thrusts us into the raw openness of the present moment. We often only get to that point through disaster, crisis, or loss. 9/11, for all its sorrow, roused us all from a deep slumber of complacency.

The good news is that catastrophe is not necessary for awakening. What it takes is thirst for the real, which makes suffering recognizable for what it is, and unacceptable, no matter how familiar it’s become.  I believe that letting go of suffering and the identity that we’ve built around it, takes guts, because it can feel like death. Positive imagination will be the death of you, if you’re living an illusion, that is. That’s why love comes first, and imagination, second.  Imagination is dangerous, love is safe. Imagination is the knife, love is the sheath. Both together make for change that’s livable.

Good therapy jump-starts the imagination, shakes the status quo, punctures pockets of darkness, releases the tender heart, and ushers in a new baseline sense of an alive self. Thirsty yet?