Abstract

This work explores five dimensions that can foster or impede the healing process. Though these are important in all aspects of life, for those of us called to heal and teach in a professional setting, these dimensions have some particularly powerful ramifications. These dimensions include: ways of knowing, ways of relating to one another, ways of considering the body, use of language and storytelling, and spiritual or mindfulness practice. ;Detached ways of knowing create powerful realities in our cure-based practice of western medicine. Postmodern thought suggests there are many valid ways to know, such as connected knowing . This epistemological position is quite useful in health care environments in that it allows us to respectfully consider many sources of knowledge and increases the possibility of healing connections in our encounters. ;A second dimension for the healing process is around relationships. A disease model where the health professional is taught to maintain and cultivate a detached, objective view of the patient is unsatisfactory. This biomedical, disease-oriented model is cure-based, not person or relationship focused. In this setting, clinicians lose opportunities to learn, grow and be sustained by what called them to this profession. ;A third dimension for healing, the way we use language , is critical for the creation of life-affirming realities. We need to move away from military metaphors, metanymic medicine and toward more nurturing ways to help hear patients as they tell their stories. ;A fourth focus for considering healing is around the ways we understand body. Bodies are not machines. Cartesian, dualistic understanding of the body in our culture is not only anachronistic, but harmful. Considering our experience as mindbody is critical to healing processes. ;Mindfulness or spiritual practice that allows one to honor and affirm life and the connections we have to each other and the universe is the dimension that provides the moral grounding for all the previous ones. Mindfulness allows for compassion, tolerance and empathy to grow and brings us to different ways of practicing and teaching medicine in life-affirming ways. Though the challenges for integrating these practices into our professional lives are daunting, to do less serves to propagate cure-based models and ignores our opportunities to heal and to be healed