Chronic Illness Spirituality And Healing

Fusing the disciplines of health care, spiritual care, and social services, this book examines the relationship between chronic illness and spirituality. Contributors include professionals working in traditional, holistic and integrative clinical settings, as well as religious studies scholars and spiritual practitioners.

Fusing the disciplines of health care, spiritual care, and social services, this book examines the relationship between chronic illness and spirituality. Contributors include professionals working in traditional, holistic and integrative clinical settings, as well as religious studies scholars and spiritual practitioners.

Many spiritual caregivers, including chaplains, spiritual directors and clergy, are unaware of how they can support people with chronic health conditions. This book combines insights on chronic illness with spiritual care skills and suggestions to enhance well-being for people living with long-term illness. Using a narrative approach, the author reflects on the stories of two women - Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, who travels from Kansas (a state of health) to Oz (an illness experience), alongside the author's personal experiences of managing an incurable autoimmune disease. Chapters will include guidelines and exercises that help equip caregivers to facilitate healing with people who live with long-term health conditions.

After twelve years, author Lorraine M. Wright, RN, Ph.D. revisits her well-received book, Spirituality, Suffering, and Illness: Ideas for Healing (2005). With updated research, new illness narratives, this latest edition provides insights, guidance and advice for individuals/families experiencing illness suffering and for helping professionals seeking to soften their suffering. Spirituality and Suffering: The Path to Illness Healing also offers clinical practice ideas from a non-religious approach to the crossroads of suffering, spirituality, and illness. A holistic model emphasizing suffering, spirituality, and illness beliefs, the Trinity Model, is also offered. Actual clinical examples are provided to show how to integrate, implement, and enhance health professionals' spiritual care practices that soften suffering with patients and families experiencing serious illness, disability, or loss. About the Author: Lorraine M Wright, RN, Ph.D. is an international speaker, author/blogger, and consultant/therapist in family nursing and family therapy. She is also a Professor Emeritus of Nursing, University of Calgary. Dr. Wright has published extensively and spoken widely at spiritual care, family nursing, family therapy, chronic illness, oncology and palliative care conferences, workshops, universities and hospitals. When not lecturing, consulting, and/or travelling worldwide, Dr. Wright resides in Calgary, Canada.

This interdisciplinary study details spiritual approaches including meditation and yoga shown to be helpful in improving physical and psychological well-being. Whether a person suffers from a psychological or physical malady, such as depression, addictions, chronic pain, cancer, or complications from pregnancy, the best practice treatments likely include one common thread: spiritual practice. From meditation and yoga to spiritual surrender and religious rituals, spiritual practices are increasingly being recognized as physically and mentally beneficial for recovering from illness and for retaining optimal health. Healing with Spiritual Practices: Proven Techniques for Disorders from Addictions and Anxiety to Cancer and Chronic Pain, edited by the director of one of the nation's best-known university institutes of spirituality and health, explains current and emerging practices, their benefits, and the growing body of research that proves them effective. Comprising chapters from expert contributors, this book will appeal to students, scholars, and other readers interested in psychology, medicine, nursing, social work, pastoral care, and related disciplines.

Most of us believe that healing miracles for the chronically ill are real, but rare. The doctrines that we have been fed, or our life's experiences, have led us to conclude that God heals mostly through medicine-and if not through medicine, then not at all. Perhaps we had a relative who had sky-high faith for a healing miracle and yet died, or have trodden the path of faith healing, but been discouraged by ministers who admonished us to "just have more faith!" Perhaps we don't know how much God really loves us. While our faith in miracles and His love may not be enough, thankfully, God is, and He is willing to heal more people supernaturally-in body, mind and spirit-than are being healed today. He can heal when medicine fails to provide a complete recovery, and even when it doesn't! This book proposes to the helpless and hopeless, another path to wellness, that isn't based upon wishful thinking and random chance, but rather, buried Biblical truths and the testimonials of thousands throughout the world. It offers unique insights into healing which include: how dysfunctional biochemistry and emotional trauma affect our ability to believe in a loving God who heals; why people who have faith for miracles aren't always made well; why God sometimes chooses other healing methods besides a supernatural encounter to heal, and how we can better position ourselves to receive a miracle from Him.

In the summer of 1995, Mary Earle returned from a vacation feeling refreshed and restored from her time away. A few days later, all that changed, when she was rushed to the emergency room with a case of acute and life-threatening pancreatitis. Being ill, she discovered, forces you to learn to live in whole new ways, ones often marked by limitation and fragility. As a priest and spiritual director, Earle began to explore ways in which her own prayer life might help her build a different relationship with her illness. Using the Benedictine practice of lectio divina, or sacred reading, she began to "read" her own illness, and discovered a way of befriending and helping to heal--if not cure--her body and her life. In Broken Body, Healing Spirit, Earle introduces this strategy to others who are hungry to find ways of living more fully despite chronic or serious illness or pain. Her practical, step-by-step approach to "reading the text of our illnesses," and learning to listen to what our bodies are trying to tell us will be of help to those who are currently suffering with disease or limitations, as well as to those who are caregivers and counselors.

This book explores how people draw upon spiritual, religious, or faith-based practices to support their mental wellness amidst forms of chronicity. From diverse global contexts and spiritual perspectives, this volume critically examines several chronic conditions, such as psychosis, diabetes, depression, oppressive forces of colonization and social marginalization, attacks of spirit possession, or other forms of persistent mental duress. As an inter- and transdisciplinary collection, the chapters include innovative ethnographic observations and over 300 in-depth interviews with care providers and individuals living in chronicity, analyzed primarily from the phenomenological and hermeneutic meaning-making traditions. Overall, this book depicts a modern global era in which spiritualty and religion maintain an important role in many peoples’ lives, underscoring a need for increased awareness, intersectoral collaboration, and practical training for varied care providers. This book will be of interest to scholars of religion and health, the sociology and psychology of religion, medical and psychological anthropology, religious studies, and global health studies, as well as applied health and mental health professionals in psychology, social work, physical and occupational therapy, cultural psychiatry, public health, and medicine.