Future Medicine: Ethical Dilemmas, Regulatory Challenges, and Therapeutic Pathways to Health Care and Healing in Human Transformation

5. Touch, Privacy, and Intuitive Information

5 Touch, Privacy, and Intuitive Information Case 5A Auric Laceration in an Island Emergency Room After the conference, we went snorkeling. The ocean waters were rough, impatient, demanding. The schools of fish beneath our man-made fins seemed unruffled by the backand -forth currents that assailed us. “Don’t go too far out!” my friend cried out as he momentarily removed the snorkel from his mouth. Our collective acumen was no match for the sea. She ruled—we retreated. Our third colleague—who had gone a little too far out—received less gracious treatment in her attempted exit from our common, ancestral home. (As my feet touched sand, I instinctively remembered something from childhood: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Perhaps that was what saved me.) Tossed like a tumbleweed by the crashing waves, wrapped around corals, our colleague stumbled shoreward. As she emerged, she dripped blood. Her leg was cut. “Five-inch laceration,” we telephoned in to the local emergency room, thirty minutes’ drive away. “We’re on our way.” In the car, Lila started to panic: the pain was settling in. I shut off the radio and tried to calm her. Intuitively, I started reaching in— back—through the wound. Immediately, I received images. Another time and place; an indigenous population; bloodshed, by this ancient being, in male form. An old incarnation, she (as a male) had slaughtered indigenous people, drawn their blood; now the ocean drew hers, to even the karmic score. Every action in the universe draws an equal and opposite reaction; now, the debt was being repaid in the form of a 167 five-inch gash along her thigh. Due to prayers and good works, the burden had been lessened. Several dozen stitches, and she would be clean—free and clear, as property lawyers say, of all (karmic) encumbrance in this matter. I did not convey my intuitive sense to Lila: among other things, it would have been disrespectful to start spouting, “The reason you got hurt is because. . . .” Respectfully, I listened to her body— to what it had to tell me. There was no discussion. On a soul level, perhaps she experienced the events being played out; on a personality level, she only felt the pain of the gash. In the emergency room, I laid my hands on Lila’s shoulders. We had to wait. Triage. The television was blaring some violent show. Lila was in pain and panicking. The nurse barked out Lila’s last name. Her tone was coarse, rude, abrupt, authoritarian, consistent with stock images of an emergency room: cold, mentally disrupting, anything but conducive to healing. “Whatever you’re doing feels good,” Lila said. I could sense Lila’s life energy leaking out—to the bombardment of the nurse’s questions; to the assault of the television show; even to the joking, minimizing comments of friends, aimed (in good faith) at distracting her from the pain. I remembered years ago, when my friend William was dying and his family came to visit him in the hospital, how my own perception had been of how out of sync they were with his needs, his wishes, his desire for silent communion, for spoken communion in his rhythm (not theirs). Finally, out of frustration, William yelled, “Please, just stop asking me questions.” Most of his mind was on managing the physical pain, the rest on managing his dying, a small corner on how to manage his family. I could not sew or clean a wound, provide emergency physical care, or perform social or “psych” functions. But I could pray. As a layperson , I could offer at least that; as a trained healer, much more. I could help mellow out a sadistic triage nurse, counteract the violent stream of bioenergetic impulses from the environment. I could work effortlessly, nonintrusively, in a supportive role, within the system. Later, Lila told me, “I don’t know what you did, but it helped. . . . I wouldn’t have made it otherwise.” 168 • Future Medicine Case 5B The Healer Whose Touch Is Innocently Inappropriate A male patient suffering from an injury to his lower back visits a hands-on healer for energetic healing. The patient is a professional basketball player and extremely tall. The healer happens to be a licensed nurse who claims that the practice of energy healing is within the scope of practice of her nursing license. Because the patient (who is fully dressed) complains, on the table...