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Allen Lawrence, M.D.
My Many Lives
Part IV
Answer Come, They Bring More Questions and Problems
With time to think and the ability to write my feelings and thoughts, I experienced a series of awakenings and insights. The first insight was to surprise me. While I thought I was worrying that a mother or baby might die under my care, I was surprised to discover that it was not about that at all. It was about death, rebirth, transitions between these stages and my own mortality. Let me explain. What I was subconsciously realizing was that everything born will ultimately die. Birth is a contract to ultimately die, yet birth was death and death was birth. What was happening during every birth was that an aquatic animal, the baby that was about to be “born,” would die as an aquatic-embryo-fetus animal, which already was alive and living, and then be reborn as a living air-breathing animal. This “new life” would no longer taking nourishment directly from its mother circulatory system, but instead had to survive based on its abilities to make it in this new world and new life. This “aquatic being” who know absolutely nothing about what was on the other side of the uterine wall and birth canal, was suddenly in a very catastrophic way thrown out of the womb and transformed, a kind of death, into a living breathing infant who minutes before had no knowledge of thoughts about the “other side” its new life, its death and rebirth.
The issue was my mortality. What happens when I die? I had projected my fears and lack of information about this into the babies and their possibility of dying. This I suddenly realized was why these thoughts had never really quite made sense to me. This recognition opened up a whole new vista for me. Unconscious fears and thought created conflict, stress and ultimately depression. This was not part of anything I had learned or been taught in medical school, my internship or residency.
This realization and my introspective thinking, my asking questions of myself and trying to understand brought me to another important recognition regarding why I had not been happy practicing medicine. First of all, I became aware that even prior to entering medical school I used to think that medicine was about “healing people.” Patients would come to us as physicians and we would “take away their illness.” We would return them to wellness. When they were finished with us, they would be free of illness. They would be healed. In fact what I recognized was that we rarely or only very occasionally healed anyone. Most of the time we treated those people who came to us for healing with medications or surgery. While some patients were healed, most, possibly the greatest majority, were simply sent out on medication to “control” rather than eliminate their symptoms or medical problems.
This realization shocked and surprised me, we, by this I mean the standard Western medical system, were not “healers” we were at best only “treaters!” I had years earlier become depressed not just because I had recognized this unconsciously, but because I was not doing what I had wanted to do, I was “not part of the solution,” I was “part of the problem.”
After a while I realized that because we were not healing people but merely helping them control and reduce their symptoms, we were ultimately causing these people to end up with chronic diseases. We, the medical profession, were not healing, we were actually maintaining and promoting illness. This was the core of my depression and while recognizing it, at that point I had no idea of what to do with this information. Worse still, there was no one to go to. If I tried to talk with any of my medical colleagues they would quickly tune me out or turn me off. There was not at that time, any real alternative medicine movement, and there was no one other then my wife, Lisa to talk with about it.
The Learning YearsWe only stayed in Hawaii for one year. Toward the end of that year events in Los Angeles relating to family created a need for us to move back to Los Angeles. We left with Maui tears in our eyes. Maui had become our home and now I knew that no where else in the world would ever feel like home.
Upon returning to Los Angeles I chose a new course. One of exploration, reading everything I could about healing and wellness, how to get people well, and then writing about this. I made the decision not to open my own practice but rather to work for others and use my free time to read and clinical experience to learn, and to take what I had learned and write. For the next 12 years this is what I did. Slowly, but steadily, I became aware of a movement of lay people, alternative practitioners and even physicians who were thinking quite similarly to me. I met with many of them, we talked, I read what they wrote and I learned. I worked on my issues on an almost daily basis. I learned how to talk with my patients. Instead of taking a linear medical history as I had been taught in medical school, I started asking them about they had become ill. I asked them what has been and was still going on in their life, that they thought might cause or contribute to their illnesses. I listened to what they said but also to what they did not say. At times I felt guilty charging patients for they only ended up with medications while I ended up with information, knowledge and in many cases a much newer, deeper and clearer understanding of how they had become ill and what possibly could be done about it. When I could help them. I did, when all they wanted was a pill or potion to solve their problems, give them want they requested. I grew while unfortunately many of them stayed on their road to chronic illness. I helped those who were open to being helped and treated all of the rest.
During the next 12 years I wrote or started nearly a dozen books, published two and continued working on the others. Lisa worked with me and together we created clearer understanding of what illness really was and what we could do about it.
©Allco Publishing, 2006
