Thanks to: Laura A. Mueller, M.Ac.,
L.Ac.
www.lauramueller.com
Acupuncture & Zero Balancing©
Feel free to comment on the blog site or contact Laura, if you'd
like to write to her about this review.
David G Mercier
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David Mercier is a seminar leader, speaker, life coach, and
acupuncturist. In the 1970s he went to Sri Lanka where he practiced
mindfulness meditation as a Buddhist monk for two years. But instead of
finding peace of mind, he became ill and depressed. After returning to
the U.S., he sought healing from acupuncture and other forms of
integrative medicine, also known as holistic or complementary and
alternative medicine. Since then, David has had extensive experience in
management and in integrative medicine as a clinician. His passion is
helping people lead a life of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.
With
master's degrees in organization development and acupuncture, David has
established and led a hospital-based integrative medicine center, and
has held consulting and leadership roles in healthcare organizations.
Combining science and spirituality, he writes of the humanistic and…more.
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A Beautiful Medicine: A Radical Look at the Essence of Health and
Healing,
by David Mercier, Still Pond Press, P.O. Box 2766, Easton,
MD, 21601. Copyright 2012.
A BEAUTIFUL MEDICINE
David Mercier
Still Pond Press
The tone of this award-winning book evokes the timeless
silence that contains both the warm, wavering light from a crackling hearth-fire
and the safe, cold ground over which stars emerge from the dark depths of space.
By holding present antipodal experiences, the writing opens in us new insights,
possibilities, and transformation—for our long-term health as well as for our
lives here and now. “A Beautiful Medicine
is the integration of all that we know of love, healing and health in a blended
singularity.” (p. 272)
David Mercier is a leader, healer, coach and Transformer,
not only inter-personally in treatment rooms and board rooms, but inclusively
through Culture honoring the Cosmos, “the fabric of the Whole.” (p. 148) He
opens a whole-hearted expansiveness by distilling his own transformational,
healing experiences into inspiring stories, effective methods, and beneficial
treatment approaches, which he distinguishes in three types: controlling
methods, substitutive, methods, and catalytic methods, all of which have their
place in a beautiful and integrative medicine. They are Heart-Essence in action
in the world, balanced by deep roots in the Ground-of-Being which is “not
neutral but loving,” (p. 150) and where, as spiritual teacher and author Andrew Cohen puts
it, "Nothing is wrong, and nothing ever happened."
Illuminated by his own and his patients’ healing journeys, David
Mercier reclaims from the screen and stage onto these pages the “the primacy of
our Heart” with the “texture, scent, and flavor of our humanness.” (p. xxvi) He
proclaims the thrill of clear-seeing into Nature’s deep patterns. He recalls to
us the gratification of feeling—from inside our bones—the currents of wind and
trees, water and earth, moon and sun. He validates why the soul of our human
narrative belongs in every visit with any doctor or health care professional. Then
he shows us how to keep it there.
What feels most enlivening is his evidence and acknowledgment
of our inexhaustible yearning—our longing for belonging—as the deep message from
which our symptoms emerge and toward which they redirect our attention. As we
grow and evolve, symptoms point us back to our Heart’s path: to our Core, the
Mystery, the “aesthetic feeling experience of the Authentic Self,” (p. 259), the
Evolutionary Impulse, “the creative principle of life itself.” (p. 49) He
reminds us of this “already-connectedness” as “The drive toward wholeness is
the task of a conscious, intelligent universe,” (p. 150) He reminds us of Brian
Swimme’s “allurement” and of Martin Buber’s insight: “the task of the world,
the task of creating unity, a task that’s in the design of the cosmos.” (p.
151)
I’m so grateful for how well this book contributes to our
patients, while providing to us practitioners a clear, tranquil, and well-lit
pool where we can deeply reflect on our work. A Beautiful Medicine consolidates the fragments we speak during
many treatments into a warm, personable reflection that opens the world of
“Integrative Medicine” and ignites in both patients and practitioners our
collective aspirations to achieve its highest purposes. After first reading
about James and Kendra—two of David’s patients whose years-long health issues
disappeared within a week of their first treatments (pp. 61-62); my husband went
“gluten-free” and noticed within four days his energy expand, abdomen lighten,
digestion improve. His warm color, bright eyes, and lasting attention
invigorate me, too!
“Health is as much about the condition of our souls as it is
about our physiology.” (p. xxvi) When we have unknowingly abandoned ourselves
into “a life skewered by disaffection,” our symptoms arise as messengers calling
us to “recollect” ourselves—to return to what has always been Essential, True,
and Authentic. In our anamnesis—our remembrance through
our symptoms—no one else can recall for us our unique relationship with our Essence
or Authentic Self. No matter how intimate they have been with us, we cannot
delegate our healing to anyone but ourselves: not to our parents or children, friends
or lovers, teachers or colleagues, country or culture. Not to our practitioners,
nor to the health care system itself.
When we discern that a particular knee pain is just that—a knee
in pain, we can get help from our practitioners to relieve the intensity. To further
reduce its duration and frequency, we can avoid recurrent twists or misuse, strengthen
muscles and tendons, rest deeply, nourish appropriately, breath fully, or perhaps
change an outgrown relationship or job. In this way we establish health,
wholeness, wholesomeness—fully empowered, hale and hearty, and as David encourages
us, “a little more peaceful and a little less troubled.”
Our privilege is to hold a space of listening—in ourselves,
with each other, and with our patients—where we perceive a symptom as a lens in
focus, sending its timely message from the Authentic Self to guide transitions
in our life here and now. “If we can fully know ourselves for the first time,
then the bursting of the seams of the self happens in a crescendo, at the omega
point of splendor, meaning, and the heart’s full satiety.” (p. 272)
~ Laura Mueller
Laura A. Mueller, M.Ac.,
L.Ac.
410-707-1394
www.lauramueller.com
Acupuncture & Zero Balancing©
Feel free to comment on the blog site or contact Laura, if you'd
like to write to her about this review.
2013 NAUTILUS AWARD
GRAND AND GOLD WINNERS
GRAND & GOLD
WINNER
promoting spiritual growth, conscious living and positive
social change – offering life-affirming options with imagination and
possibility to a world that longs for a new story.
Nautilus Awards are given to print books of exceptional merit that make a
literary and heartfelt contribution to spiritual growth, conscious living,
high-level wellness, green values, responsible leadership and positive social
change, as well as to the worlds of art, creativity and inspiration.
=======================
About Jan Bowman
Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in
numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo
Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer
Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short
Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award,
her stories have been nominated for Pushcart
Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story
was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another
was a 2012 finalist in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two collections of short stories while shopping
for a publisher for a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications
in Trajectory
and Pen-in-Hand.
She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life
and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers. Learn more at www.janbowmanwriter.com or
