by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
Love reconciles and connects, it enlivens and inspires, it fulfils. It makes us happy. What’s more, it can heal. Spiritual medicine harnesses its tremendous therapeutic power. Since 2007, the therapy camps run by the Auswege foundation have demonstrated just how much it can achieve.
Worn out by constant misuse, some expressions have become so clichéd and hollow that one would prefer to ban their continued use. Politicians have abused the terms ‘social’ and ‘liberal’, the online network Facebook has abused ‘friendship’, food manufacturers have abused ‘enjoyment’, FIFA has abused “ethics”, fact checkers have abused ‘fact’, ‘truth’ and ‘disinformation’ – and a coalition of exuberantly infatuated people, pop industry songwriters, Hollywood screenwriters and aloof esoterics have done the same to the concept of love.
This makes it all the more difficult for us to admit: we love the people who come to the therapy camps of our Auswege /Ways Out foundation, each and every one of them – the outwardly disfigured, the mentally retarded, the physically disabled with the most extreme limitations, as well as the epileptic shaken by convulsions and the hyperactive, aggressive child; stressed, quarrelsome, demanding parents as well as grumpy, stubborn, uptight, self-righteous, intellectual, ungrateful adult patients and distant, suspicious, know-it-all relatives.
This is exactly how most of those who entrust themselves to us feel: At the end of a week of therapy, they rave about the abundance of love they have experienced with us.
Misuse of a term?
Do both sides, helpers and those seeking help, urgently need extra lessons in semantics?
Love is the strongest affection and appreciation that people can show each other; It is characterised by an intimate, deep bond that transcends its practical value. Even in ancient times, poets and philosophers distinguished between three types of love. In the sense of the first, eros, our work is entirely loveless: We certainly do not feel sensually or erotically connected to the participants through passionate desire. However, we are connected by philia – the friendly form of love based on mutual recognition and understanding – and agape, which is selflessly concerned with the well-being of others.
In what way? Like all psychological states, love is associated with certain feelings, attitudes and forms of expression. And in each of these respects, the term certainly applies to our close relationship with camp participants: we are emotionally connected to them through sympathy and compassion. Our attitude towards them is characterised by unconditional appreciation, sincere interest, empathy and care. We do not hide either of these things, but express them at every opportunity in everyday camp life – through comments during healing sessions and counselling appointments, in group meetings and conversations outside the daily programme, as well as through non-verbal signals in facial expressions, gestures, body language and behaviour that require no effort on our part and are not calculated: smiling at participants, holding their hands, hugging them is not difficult for us at all.
‘Can work wonders’
We see this as much more than just a wellness-promoting accessory to therapeutic work – it is an essential part of it. Because we are firmly convinced that love heals. In this we agree with holistic doctors, therapists and healers who have emphatically emphasised this aspect (1). A literary manifesto of this belief is the collection of essays published around 1990 entitled What is Healing? (2). In it, American authors Richard Carlson and Benjamin Shield asked 28 famous healers, sympathetic doctors and scientific experts to give their views in short essays. ‘Love is the healer,’ is how the editors summarise the basic tenor of most of the contributions in their introduction. ‘Love is regarded as the lowest common denominator underlying all successful healing and supporting all effective healing methods. Without love, there is no real healing.’ (3) ‘It is love that heals,’ taught one of the most prominent healers in the therapist network of the Auswege Foundation, the late Pamela Sommer-Dickson, who died far too young – “a very strong but also very subtle energy that can touch us when we are ready to open our hearts and accept ourselves (…) Then we experience how it can work wonders.” (4)
But how can love unfold its healing power? It does so on both sides of the therapeutic relationship: Helpers who love are particularly motivated to give their best. Those seeking help who feel loved trust, open up and cooperate more. Finding help that is clearly selfless and purely voluntary is a completely new experience for most camp participants, strengthening their trust and making them more cooperative: ‘We were surrounded by angels who took excellent care of us; everyone was warm and helpful,’ enthuses the mother of a severely disabled boy. ‘This atmosphere was contagious. No one here thought about money or their own advantage. I met a whole house full of good people here. I’m taking courage, hope and strength with me.’ The mother of a five-year-old boy with epilepsy “wasn’t able to thank everyone in the final round, otherwise I would have just cried. Your selflessness is almost impossible to understand. Thank you for being there, and thank you for what you do for all of us.”
What amazes many camp participants is that even doctors bring this special spirit to everyday life at the camp. ‘We find it difficult to switch from technical medicine to adequate humanity,’ admitted the former president of the German Medical Association, Prof. Frank Ulrich Montgomery (5) – but the doctors in our camps manage this effortlessly, without having to overcome any inner resistance. ‘Genuine compassion is perhaps more valuable than any purely medical treatment,’ states American cardiologist Brian Olshansky. (6) We offer ‘love instead of Valium,’ as a member of our foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board, former Berlin Medical Association President Dr. Ellis Huber, titled a much-discussed polemic. (7)
Those seeking help are highly sensitive to the spirit in which we engage in the camp, and this produces welcome therapeutic side effects. ‘That’s what I call dedication,’ said the mother of a five-year-old boy suffering from neurodermatitis. ‘I am moved and deeply touched. I bow to you.’
