Deep Medicine

William Stewart

Informations

• Publié par: New Harbinger Publications
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781608824861
• Langue: English

Extrait

“ Deep Medicine offers a free-spirited approach to exploring your innate health-building potential.”
—Mehmet Oz, MD, heart surgeon and coauthor of YOU: The Owner’s Manual
“When it comes to our health, our choices are often our destiny. In Deep Medicine, Dr. Stewart supports our choices with the skill of a surgeon and the wisdom of a healer.”
—Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, professor and author of Kitchen Table Wisdom
“Dr. Stewart is a pioneer in holistic and mind-body medicine and was one of the first clinicians in America to build a firm bridge between holistic and conventional medicine.”
—Larry Dossey, MD, author of Healing Words and The Power of Premonitions
“Dr. Stewart has pioneered a new and effective approach to body/mind/spirit healing.”
—Justine and Michael Toms, cofounders of New Dimensions World Broadcasting Network and coauthors of True Work
“In a most magical way, Dr. Stewart shares what he has learned about life and living well. Readers will be engaged and discover that their personal wellness is connected with everyone and everything.”
—Bob Duggan, MA, M.Ac., president of The Tai Sophia Institute in Laurel, MD
William B. Stewart, MD
New Harbinger Publications, Inc. -->
Publisher’s Note
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books
A copublication of New Harbinger Publications and Noetics Books.
Copyright © 2009 by William B. Stewart
New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
5674 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
www.newharbinger.com
All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America
Acquired by Jess O’Brien; Cover design by Amy Shoup; Cover photograph: Datura H, © Doris Mitsch; Edited by Jasmine Star; Text design by Tracy Marie Carlson
Epub ISBN: 9781608824861
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as:
Stewart, William B. (William Bennett), 1943-
Deep medicine : harnessing the source of your healing power / William B. Stewart ; foreword by Angeles Arrien.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57224-644-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-57224-644-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Health--Philosophy. 2. Self-care, Health. 3. Mind and body. 4.
Healing. 5. Spirituality. I. Title.
RA776.5.S8146 2009
613--dc22
2009014651
With deep respect and gratitude, this book is dedicated to Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy (Dr. V), who, through his and his family’s vision and mission at the Aravind Eye Hospitals in India, showed me the possibilities of braiding science, service, and spirit in the practice of medicine; to Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., whose cross-cultural synthesis of principles and practices for health and healing provides access to the language and tools to manifest deep medicine; and to my life partner, Susy Stewart, whose gifts, talents, and love are daily blessings.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bridging Science and Spirit
1. What Is Deep Medicine?
2. The Challenge of Change
3. Tools for Change
4. Pillars and Practices of Self-Care
5. Creating Your Own Healing Story
6. Making the Connection from Personal Health to Planetary Healing
7. Bridging Inner and Outer Worlds and Becoming Whole
Resources
References
Foreword
Cross-culturally, the power of choice for human beings has three functions: First, through choice we can create a new experience or reality for ourselves that inspires us. Second, through choice we can end an experience or reality for ourselves that is no longer tolerable. And third, through choice we can maintain and sustain our current experience or reality as it is.
Often these choices present themselves during times of change and transition. Most people tend to support the third function: what is knowable, comfortable, and controllable. However, when we are healthy and happy, we’re motivated and tend to gravitate to the first function: making choices that support what has heart and meaning. And if we can no longer tolerate the experience or reality we’ve created, we will choose the second option: to galvanize our actions to create change. What choices are we making that are currently health creating? What choices are we making that are health negating?
In a time when obesity, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are at their highest rates, Deep Medicine provides a necessary and very palatable antidote for reducing illness and disease and enhancing well-being in our lives. How we engage in the four pillars of self-care offered in this book—nutrition, physical activity and relaxation, relationship and community, and contemplation and solitude—on a daily basis determines the sustainability of our health and healing. By engaging in our own self-care, we can truly become primary care physicians for ourselves.
