Larry Dossey - The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things: Fourteen Natural Steps to Health and Happiness

Engrossing and thought-provoking.... Dr. Dossey is a meaning-maker par excellence.

Spirituality & Health

Larry Dossey's insights into the ordinary illuminate a path to happiness and help us see the universe in a grain of sand.

Mehmet C. Oz, M.D., coauthor of YOU: The Owners Manual

One of our most original thinkers on the nature of consciousness and its role in healing.

Michael Lerner, president of Commonweal

In this elegant, thoughtful, and profoundly useful book, Larry Dossey reminds us of the healing power of the life around us and offers us the gift of new eyes. style="font-style:italic;">The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things vindicates anyone who has looked beyond drugs and surgery in search of their own ability to heal.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., author of Kitchen Table Wisdom

Larry Dosseys words of wisdom have inspired and challenged me for years.

Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Mother-Daughter Wisdom

In his quirky, brilliant, and passionate book, Larry Dossey offers us the quintessence of a lifetimes search and conveys his message with the lucid grace of a born writer and the authority of a sage. In a hundred years, he will be remembered as someone who, in a grand way, assisted a shift in how we perceive the magic and mystery of our world and our place within it.

Andrew Harvey, author of The Direct Path

also by Larry Dossey

Healing Beyond the Body: Medicine and the Infinite Reach of the Mind

Reinventing Medicine

Be Careful What You Pray For ... You Just Might Get It

Prayer Is Good Medicine

Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine

Meaning & Medicine Recovering the Soul

Beyond Illness Space, Time & Medicine

Fourteen Natural Steps to Health and Happiness

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint from these previously published works:

Alfred A. Knopf for an excerpt from Tao Te Ching by Lao {" ======================================-, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. Translation Copyright 1997 by Jane English. Copyright 1972 by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf a division of Random House, Inc.

Michael Grosso for an excerpt from Soulmaking: Uncommon Paths to Self-Understanding by Michael Grosso. Copyright 1997 by Michael Grosso. Published by Hampton Roads. Used by permission of the author.

Copyright 2006 by Larry Dossey All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

Some of the material in this book previously appeared in different form in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dossey, Larry

The extraordinary healing power of ordinary things : fourteen natural steps to health and happiness / Larry Dossey.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. HealingPsychological aspects. 2. HealingReligious aspects.

3. SickPsychology. 4. Naturopathy. I. Title. R726.5.D668 2006

616.001 9dc22 200501513 2

elSBN: 978-0-307-39475-0

Design by Chris Welch vl.0

I have always been attracted to the veiled power of ordinary, commonplace things. By reasons of birth and upbringing on a spare farm in the ascetic culture of central Texas, the austere side of life has always had great appeal. To my parents I owe a debt I can never repay, because it is not possible to measure, let alone pay back, unconditional love and unstinting sacrifice. The gift is simply too great, and my resources too meager. Nonetheless, this book, which extols the greatness in what is commonly thought small, as Virginia Woolf says, is a token of gratitude to my mother and lather.

During the construction of this book, I have had the great good fortune to work with a remarkably talented editor and publisher, Toinette Lippe. When we began this collaboration, I did not know that she was the author of Nothing Left Over: A Plain and Simple Life, a wise book that is congruent with my premise in this one. As I sought ways of expressing the value of simplicity, she lived and painted it. Along with manuscript pages that flew back and forth, she regularly sent me electronic versions of her brushstroke art of fruit, vegetables, and flowers. These simple but elegant images reminded me to be less stuffy and verbose, yanked me back on track, and perked me up. I bow deeply.

To my literary agents, Arielle Eckstat, James Levine, and Kitty Farmer, I am grateful. A book could not have better ambassadors.

Some of these chapters had their first incarnation, in different form, in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, for which I served as executive editor for nearly a decade beginning in 1995, and to which I am grateful. Should readers be interested, I shall continue exploring the role of consciousness and spirituality in health as executive editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (www. explorejournal.com).

Goethe said, The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity. Barbara, my wife, is my greatest exemplar of extraordinariness. Because Goethes eternity shall have to wait a while, this book is dedicated to Barbara now, in yet another unpayable debt. She appears often in these chapters, because for decades our paths have been intertwined and often indistinguishable. Our relationship has greatly influenced this book about simple thingsfor simple originally meant together, united, a whole.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrels heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

george eliot, Middlemarch

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.... Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Virginia woolf, Modern Fiction

Thats what I want to get into this bookthe astonishingness of the most obvious things.

aldous huxley, Point Counter Point

The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things

There is an old saying: If you want to hide the treasure, put it in plain sight. Then no our will see it.

In the pages that follow, we will explore things that are in plain sight, but whose healing power and ability to add to lifes fulfillment have been overlooked or forgotten. These are ordinary, simple things. Some of them are elegant and lovely, such as music. Others seem lowly, such as din, or exceedingly common, such as plants. One involves, quite literally, nothing. But what they all have in common is an extraordinary capacity to help us heal, to understand our place in the natural order, and to be more complete human beings.

Modern medicine is not simple. It is increasingly complex think genomics, stem cells, transplantation, drugs, and surgery. It often ignores those very things that can heal us, particularly if they are plain and ordinary. Unfortunately, ii sometimes seems that modern medicine is actually hostile or contemptuous toward simple approaches, as if they are in some way opposed to medical science. Nothing could be further from the truth.