Arnold Mindell - The Quantum Mind and Healing: How to Listen and Respond to Your Bodys Symptoms

Books by Arnold, Mindell

Quantum Mind: The Edge Between Physics and Psychology

Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity

The Shaman's Body: A New Shamanism for Transforming Health, Relationships, and Community

The Leader as Martial Artist: An Introduction to Deep Democracy

The Year I: Global Process Work with Planetary Tensions

Inner Dreambodywork: Working on Yourself Alone

Riding the Horse Backwards: Process Work in Therapy and Practice

Coma, Key to Awakening: Working with the Dreambody Near Death

City Shadows: Psychological Interventions in Psychiatry

The Dreambody in Relationships

River's Way: The Process Science of the Dreambody

Working with the Dreaming Body

Dreambody: The Body's Role in Revealing the Self

Dreaming While Awake: Techniques for 24-Hour Lucid Dreaming

The Dreammaker's Apprentice

The Deep Democracy of Open Forums: Practical Steps to Conflict Prevention and Resolution for the Family, Workplace and World

The Quantum Mind and Healing

How to Listen and Respond to Your Body's Symptoms

ARNOLD MINDELL, PH.D.

Copyright 2004
by Arnold Mindell

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this

work in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.

Cover design by Steve Amarillo

Cover art by Steve Amarillo

Illustrations pgs. 38, 39, and 119 2004 by Anne L. Louque.

All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mindell, Arnold, 1940

The quantum mind and healing : how to listen and respond to your body's symptoms : an acclaimed therapist's breakthrough redefines the mechanics of health / Arnold Mindell.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-57174-395-2 (alk. paper)

1. Healing--Miscellanea. 2. Quantum theory. 3. Mind and body. 4. Consciousness. I. Title.

RZ999.M543 2004

615.8'9--dc22

2003025992

ISBN 1-57174-395-2

10987654321

Printed on acid-free paper in the United States

Acknowledgments

Thanks to

Susan Kocen, for transcribing my original lectures and seminars given at the Process Work Center of Portland, Oregon.

Dear participants in my original classes and seminars in Portland, London, Zurich, Tokyo, and many other cities, given with my partner Amy Mindell, on the topics of quantum medicine. Your experimenting, listening, and questioning drew these ideas out of me.

Richard Leviton of Hampton Roads, for your encouraging interest in this book, and for suggesting the first subtitle, Quantum Dimensions of Symptoms. His ideas released many new thoughts with me.

Margaret Ryan, for your remarkable ability to add to, and bring out, crucial ideas through editing. How do you manage to get inside the author's mind so well?

Carl Mindell, for telling me the original version was too full of physics and helping me relate better to doctors and patients.

Randee Levine Tully, for catching my errors in music.

Sharon Sessions at the physics department of the University of Oregon, for checking my physics, especially thoughts about what thermodynamics says about the universe.

Heiko Spoddeck for helping me with many details, and asking me to be more aware of when I was in an everyday mode of thinking, and when I was thinking as a dreamer.

Dawn Menken, Jan Dworkin, Max Schupbach, Joe Goodbread, and other friends for having steered me toward the endeavor of relating the science of bodywork to the deepest experiences of the mind.

My friends and courageous interpreters and re-creators of physics, Fred Alan Wolf, Nick Herbert, and Amit Goswami for the forerunning nature of your work.

To those who helped me understand medicine and alternative nonlocal medicine, Jai Tomlin, Pierre Morin, Mitch Stargrove, and Larry Dossey.

Dear ghosts of teachers, who sit around me as I write this book: Marie-Louise von Franz, who introduced me to C. G. Jung's idea of synchronicity in Zurich in 1961; Franz Riklin, for introducing me to shamanism and showing me how to live it in everyday life; C. G., for your background support in all things concerning what you called psyche and matter.

The various allopathic, alternative, and complementary medical doctors who have been my clients, friends, and helpers, for what I have learned from you.

Though they no longer are alive, I must thank the amazing parents of quantum physics, Louis DeBroglie, Erwin Schrdinger, John von Neumann, David Bohm, and Richard Feynman; and the living physicists of hyperspaces, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking, for their statements about the virtual spaces, imaginary times, and other realities behind life.

Dear Amy, your work on creativity taught me to take puppets seriously. Together with those puppets, your scientific spirit helped test, clarify, and educate me about the quantum dimensions of symptoms I think no physicist (without a puppet) ever thought of. You helped develop and teach just about every chapter of this work. Thank you.

Preface

How do our thoughts affect our bodies? How do we use our awareness to transform the experience of body symptoms? What can we do to deal with the fear and pain connected to headaches and backaches, lumps and bumps, fatigue and dizziness? What role, if any, does our subjective experience have in cancer or heart trouble? Is it all caused by genetics, the environment, and chance? Is there intelligence behind all these problems?

Yes. There is a deep form of intelligence in the background. I call it the quantum mind and will show how it can be a source of healing.

In The Quantum Mind, and Healing I explore connections between traditional biomedicine and alternative medical procedures, and suggest experiential and quantum mechanical foundations for the body's intelligence. My therapeutic work with individuals and groups drove me to study special areas of psychology, physics, and medicine to combine these sciences. This book is based upon the discovery of the similar basic patterns underlying our subtlest experiences and subatomic physics. The discovery of these patterns has lead me to develop new ways of thinking about people and working with body symptoms.

The study of nano-events and nanomedicine (nano- is a prefix meaning the one-billionth part [10-9] of a unit of measurement, here meant to speak of atomic and molecular processes occurring within one-billionth of a meter) will soon create many advances in present-day medicine. Medicine and the associated disciplines of psychology and physics will be drawn together even more than they are today. Yet there are few known unifying paradigms connecting research in anatomy, psychology, psychobiology, biophysics, medical engineering, medical education, general practice, and medical diagnosis with the many psychotherapies, including movement and music therapy.

The first purpose of The Quantum Mind and Healing