Discover Maximum Medicine

Discover Maximum Medicine

by Sharon E. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., author of Maximize Your Healing Power

My tipping point toward learning about shamanic practice and energy medicine came completely unexpectedly. I opened a clinic in rural Pennsylvania about 18 years ago and was faced every day with the differences between Western medicine and what felt to me like a more holistic healing approach.

One day, a Friday evening, about 5 o’clock, after a long week of seeing patients back to back, I was exhausted and ready to drop. The drive home was about 30 miles, and I was eager to get started. I came out of the exam room and stood at the counter in the nurses’ station to finish up my paperwork for the last patient. I looked up and saw the receptionist walking down the hall from the main lobby, a worried look on her face. She told me a young man had come into the office with his girlfriend—he was not our patient—complaining of anxiety and looking agitated. The receptionist had talked over the situation with one of the nurses; they both thought it was important that I see this patient.

My mind was a tumble of thoughts, some of them not so charitable because of the time and possible needs. Doesn’t he have his own doctor (meaning, why do I have to work late on a Friday night)? What if he is clinically psychiatric (meaning, how am I going to get the state police or ambulance here to bring him to a psychiatric facility; or, what if it takes the police two hours to get here and I am stuck waiting)? Do we have to restrain him if he needs psychiatric admission and refuses to go (am I put[1]ting my staff in an unsafe position)?

I took the young man into the exam room while his girlfriend sat in the waiting room. Something told me to put away the computer and paper; I turned my gaze to him and just sat. He was handsome and youthful, with soft blonde hair that curled gently on his head. Later, I reflected that he looked like a cherub. He began to tell me of the vivid dreams he had every night; dreams about things that would happen to people he knew and sometimes to people he had never met. Mostly, the dreams were about bad outcomes for the people. In the daytime he could not get the images out of his head. The worry was disrupting his sleep and his ability to find peace.

The key thing in psychiatry, at least at the level of a general practitioner, is whether these images are hallucinations or whether his beliefs were paranoid or delusional. Was he simply having a bipolar episode with his mind racing and his problems sleeping and eating? I decided to call his girlfriend back to the exam room. When he has these dreams, I asked her, do they come true? Do they yield accurate predictions? Yes, she said. Then I asked whether anyone else had noticed his ability to predict the future. Again, her answer was yes. In fact, his grandmother was a Romani and told the family when this young man was a toddler that he had “the sight.”

The more I learned about him, the more I realized that Western medicine’s approach would not be helpful and might even be harmful. First, he was not crazy, and no amount of medication would fix what was ailing him. He had heightened intuitive skills, even predictive skills. The most psychiatry could offer was antianxiety medications, which would be sedating at best. And pushing this lovely young man into the medical system would cause him to be labeled as defective or “cracked,” which he was not. Rather, he was extremely intuitive and empathic—traits that are undervalued in our society. What he really needed to learn was when to allow his “seeing” to occur, to make it on his terms. In a sense, he needed to gain mastery over his perceptions.

I told him how I saw his issues and that I did not think he was crazy. That was all he wanted to know. The relief on his face when I said this was reassuring to him and rewarding to me. Had I not seen this issue from an out-of-the-box perspective, things would have turned out a lot differently. I suggested that he seek out some renowned intuitives and find out how they learned to master their “sight.” He left the office that day calmer and reassured. I left the office committed to learning a new way of “seeing” things myself.

Not long after, I began in-depth shamanic energy training with Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., founder of the Four Winds Society, an organization that teaches healing of the luminous energy body. Over the last 20 years, I have studied with some master healers, some of whom are very intuitive as they work with the energy body, while some follow techniques passed down from the elders of indigenous cultures. The commonality among all my teachers is that they firmly believe the pathways to health and well-being are much broader and deeper than those used in Western medicine. I have come to agree with them.

I have watched and heard from patients over the years about their distress with the system of medicine in the United States. (I think the challenges in neighboring Canada, for example, are likely different. There, cost is taken out of the equation, although perhaps patients must wait longer to get in to see a specialist.) Here is an example of what patients might go through when they come to the office for a medical appointment in the United States.

The office feels industrial. Your copay is $15 more than it was last year, or your deductible is huge. Your appointment is for 10:00 and it’s already 10:30. You had to take time off work to come to the appointment—every hour you miss work is more money out of your pocket. You have belly pain and occasional diarrhea, and you are scared you have colon cancer. Somewhere in your family tree is someone who had colon cancer, and you wonder whether you are cursed with that genetic predisposition. You haven’t seen any blood in your stool, but you have read that sometimes colon cancer can happen without any blood. Meanwhile, you have your mask on because you’re scared to death to be in a medical facility when deadly respiratory diseases are circulating in the community.

When you finally get to the exam room, you are asked to put on a paper-thin gown for examination and are freezing and one step shy of a full-blown panic attack. Should you sit on the exam table, which is uncomfortable, or in the chair? How much longer is the doctor going to be? Do they disinfect the exam tables between patients?

The doctor arrives, wearing a mask, and hardly looks at you; she just types on her laptop. You tell her you have diarrhea sometimes and your belly hurts. You ask whether you could have colon cancer? She says, “Oh, you just have irritable bowel. You need more fiber.” She goes on to say you are on the young side for colon cancer, and you do not have a high-risk family history, but she will have you do stool cards to look for hidden blood. Meanwhile, start taking Metamucil each night and cut out all soda and artificial sweeteners.

Your mind is spinning. You do not drink soda and don’t use artificial sweeteners. Why didn’t she just ask you? How is Metamucil going to help? You are already almost vegan in your diet and eat lots of plant-based foods. Why do you need more fiber? The doctor leaves the room having never asked about your belly pain.

