Margaret and David Hiller Life Challenges

Creative Ways to Transform Challenges:
Praying

The Connection between Spirituality, Prayer and Healing: A Report on the Harvard Conference on Spirituality and Healing in Medicine: Part I. Margaret Hiller, M.A.

A few years ago, I attended the Harvard conference, Spirituality and Healing in Medicine, put on by the Harvard Medical School in conjunction with the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston. The conference is partly funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which also funds research on the ethnicity of prayer and meditation impacting healing outcome. The conference is done twice a year in different parts of the country, and over one thousand people went to the one that I attended. Two-thirds were doctors, and the rest of us were clergy, therapists and counselors.

The purpose of the conference was to explore the relationship between healing and spirituality in medicine and to explore perspectives on healing from world religions. Most of the world religions are represented at these conferences, but not all. They gather to discuss the physiological, neurological and psychological effects of healing resulting from spirituality and religious beliefs.

Dr. Herb Benson was the keynote speaker at the conference. Dr. Benson is associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, founder, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, and chief of the behavioral division of medicine at Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital in Boston. This is a well credentialed fellow. In the l960's, he went to study with the Dalai Lama and studied about the power of meditation to reduce stress, cardiac difficulties and depression He then came back to America and studied transcendental meditation. He found out that meditation and a spiritual perspective, including prayer, had an effect on many medical issues. He applied for research grants to study this, and his colleagues told him that it would ruin his medial career. In fact he now chairs a whole department named after him. He's doing conferences all over the country, and if you're reading the books that I am, you'll know that spirituality, meditation and prayer are now more welcome in the medical arena. Herb Benson is at the cutting edge of work that he was told would ruin his medical career.

Study of Spirituality

Harvard defines spirituality as a person's inner experience or belief in the presence of a force, power, energy or God. Spirituality is to believe that there is more than we see early in life. We look for meaningful relationships with people and a moral connection of making a difference in the world. All these things added to the definition of spirituality are in the Harvard research.

Sometimes the question arises: Was one particular religion over another studied? They have tried to include most of the major world religions. When we talk about prayer, it doesn't seem to make a difference what kind of prayer. It only makes a difference if the person believes in the prayer that's being done with them.

Harvard defines healing as meaning: to restore to health, to set right, to amend, to restore wholeness to the body, mind, emotions or spirit. Healing is feeling connected with one's inner life and to one's relationship with others and outer life. This is based on almost 35 years of laboratory research. Also in the research, Harvard defines meditation as, sitting quietly and still, repeating a word, a sound, a prayer, a thought or a phrase, and passively returning to the repetition of that word, sound, thought or praise when other thoughts intrude. When they did all of their research, this is how they instructed people to meditate.

The idea of creating remarkable healings or miracles is not new in the world. It's been going on forever. David Hiller, my husband, and I work not only as counselors trained as psychotherapists. We're also interfaith ministers. As a result, we work with people a lot on their healing process and their life challenges, and we've seen a lot of people make incredible shifts. We work with M.D.'s and psychiatrists, and are often asked to be on a healing team. We are holding this vision along with a lot of you that the field of medicine and psychology will begin to work even more with teams of edical doctors, nurses, psychotherapists, massage therapists, acupuncturists, and a representative of each person's spiritual perspective.

"What Religion Are You?"

Years ago you were asked on a hospital intake form, What religion are you? A lot of those intake forms have changed and no longer ask this. They now ask, Do you want a spiritual representative of your religion or spiritual path? We hold the idea that it is important to have that spiritual representative for each person who's on the team, not just someone who's invited now and then, but a bona fide part of the team.

One of the most remarkable healing shifts that David and I ever heard about happened about 10 years ago at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, where we used to live. We heard about this healing on Tom Brokaw's national television news hour. We saw a medical doctor stand before a camera at the hospital and say that six weeks prior to this, a baby had been born in that hospital with a two- chambered heart. They put the baby on life support system and made a plea for an infant heart to be made available. Six weeks passed, and they heard something different on the heart monitor. They opened up the child's chest cavity, and found a four-chambered heart. The doctor said on national television that this had never occurred before in medical history. I don't know how long we've been recording medical history, a hundred years? I don't know. He said never before in medical history has this happened, and he looked right back at that television camera and said. "This is a miracle."

I don't know what he was thinking about next, but I watched as he turned and looked behind the camera, behind where the rest of us could see, and I think he might have been looking for the chief of staff. I used to work in a children's hospital. I know we, especially medical doctors, did not say the word miracle on national television. I'm making this up, but I wonder if he was looking for the medical chief of staff to see if he was in trouble for saying the "M" word. But he did say it and went right back at the camera and said it again, "This is a miracle. When the show was over, I was out of my chair. Yes, there was a medical doctor with his white coat on national television talking about miracles. This was exciting. Now we're seeing it more and more.

Then I began to wonder what was going on behind the scenes. There are always lots of interesting things that go on in hospitals and lots of people on the medical team who do believe in prayer and healing touch. They are manifesting a presence of healing that goes beyond medical care.

