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I SING THE MAGICKAL BODY
An excerpt from Dr. Nancy Offenhauser's forthcoming memoir, Healing Cancer Peacefully: When the Body's Not a Battlefield, It Can Tell You What It Needs
I had my first major religious experience in the Gross Anatomy lab at chiropractic school. We began dissecting cadavers on the second day of class, beginning with the upper thigh.
This was good planning for two reasons: one, because the structures there are relatively large and we were less in danger of destroying them due to poor technique; and two, because the rest of the cadaver was draped, and beginning with a part that didn’t seem so immediately human made it possible for us to be gradually desensitized, so that, by the end of the second trimester, we were prepared to work on the face and the brain.
So, as we separated nerve from muscle, and saw the highly individual pathways taken by the veins, it was possible to focus on the miraculous way in which the body is put together.
Up until then I hadn't seen any particular need for the Divine, so didn't pay much attention to it. Then I began to appreciate the brilliance and intricacy of the way the human body is designed. In one way, Gross Anatomy offered very few surprises—I saw over and over again that the way in which a part of the body functioned was inevitable in its simplicity and elegance.
Organs tend to be packaged in inner and outer wrappings. The ear, for instance. The three ossicles—tiny bones, hammer, anvil, and stirrup— in the ear are each the size of a grain of sand. The vibration of these against the eardrum in the middle ear allows for the transfer of sound to the inner ear. Also built in is a mechanism to protect the inner ear from potentially damaging loud sound: The muscles driving the ossicles can be set at varying levels of tension to facilitate or to damp down the vibration. Control of these is usually subconscious, but can also be conscious.
I don't think I could design anything as neatly as that, and don't know any other human being who can.
So How Does Healing Work?
This is the ultimate mystery. I do not presume to know anything more about it than that. I can, however, offer generally accepted facts and proceed from there to chiropractically accepted findings, personal experiences, stories, extrapolations and conjectures, and in doing so, perhaps shed some light on the subject.
I find, for instance, that my experience with the healing process over the last thirteen years has shaped my way of coping with cancer, the subject of this book, in many profound ways.
Every Day, a Miracle
Over the years I've been in practice, I have noticed several key things about the human condition:
First, that physical pain can be the body's way of expressing an emotional issue that needs work, as well as the result of a physical injury.
Second, that physical injury sometimes seems to occur in order that the emotional issue be addressed. I discussed this with a psychotherapist colleague once. He agreed with me that sometimes injury seems to happen to insure that a deeper, older trauma will be brought to light, worked on, healed. The intelligence directing this is far more profound than our simple, everyday consciousness. The trauma that is experienced by such an injury may or may not be of the present lifetime. I find it true, and remarkable, that we can have cellular memories deriving from other lifetimes, other bodies.
Third, that the depth of healing that can occur is far beyond what one would normally think could be accomplished by touch and talk.
Fourth, that the problems patients come in with tend to mirror my struggles of the moment more than seems randomly reasonable, and I am changed by my interaction with them.
And fifth, that a patient’s condition can be changed by a shift in his or her perception of it.
Describing the healing process doesn’t begin to explain it. I can't help believing that something beyond the human is at work here. I see small and not so small miracles every day. I am still in awe any time I feel a healing occurring under my hands. It is still a mystery.
