Homo sapiens meet Homo empathicus* meet Homo aquaticus
Elsewhere on this website, I have written that '[t]his is the story of my journey from science to soul through water'. You'll find plenty of evidence for my ambivalence about its insistent pull, yet science has never quite let go of my tail.
A glance through my Special Series of blogs posts on Aquatic esoterica and Healing or therapy? will illustrate this quite well. I suspect that it sometimes leaves a few people wondering where exactly I do stand - for or against?
I'm lucky to have found a fellow explorer in my partner Joe Landwehr, also a scientist by training, whose healing modality is astrology. He recently posted a series on his blog entitled Why astrology is not a science which had a Forum of his colleagues up in arms for weeks.
You've got to be brave to question the power and omnipotence of science. Many will assume you are anti-science and by definition lacking in cognitive intelligence or deluded by magical thinking.
So, when I came across Larry Dossey's brilliant lead article 'A Challenge to Science' (Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing July/ August 2010 (Vol. 6, Issue 4, Pages 197-214) - it felt as if all that I'd wanted to say or have said was right there in front of me.
There can be no better way to share where I stand with you, than by asking you to read that article.
Extract:
For many years I've kept a file I call The Letter [write's Dossey], in which I save the written communication and e-mails I've received from premed and medical students over the years. There is a common theme among them. They describe how the student is dissatisfied with the overwhelmingly materialistic, physically oriented educational system he or she is in. Can I suggest a medical school where a broader view is supported? Where faculty members understand and address the evidence for the role of meaning and mind mediated effects in healing?
Extract:
If empathic consciousness flows from embodied experience and is a celebration of life--our own and that of other beings--how do we square it with faith and reason, which are disembodied ways of looking at reality and steeped in the fear of death.
Finally, to bring us back to the water, here is a short extract from my own writing, Liquid in Motion: water as healer, on the embodied experience that is aquatic bodywork for me:
Aquatic bodywork has shown me that I have a deeply resonatory nature, a melodious underwater life, in which all my experiences are embedded like beautiful overtones. There is much scope for both scientific research and creative expression in the experience of aquatic bodywork. Perhaps through such studies we can reflect back to water the life-giving properties it so freely lends to us.
