Alright, I'll bite, but I hope you aren't disappointed that I'm not
coming in with my rhetorical fists swinging. At best, I've got a few
observations. Or reflections. Or something.

> Do I really believe that I have the power to cure... am I really so
> pompous as to believe that I can CURE a patient and this is my high
> and only mission?


I certainly don't think of my mission being to cure my patients,
though I admit that I'm often guilty of forgetting that that's not my
mission. A garden, so the saying goes, is never finished. Neither are
people, I don't think. "Cure" is definitive. It has sharp boundaries,
not fuzzy ones. It's a box that can get checked.

I feel that what I'm doing is entering into a relationship with my
patients, and that my role is to facilitate some process that the
person is engaged in already. As they enter my office, I never know
where in the river of life they are, but my job is to figure that
out, to float along with them for a time (days, months or years) and
bring the skills I have to understanding why their ride is bumpy.

In my experience, the bumps don't end when the migraines stop. Or
when the knee pain is gone. Or when the anxiety has lifted. It's that
a new layer of bumps get noticed. As Ogden Nash wrote:

Even fleas have fleas that bite'em
And on it goes, ad infinitum.

That may not be a quote, but the point is the same. If there is such
a thing as "cure," I imagine it is very much like death. Our maladies
make us human, and my role (*my* role; I do not pretend to speak for
anyone else) is to apply the skills I have to bring people into a
different kind of relationship with their world, because it is that
relationship that is causing trouble.

Perhaps I can get part of the way with some chromium. Perhaps I can
cover some more of the distance with acupuncture. And a bit more by
listening - intensely listening - to where they are, and where they
want to be, and offering a few words that help them see how the
distance can get spanned. I never know going into it, and every time
before I walk in the room for a visit - every single time - I get
nervous wondering if I'll have anything to offer that will be of
benefit. But somehow they keep coming back, and we both feel more
enriched because of it.

"Cure" is not a word in my lexicon. If I can connect - something I
find to be enormously challenging, beyond a relatively superficial
naturopathic doctor/patient level - then everything else is gravy.
There are places (I believe) in the human experience that are
unreachable by another person (http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/L/
LawrenceDH/DeeperThanLo.htm). But the closer I can get to that place
in the time I have, the closer I come to changing their experience on
this planet.

> How often do we hear people state that they are stimulating the vital
> force...or learning the vis?

There are a a dozen models for how the human psyche works. There are
computer models that describe things in terms of programs and
hardware and software and whatnot. There are neurological models that
describe behavior in terms of synapses and neurons and
neurotransmitter this and that. There are even morphogenic models
that describe behavior, personality and memory as things that
originate outside the confines of the brain, organized and informed
by fields that exist non-locally. Milton Erickson, the Godfather of
hypnotherapy and the most masterful technician of the unconscious
that I know, was never ambiguous in his belief that the idea of the
unconscious is just a concept, a model that is useful.

In my mind, conceiving of humans as animated by the vis is a model.
It has many ways that it can be used which are useful. There are
other models that I find useful as well, and I try my best to shift
between them as the situation asks. In one moment I may think in
terms of the vis, and in another I may think in terms of mechanism
(how else could I understand why I am giving the chromium?) and in
the next I might throw out bodies altogether, offer up a prayer, and
think in terms of non-duality and Godness (which does not jive with
the vis model, because the vis model is fundamentally dualistic).
It's not that I think that someone else sticking with one model is
handicapped, it's just that I haven't felt at home in any particular
one. I'm always striving for the non-dual model, but alas, I keep
mistakenly finding myself in a dual world.

Thanks to all who have shared. What a long, strange trip this
profession has been...

Greg