As the medical director of the Institute for Health and Healing at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Dr. William Stewart successfully practices and advocates a holistic approach to health and healing that combines contemporary medicine with a worldview that acknowledges the complexity of the ingredients contributing to our well-being, or our lack of it. Dr. Stewart’s most compelling message is “Everything is either health creating or health negating. Everything!” According to Dr. Stewart, everything we think, feel, say, and do contributes to our health. Seeing health from this truly holistic perspective motivates us to make choices that serve personal wellness and then go further, to ­contribute to enduring public health and aid planetary healing.
Every day provides a new canvas on which to create health. Deep Medicine offers complete and thorough guidance on both practical and universal ways in which we can change our health and well-being internally and externally, mentally and emotionally, and physically and spiritually. The human spirit is always reaching for the reclamation of its own well-being. Deep Medicine offers a compelling invitation into a process and a way of thinking by which we can choose to make that our experience and our reality.
Dr. Stewart remains the foremost advocate and guide on this transformative, evolutionary healing path that empowers responsible health care and health-creating choices. Deep Medicine reminds us that eradicating disease, creating health, and preventing future illness are personal and collective sacred tasks. If we accept the premise that we have a responsibility for our own health and well-being, then it follows that we are all healers.
Deep Medicine is an outstanding contribution to the fields of integrative medicine and preventive medicine—and medicine in general. Dr. Stewart’s call to each of us as a doctor and a healer is to actively engage our health and well-being using the concepts, tools, and practices in this book. Will we be conscious of the choices we are making and committed to the changes we desire? Let us begin our holy healing work and choose health for ourselves, others, and the world.
—Angeles Arrien, cultural anthropologist
Acknowledgments
The manifestation of this version of Deep Medicine: Harnessing the Source of Your Healing Power rests on the shoulders of those who contributed to planting the seeds and nurturing the sprout of the first incarnation, and some important others who saw a potential for enhancing the original and making Deep Medicine available to a new and larger audience.
My thanks to Matthew Gilbert, director of communications at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and to editor Jess O’Brien at New Harbinger Publications, who opened the conversation and trusted in the worth of this project.
I am indebted to Beth Witrogen, who brought her considerable editing skills and creative expression to subtracting what needed to be eliminated and adding to what needed more substance. Doug Winger helped simplify, clarify, and interpret the promise of Deep Medicine. Copy editor Jasmine Star brought her gentle touch to aligning and refining the final product. Milena Fiore, fine nurse and caregiver that she is, helped maintain the balance between my “day job” and the revision and renewal of Deep Medicine . Their caring interventions were well tolerated by the “patient,” who became stronger in the process. Thanks are also due to Doris Mitsch for the cover art, and for her many gifts and talents.
I am grateful to my colleagues, the staff, and our patients and supporters at the Institute for Health and Healing (IHH), and to Drs. Bruce Spivey and Martin Brotman, CEOs at the California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, for their support during the genesis and evolution of IHH. Judith Tolson has been a gifted leader at the IHH since its inception. Without her capacity to manifest a transformative vision of healing and her enduring encouragement, both IHH and Deep Medicine might still be on a to-do list waiting to happen.
The patience, understanding, and support of my family during the many hours I spent writing this book provided the needed sustenance for the journey and many lasting lessons in my personal practice of deep medicine.
Introduction
Bridging Science and Spirit
If you are looking for the greatest treasure, don’t look outside. Look within. Seek that.
—Rumi
There is no happiness that is not somehow rooted in the task of systematic self-examination.
—Plato
Everything you think, feel, say, and do is either health creating or health negating. Everything.
Whether you’re talking about the symptoms of a heart attack or stroke, or findings related to diabetes or a diagnosis of cancer; whether you’re talking about environmental degradation, social injustice, economic disparity, poverty, violence, or spiritual crisis—you’re talking abou