How to Live Between Office Visits: A Guide to Life, Love and Health

How to Live Between Office Visits: A Guide to Life, Love and Health

In this compassionate and powerful healing guide, Dr. Bernie Siegel, the author of the triumphant bestsellers Love, Medicine & Miracles and Peace, Love & Healing , provides readers with healthy ways to respond to life's adversities. In this compassionate and powerful healing guide, Dr. Bernie Siegel, the author of the triumphant bestsellers Love, Medicine & Miracles and Peace, Love & Healing , provides readers with healthy ways to respond to life's adversities. Bernie Siegel, M.D. embraces a philosophy that is at the forefront of a society grappling with medical ethics and spiritual issues. His books, Love, Medicine and Miracles published in 1986, Peace, Love and Healing in 1989, and How to Live Between Office Visits in 1993, have broken new ground in the field of healing. Over the span of twenty years, physicians have become increasingly more receptive to his message. Bernie's efforts have now turned toward humanizing medical care and medical education, and he continues to travel extensively with his wife Bobbie, to speak and run workshops, sharing his techniques and experiences. Bernie and Bobbie have five children and six grandchildren (so far). How to Live Between Office Visits A Guide to Life, Love and Health By Siegel, Bernie S. Quill Copyright © 2004 Bernie S. Siegel All right reserved. ISBN: 0060924675 Chapter One Help, Where Do I Go From Here? This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap... -- George Bernard Shaw Epistle dedicatory To Man And Superman I don't want to be saved, I want to be spent.-- Fritz Perls Founder Of Gestalt Therapy We Are Perfectly Imperfect I receive many letters, and often they end with thesewords: "Help, where do I go from here?" This questionsometimes comes from people who are ill, or it may beasked by those who are well again and are wonderingwhat to do with their lives. One lady wrote saying,I was told many times that I had not long to live, and as I was very ill I thought they might be right. So I made out a will, gave away my valued treasures to family and friends, I bought a dog, took more vitamins, started exercising and eating better, laughed more, and put in a backyard wildlife habitat, my life's desire. If I was going to die, I might as well die doing all the things I wanted to do.I lived, and now I'm going to kill myself by never slowing down. Help, where do I go from here? People like this are easy to help. I can write them a prescription: "Take a nap." They are living their lives fully: burning up, not burning out. They are spending their lives. When you are burning up you are living your life, and taking a nap or a vacation will provide you with energy and strength to go on. But burning out, a simple rest won't cure. Burning out means misusing yourself, dying with much left over in the candleholder. It means never really having lived fully. Many people are in incredible pain. They are overwhelmed by life's difficulties and seeming unfairness. They have lost their power. So when a book comes out on how to commit suicide, it becomes a bestseller. But if you regain your power, you regain your life and your death and you don't have to be afraid. How do you gain that power? That is a question that I hope we can explore together. I know that part of the answer lies in realizing that we don't have to be perfect. In Martin Buber's "Tales of the Hasidim," there is a story about how each of us should carry in one pocket a card with these words: "For my sake was the world created." And in another pocket, a card saying, "I am earth and ashes." Both statements are true. Together they say that we are perfectly imperfect. You can reach into whichever pocket is appropriate for the day. I like to keep that thought in mind, because it is the process of living that is important and that we are all struggling with -- not the product, or the result. In fact, we can say that the process is the product -- that's what living your life means. Raising your child, tending your garden, driving the bus, running the elevator, loving the world in your way -- these are the things that are significant, not the gold watch you receive when you retire, or the diploma. It is the experience of living that is important, not searching for a meaning. We bring meaning by how we love the world. We will never be finished products. And once we realize that we don't have to be perfect, we can reveal our vulnerability and ask for help. We can change our idea of what being "independent" is. The Real Meaning of Independence Many of us are brought up to think we have to solve our problems by ourselves, to put on "a brave front" and be strong. But if you think that trying to do it all makes you independent, you're wrong. What this does is exhaust you and make you vulnerable to illness, and it leads you to resent the world. You end up with few true rela