Larry Dossey in Recovering the Soul writes: “One bright Tuesday morning in early December, Elizabeth took a trip. She’d planned the journey for months, except for one important detail: she had intentionally never set a date for departure. Elizabeth wanted to let the trip happen on its own and knew she would understand when the time was right. This was the morning. Without ever leaving her house, Elizabeth traveled—into her body.
“It was not an aimless excursion. Elizabeth wanted to know the reasons behind the nagging pain she had been experiencing for several months in the lower left side of her abdomen. Always given somewhat to introspection, she was confident that she could find our the reason behind it—moreover, that it was indeed her rightful task to do so. This job did not belong to others, even to her doctors, except perhaps as confirmation of her own knowledge. She did not know where her certainty came from, but it was there: an unpretentious, inner awareness that she could know her own body’s ways.
“She sat in her favorite wingback chair in a sunny spot by the big bay windows in the living room and closed her eyes. Her feet resting solidly on the floor, palms down on the chair arms, she took several slow, deep breaths and let her mind be free. This state of consciousness was not new to Elizabeth; she had regularly engaged in deliberate relaxation techniques for a decade and could enter deep states of tranquility at will. As usual she adopted no particular mental strategy, but let her consciousness be blank. I already know everything I need to know, she said to herself; I only have to let the knowledge surface. So, allowing her mind to be empty, she waited.
“Images came: something multiple, circular, ovoid, now inside a larger object, itself seemingly spherical. Soft, white, three of them. Not angry, this triad, but calm and placid—something that belonged inside her and something that, strangely, seemed to own pain as a rightful expression of its being. Something unmistakably her.”
When Elizabeth came to see Dossey, she told him she didn’t have cancer but had three spots on her left ovary. Dossey writes: “Something about this woman was extraordinary. She had a presence that commanded great respect. She was delivering what for her was a simple, honest statement of fact.” A sonogram revealed three cystic lesions on Elizabeth’s left ovary, each appearing white. An operation confirmed that these lesions were benign, but they were removed and that ended Elizabeth’s pain.
Dossey concludes: “If cases like Elizabeth’s were rare, perhaps they would deserve no more than a raised eyebrow. But they aren’t. Medicine is thickly littered with similar examples showing that the mind’s range is beyond the brain. Frequently it appears that an illness or a crisis with one’s health is the key that turns on nonlocal ways of knowing . . . freeing the mind to behave nonlocally in space and time.”
Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 19-23.
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