I began to ask what was going on behind the scenes, and about a week later, I read in a well-known medical report about this circumstance, this baby, and I read it in People Magazine. Here's the rest of the story: When that baby was born with a two chambered heart, the family put out a call to their church and asked for prayer. That church called a lot of other churches, and before it was over, thousands of people across this country were praying. Then I got even more interested in what they were praying for. We're they praying for an infant heart to be available? Because that's very exciting medical technology. It does mean, however, that one family is in grief while another family is rejoicing. So I wondered, What they were praying for, because ten years ago, I'm not sure that I would have considered that the infant's heart could continue to develop and become a whole, healthy heart after it was born. I'm not sure if I would have, as a minister or a healer, seen that kind of possibility. Somehow it happened, and the family and the doctors all agree that it was a miracle and partly because of the prayer that was going forth for that child.

Consciousness

Dr. Paul Pearsall wrote Miracle Makers, a very exciting book. He talks about the effects of consciousness that are required to really move into powerful intercessory prayer, to move into knowing that healing possibilities are possible, whether you call them miracles or remarkable outcome. Dr. Pearsall was diagnosed with bone cancer about twelve years ago and he was told to put his life in order and prepare to make his transition. Now, twelve years later, he's written several books, lives in Maui and does workshops and seminars with people. He found a way to shift his diagnosis. If you know anything about bone cancer, holding in consciousness a possibility for healing would not be easy for a lot of people, but he did.

This is what he came up with-four aspects of healing consciousness that we need when working with prayer. Harvard worked with these four aspects of consciousness as well. They found that compassion and caring had to be present first of all before you ever went into prayer. Then these four aspects of consciousness:

1. Maintain a hopeful view.

No matter what else is happening, no matter what it looks like, no matter what the diagnosis, maintain a hopeful view. Pearsall called it alchemy of hope. Harvard noted this too-that when hope is present, it seems to shift outcome. An alchemy of hope is a perception of hope.

2. Amidst chaos, look for signs of healing and renewal.

With healing consciousness when we go into prayer for people, we look for opportunity and signs of healing and renewal-even amidst chaos, even amidst things appearing as if they're collapsing for that individual or that family. We constantly look for signs of opportunity and renewal.

3. Have loving kindness for self.

Working with healing and prayer is to have loving kindness for the self, whether you're doing prayer work for yourself or loving-kindness for another. Harvard calls that compassion. Especially with people working with the AIDS community, the prayer researchers weeded out anyone who had anything other than compassion for that community.

4. Look for signs of connection.

In creating healing and working with prayer, Harvard looked for signs of connection, serendipity and synchronicity. We're constantly looking for things to come together and for the connections to be made. Perhaps you need to meet a doctor to be on your team to work with cancer or a heart condition, and suddenly he or she appears at a party or a family gathering where you've been invited. That's synchronicity. That's a connection.

Self-Care

The Harvard researchers look at medical treatment like a three-legged stool. They see the pharmaceutical as a good support. They see that surgery is a good support, and then they look at self-care. Within self-care, the research showed that 60-90% of medical symptoms can be treated with self-care. Self-care includes stress reduction. In the research they worked with stress by using meditation, relaxation, and a spiritual component. They work with each individual's spiritual belief system. including noting a particular religion. Some people, however, were very clear that they were spiritual individuals, but that spirituality for them was about nature, love, or compassion. They didn't claim to be part of a particular religion. The research indicated that spiritual can include church experience and/or connection with life and community. Self-care also includes nutrition and exercise.

The research showed that 77 percent of patients at the Mind/Body Medical Institute and Harvard Medical School felt that their physicians should consider their spiritual needs. Forty-nine percent of them, and this figure is now more like 55%, want physicians to pray for them. Partly what we're seeing is that the more relaxed we all are about bringing up our spiritual beliefs and talking about spirituality the more we're seeing our doctors, nurses and practitioners opening up to the spiritual component of healing. Thirty-seven percent of patients want to discuss their religious beliefs with their physicians and that figure has increased as well.

Now I'm not here to propose anybody go to church more, but it does appear that people who go to church more often have less hospital stays. Moreover, when they were in the hospital, their stay was shorter if they were people who attended church. They also looked at the component of fellowship. Being connected with the community, having friends and people who care about them and being connected with other human beings were all part of it.

This research indicates the following suggestions for physicians and at Harvard. It suggests that the physician acknowledge the role and the implication of spiritual factors, that the physician inquire about the patient's spiritual life or beliefs, that the physician encourage spiritual or meditation practice as a part of the healing process and that they make referrals to clergy and counselors as a part of the medical process.

Adapted from a talk given by Margaret and David Hiller at Providence Hospital in Medford, Oregon. To read David Hiller's portion of this talk, go here

Margaret Hiller, M.A., is an ordained minister, spiritual counselor, author and has a masters degree in therapeutic psychology. Her healing work is psychospiritual with an interfaith focus. She has traveled extensively since 1979, teaching and counseling about the spiritual aspect of body/mind healing. Margaret frequently speaks at various Unity and Religious Science churches throughout the country and teaches a workshop entitled "Dynamic Heart Connected Public Speaking". She is presently writing a book on Generational Healing. For more information about Margaret and David Hiller and how to obtain any of their inspirational cassettes, booklets, or art work, visit their website at www.sb.net/miracles or e-mail them at miracles@sb.net.

Part II of Margaret's talk will appear in our next update.

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