Psychology plus paraphysics
But how does love heal? Psychological factors may be joined by a paraphysical one – the very one that healers refer to when they assert that thoughts are ‘vibrations’ in the ‘subtle realm,’ loving thoughts being the highest form of vibration. After more than a century of parapsychological research, such speculations are no longer far-fetched: countless tests and experiments, many of them at a high scientific level, now suggest that mental events, processes and states can trigger measurable physical changes: in ‘blinded’ test subjects, in animals and plants, in fungi and bacteria, in cells and cell components, even in inorganic material. (8) And some studies have shown that loving intentions make a particular difference: they synchronise brain wave patterns (9), accelerate the growth of plants (10) – as amateur gardeners with ‘green fingers’ have always known – and they change the structure of water (11), which is medically highly significant in that the human body consists of two-thirds H2O, the brain of 85 percent, and blood plasma of up to 95 percent.
Love heals – which is another reason why what happens in our camps is beneficial.
Notes
1 See H. Wiesendanger: Fernheilen, Volume 1: Die Vielfalt der Methoden (Remote Healing, Volume 1: The Diversity of Methods), chapter ‘Die Liebenden – Fernheilen mit dem höchsten aller Gefühle’ (Lovers – Remote Healing with the Highest of All Emotions), p. 286 ff.
2 Original: Healers on Healing, ed. R. Carlson/B. Shield, Los Angeles, no date; the German translation was published in 1992 under the title Was ist heilen? Berühmte Heilerinnen und Heiler antworten (What is healing? Famous healers answer).
3 ibid., p. 10
4 in H. Wiesendanger (ed.): Spiritual Healing for a New Age – From ‘Miracle Healing’ to Holistic Medicine, Munich 1999, pp. 17-30, and in the same (ed.): How Jesus Healed. Spiritual Healing: An Act of Christian Charity, 4th revised edition, Schönbrunn 2008, pp. 305-315.
5 Der Spiegel 6/2014, p. 35
6 Quoted from https://www.spiegel.de/politik/wundermittel-im-kopf-a-8f9507f3-0002-0001-0000-000052032649
7 Ellis Huber: Liebe statt Valium – Konzepte für eine neue Gesundheitsreform (Love Instead of Valium – Concepts for a New Health Reform), Berlin 1993
8 I present impressive research results in Fernheilen, Volume 2: Case Studies, Research, Objections, Explanations, Schönbrunn 2004, pp. 115-210 and in Das Große Buch vom Geistigen Heilen – Möglichkeiten, Grenzen, Gefahren, Schönbrunn 2002, pp. 259-304.
9 See Fernheilen, Volume 2, op. cit., pp. 179 f.. and Harald Wiesendanger: Die Jagd nach Psi – Über neue Phänomene an den Grenzen unseres Wissens (The Hunt for Psi – On New Phenomena at the Frontiers of Our Knowledge), Freiburg i. Br. 1989, pp. 243 ff.
10 At the end of the 1970s, a leading journal for parapsychology reported on an experiment in which a healer worked with two groups of 19 radishes each; he devoted 15-20 minutes a day for a month to ‘loving, caring thoughts’ to one group, while ignoring the other. Both groups of plants were kept under the same physical conditions in terms of light, heat, watering and soil. At the end of the experiment, the radishes that had been treated ‘spiritually’ were statistically significantly heavier. Chris Nicholas: ‘The effects of loving attention on plant growth’, New England Journal of Parapsychology 1/1977, pp. 19-24.
11 The Japanese parapsychologist and alternative medicine practitioner Masaru Emoto – who died in October 2014 at the age of 71 – made sensational contributions to the phenomenon of ‘water memory’: in his view, water can store the influences of thoughts and feelings, thereby changing its quality. He was prompted to do so by experiments in which he exposed water samples to either positive messages such as ‘thank you’ and ‘joy’ or negative messages such as ‘hate’ and ‘war’ – partly by means of labelled slips of paper immersed in the water or attached to the container wall, partly through purely mental attempts to influence it – and then froze it; He photographed the resulting ice crystals and interpreted them on the basis of aesthetic and morphological criteria. He found that water influenced ‘positively’ always formed extremely harmonious, mostly symmetrical shapes, while ‘negatively’ contaminated water developed malformed, amorphous structures. Critics, however, accuse Emoto of impurities in the investigation process and the ‘analysis’.
This article contains excerpts from the book by Harald Wiesendanger: Auswege – Kranken anders helfen(2015)