The Healing Path: A Soul Approach to Illness

If you could read only one book about the inner, subjective side of becoming and being ill and becoming and being well, this book gets my vote. Barasch is the Joseph Campbell of the illness/healing process. Being a journeyer himself, he interviewed other journeyers. In The Healing Path he describes the common factors all these people went through. He has found and beautifully describes the Ariadne’s thread of meaning that is the potential ripcord that can open up any serious illness. Discovering and following your own thread is often associated with healing, although part of the healing process may be to drastically redefine what healing is. Also, the well-healed (no reference to money intended) person is almost always a very different person than the one who became ill. Barasch writes so well I am sorely tempted to quote him profusely, but give the joy of that discovery to future readers of his book.

After describing the varieties of healing experience, he presents an overview of the path of healing, from the roots of disease, the tangle of symptoms, the stark shock of diagnosis, the various encounters with allopathic medicine and the need to take back control and find new footing, the personal discovery and exploration of alternative forms of healing, the appearance of "the helper," the discovery of the "healer within," the recovery of feeling and exploration of "the healing selves," the reweaving of a new self and integrating it with the fabric of society, the Return, having credited/stumbled upon a new way of life and lastly, the experience of rebirth, in which you take on a new identity and live from a new worldview. The foregoing descriptions of the healing process are based on Barasch’s chapter titles. However, exceptional human experiences (EHEs), which are often associated with guidance and wisdom, may be found at any stage of the healing process. Moreover, the process of healing and its stages are very like those of the EHE process.