Blog starting point 9/7/06                 

When I was a teenager, seeking a profession, I was excited to learn about psychotherapy. I could hardly believe that anyone would get paid for doing something that was so fascinating. I studied psychology, medicine, research and psychiatry.

I trained in the 60’s and early 70/s, when psychiatry was mostly psychotherapy. Early in my training, I came to appreciate Abraham Maslow’s observation that “If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.” I vowed I would never end up like that, and have passionately pursued the study of as many different ways of helping people (including myself) to heal.

Another passion in my life has been the study of wholistic healing. I started with the investigation of spiritual healing (as in Therapeutic Touch, Healing Touch, Reiki, LeShan healing, prayer healing and the like). At first, I was the ‘objective observer,’ studying about healing but doing my best to remain separate from the subject. I collected all the research evidence I could – to convince myself as much as anyone else – that spiritual healing is a real and effective treatment. My collection of 191 scientific studies of healing is published in a book with popular and professional editions.

After two years of objective studies, I came to realize that I didn’t really know what I was talking about, and opened into developing my own intuitive and spiritual awareness and healing gifts – explorations that continue today and will be shared in this WHEE-MD Blog.

Over the years, managed care has shifted psychiatrists into the role of primarily prescribing medications. I refused to conform, as this was not what I had trained to do. From 1987-1997 I was a fugitive, in essence, from managed care – living in England and practicing psychotherapy. (Psychotherapy is unregulated there, because the behaviorists and analysts can’t agree what psychotherapy is or should be!)

I supported myself for the past eight years through my practice as a psychiatrist, primarily prescribing medications. I continued to insist on including psychotherapy in my treatments – a challenging prospect when one considers that psychiatrists in pre-managed care days saw people for 50 minutes once or twice a week, and now see people 15-20 minutes once a month.

It was under these circumstances that I developed WHEE, an extraordinary self-healing method that is potent, easily learned and rapidly effective. WHEE helped me as well as my clients to de-stress. It also helped me with passion fatigue.

I was working as a psychiatrist 3 days per week, and pursuing the passions that make my heart sing for another 6 days per week. I came to see that I was not practicing the wholistic lifestyle I recommend to other. So this year I abandoned my salaried work of prescribing psychiatric medications and am now free to write this Blog and offer other wholistic help.

This Saturday, 9/9/06, I’ll be giving a workshop on Clearing the Vessel Through Which Healing Pours at the annual conference of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology in San Francisco.  

This Sunday, 9/10/06, I’ll be giving a 1-day workshop on WHEE at the Zen Center in San Francisco.