You have a moment of real self-reflection, as the question you want to be asked by your doctor is now foremost in your brain: When did this all start? You remember back to three months ago, when you broke up with your lousy boyfriend after you caught him cheating on you, and you argued, and he said you were never a good lover. Tears come to your eyes. Why didn’t she have more time to talk about what is really going on inside you? What is going on will not be fixed by Metamucil, of that you are certain. You are starting to get angry, and you are still freezing cold as you sit there in a hospital gown. You are still scared and sad, and you still have not received any help.

Nothing is worse than feeling under the control of a system that is terribly broken. This example could be replaced by any symptom, any office visit, and the complaints would still be the same: Too much money, too little personal time, you don’t feel heard or listened to, you’re confused about what to do to take care of yourself, and you’re angry that you have to leave your health in the hands of this broken mess.

The concerns about not having enough time and not being listened to are present in the Canadian and UK health systems as well as here in the United States. Even if you are very proactive about your well-being, you would like information to guide you on what you can do for yourself; you have questions and would like some answers.

I, myself, am fed up with the state of today’s Western medicine. I am a board-certified, internal medicine physician who works at a clinic in rural south-central Pennsylvania. I know how to do “standard of care” academic medicine, how to diagnose disease, how to choose appropriate treatment, and how to get the numbers of your lab results back to the “healthy” range. However, I am increasingly dissatisfied having to push a volume of patients through just to pay the bills. I do not like having to click certain boxes in the computer just to make the documentation requirements for the insurance companies. I want to sit, talk, guide, and teach you. I want to have conversations that help you make healthy choices and nudge you toward taking better care of yourself.

I wrote my book Maximize Your Healing Power to help you back into the driver’s seat of your health and well-being. In addition to being a Western-trained physician, I am also a shamanic practitioner who heals through the luminous energy field. In other words, I am also an energy practitioner.

Through my training with Dr. Alberto Villoldo and the Four Winds Society, I learned that the Luminous Energy Field (LEF)—also called the light body, halo, or aura—is a matrix that envelops and informs the physical structure of all living beings and organizes the body in the same way that iron filings are organized by a magnet. It is a reservoir of vital force—a sea of living energy as indispensable to our health as the oxygen and nutrients carried by the bloodstream. These energies are the purest and most precious fuel for life. When the vital reserves are depleted through illness, environmental pollutants, or stress, we suffer disease.

My book is a compilation of processes and techniques that, I believe, will teach you how to heal by adopting a different perspective. I will show you how you can blend the Western approach your doctor prescribes for you with powerful practices and awarenesses gleaned from the indigenous ways of healing. You will be shown step-by-step ways to learn about your energy field, to increase your awareness and control over your field, to not only shift the trajectory of a health challenge but also to amplify your immune system and well-being. Even in the absence of a health challenge, you can use the book to increase your ability to thrive in your world, increasingly empowered.

As you work with the book, you will be shown how to see your health from different perspectives. I will teach you how to have increased awareness—of your body, of your energy field, of the world around you. You will learn how to sense forces and energies of the unseen world. These forces influence our health by impacting our energy body, so awareness is the first step toward mitigating the impact. In common with our indigenous ancestors, you will become more deeply connected to Nature, which, in and of itself, amplifies your personal power. Your intuition will expand, and you will gain mastery over your intention and your own energy field—characteristics that are vital to self-healing. These abilities are valuable not just innately but also when used in concert with and as a complement to the brilliant technologies of Western medicine.

Some of the practices in the book are rituals; most have a spiritual quality. By this I mean that inherent to all these practices is the philosophical belief that we humans are not alone in the Universe; that we are not separate from Nature, from the Divine, from the Cosmos. Thus, when we heal through and within the luminous field, we are engaging aspects of ourselves that are integrally linked to the universal matrix, giving us access to power and forces greater than us.

Each process or practice I teach is valuable inherently, even as a stand-alone process. You can work with each one specifically and after gaining familiarity and mastery, you will find yourself feeling more enlivened. For example, I will show you several ways to enhance your intuition. Even if you do not apply this learning to your health, being more intuitive will serve you well in life—to sense when to have more caution, when to step in and act, when to be more of an observer. The techniques I teach in the book will help you to expand your perspective—from looking at the literal, to experiencing the emotional, to standing back as the observer watching your soul’s journey. You will take in data in a new way and have a better command over your energy field and thus be more able to steer your life in the direction you choose.

As you apply these abilities to your energy body, you gain downstream beneficial effects in your physical health. The greater the amount of knowledge you gain, the greater the amount of control you accumulate over your energy body, which influences your physical health. You will learn that you are no longer buffeted about by life but now are more able to choose the direction of your path. Many patients over the years have shown me that when they feel able to make conscious choices and feel more in control of the energy affecting their health, their resilience and potential for self-healing increases.

Even if you have never done shamanic or energy medicine work before, I will help you get started and encourage you to develop your self-healing abilities. In the resources section at the end of the book, you’ll find lists of groups and practitioners I trust to help you do shamanic healing work. They might be able to help you do more effective, powerful work than you could do on your own initially, and I would trust any of them with my own health.

With the viewpoints and processes I teach in Maximize Your Healing Power, you will have the ability to shift the course of your health. If you are not physically challenged but seek greater vitality and confidence, these shamanic techniques and practices are highly effective. Step into the power of self-awareness as you learn how to be in charge of your energy structure and your physiology, both of which the luminous field shaped and continually influenced. At the very least, learn and incorporate these teachings so that the next time you go to a doctor’s appointment, you can proceed with authority over your health, knowing more of what you want to obtain from the visit and feeling energized to make that happen.