A Visionary Journey of Healing Jeanne Achterberg
Dr. Jeanne Achterberg is one of the original founders of the alternative health movement - psychology professor, author, lecturer, teacher of healing visualization, and senior editor of the cutting-edge journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. Her other books are: Imagery in Healing: Shamanism and Modern Medicine, Woman as Healer, Rituals of Healing: Using Imagery for Health and Wellness (with Barbara Dossey).
Her last 25 years of work have been about the psychological and spiritual dimensions of cancer. I thought when I opened this book that I would be reading the straightforward story of a woman who faced a serious health challenge and simply applied everything she knew about alternative healing. Well, no and yes - this honest and completely absorbing memoir could just as well be subtitled “muddling toward the truth while trying to keep your sense of humor.”
She is suddenly faced with a diagnosis of ocular melanoma, a condition for which conventional medicine offers only removal of the eye or irradiation at a nuclear facility (literally), and metastasis usually leads to death within months. Achterberg reacts with the same fear, confusion, and shock that anyone else would. The diagnosis is so rare that there is no record of anyone being treated successfully with alternative methods. Moreover, the immune system of the eye is different from the rest of the body because it is such a small and delicate organ, and not much is known about it.
In spite of the fact that many of the most creative and talented thinkers and practitioners in the field are personal friends, she is alone with the decision of what to do. She does not immediately calmly do all the things she counsels patients to do. She follows what I would call a kind of spiral pathway that consists equally in putting into practice the knowledge of alternative healing that has become second nature to her, and attempting to be open to what is real intuition, both her own that and that offered by friends and healers, and to act on that.
After a series of disconnects with doctors that undermine her confidence in any treatment they can offer, she ends up honoring her instinctive rejection of medical interventions, refusing conventional treatment, and trusting her own somewhat spontaneous choice of treatments, sometimes through very scary interludes. Strikingly, she never calls her illness “my cancer.” She calls it “the eye thing,” keeps some humor and objectivity about it even at the worst moments, and treats it as an unknown entity which can be observed and learned from.
In the course of the book she includes a lot of information about alternative attitudes and treatments of disease, though not in any organized way—this is by no means a treatment manual. However, if you research the things she mentions you will see the logic of her decisions. The riveting story is the one that tracks Achterberg’s initial denial and then gradual opening to being able to bring to light buried conflicts in her apparently happy and successful life, and the ultimate effects on her life of those realizations.
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