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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504382120 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| File size: | 594 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Healing Touch Overview
In the Introduction I referred to Anne's story in my book What Obituaries Don't Tell You: Conversations About Life and Death, which was the impetus for this book. I want to share excerpts of the story with you but before I do that it will be helpful to know more about Healing Touch itself.
Application
Simply put, Healing Touch is a method of hands-on-healing – although it is often done without touching the body – that enhances the body's ability to heal, calms and clears the mind, promotes positive emotional states, and aids in receptivity to spiritual connection. If you are a parent who has ever soothed your child with touch, or comforted them with your presence and words, you have practiced healing touch. The difference between healing touch and Healing Touch is that the latter is a system of interventions that are given for specific purposes, and to become a Healing Touch practitioner requires five levels of course work, hands-on training and practice, followed by a certification process. In my research (Weymouth, 2002)1 the top ten purposes for which practitioners used Healing Touch were: pain reduction, anxiety and stress reduction, relaxation, to maintain wellness, to accelerate healing from a disease or illness, to accelerate post-operative healing, to deal with emotional trauma, to ease the dying process, to ease depression, for insomnia, and for respiratory problems. But as you will see in Anne's story, it also facilitates meaningful conversations, allows family members and friends to be involved in the treatments in loving and gentle ways, and provides a safe space to celebrate life and face death.
History
Healing Touch was founded by Janet Mentgen, BSN, RN, (1938-2005) based upon and incorporating her education and training in nursing, her nursing practice, several energy healing modalities in which she was trained, techniques that she developed herself, and teaching.
For nine years, from 1980 to 1989, she used the techniques in her private healing practice, and at the urging of some colleagues began to develop the curriculum which became the Healing Touch Programš. In 1989, the president of the American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA), Lynn Keegan, asked Mentgen if she would like to offer the Healing Touch course as a certificate program. The nurses credited with developing the Healing Touch Programš are Janet Mentgen, Dorothea Hover-Kramer, EdD, RN, Sharon Scandrett-Hibdon, RN, PhD and Myra Tovey, RN, BS.
Course certification was granted in 1990 when Scandrett-Hibdon was president of AHNA and the rest of the group were on the Board of Directors. Certification of practitioners and instructors began in 1993. In 1996 the AHNA took up the issue of whether or not they would certify practitioners who were not nurses. Mentgen was committed to training anyone who was interested in the work and would practice under the ethical standards of the program, whereas the AHNA felt that certifying anyone not a nurse overstepped their mandate as a nursing organization. The decision was made that AHNA would continue to endorse the program but certification would come through a new organization. In 1996 Healing Touch International (HTI) was incorporated as the program's certifying body with headquarters in Lakewood, Colorado.
Eventually the program became two entities: Healing Touch Programš, www.healingtouchprogram.com and Healing Beyond Borders, Education and Certifying the Healing Touch.®, www.healingbeyondborders.org Both programs use Mentgen's teachings and levels toward certification, but only the Healing Touch Programš is accredited by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA), making it the only exclusively energy medicine education program to have achieved national accreditation. The Healing Touch Programš is endorsed by the American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA), The Canadian Holistic Nurses Association (CHNA), accredited as a provider of continuing nursing education by the American Nurses Credentialing Center's Commission of Accreditation (ANCC), and approved by the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork (NCBTMB) as a continuing education approved provider. Healing Beyond Borders® is endorsed by the American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA), approved by the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork (NCBTMB), and approved as a California Nurses provider.
Requirements for certification
To become a certified practitioner five levels of education, training, and hands-on-experience is required. The mentored apprenticeship, of approximately one to two years post-class room time and application and practice of techniques, is followed by submission of qualifying materials to a panel of examiners. Once certification has been achieved, recertification is required every five years to maintain certified status. For recertification in the Healing Touch Programš, proof of 75 hours of continuing education is required: recertification requirements in Healing Beyond Borders® is essentially the same. As an adjunct to other health care modalities, Healing Touch is offered in many hospitals, hospices, health care facilities, and private counseling and healing practices. Many communities offer regularly scheduled free sessions at hospitals, churches, homeless shelters, and other gathering places.
The specific interventions that are mentioned in the interviews are not described in detail because this is copyrighted information and would not be of great value to the reader without being trained in them. However, there are YouTube videos that discuss Healing Touch and demonstrate techniques, and thanks to Janet Mentgen and her vision of having somebody in every household know how to do energy healing you can sign up for courses with the Healing Touch Programš or Healing Beyond Borders®.
Summary
Anyone who is trained in Healing Touch has at heart a deeply held desire to ease suffering and provide a type of healing that is rarely present in modern-day medicine. I often think of American Medical Association (AMA) medicine as masculine with its machines, pills, and surgeries, and complementary and alternative practices as feminine, with its compassionate presence, touch, and other modalities you will read about in this book. If we can combine these approaches more often than is being done now we would have holistic and integrative medicine that would benefit patients, clients, families, and professionals.
Although the primary focus of this book is on terminal illnesses and end-of-life care, the techniques can be used at any point in a person's life for enhanced wellness and relief of suffering. When I asked the professionals whom I interviewed how they thought complementary and alternative modalities can be integrated into mainstream medicine, they said it will happen when patients in large enough numbers ask for it, i.e., patient demand. Once you read about the techniques and their benefits described in this book I hope it inspires you to ask for them on behalf of your loved ones, your patients and clients, and for yourself.
CHAPTER 2
Anne's Story Nurse Nursing Instructor Healing Touch Certified Practitioner
Introduction
The following are excerpts from Anne's story from my book What Obituaries Don't Tell You: Conversations About Life and Death. It is this story and my personal experience with Healing Touch, both as a recipient and a practitioner, that made me want to share this work and other complementary and alternative methods with people who are suffering, people who want to help relieve suffering, and everyone who wants to have a peaceful death.
Interview
I got home after midnight, and there was a message on my machine asking for my help. I rushed over to the hospital where my roommate from nursing school and long-term friend had just been diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and needed to make some fast decisions, hopefully the right ones, about what to do next. One of my relatives is a doctor and she wanted me to consult with him. As it turned out, she was being seen by the best physicians, which was her greatest concern at the time: "Am I being treated by the right doctors? Can I trust their recommendations?"
The cancer was a surprise. She had been having symptoms for six months, but they were all upper GI symptoms; dyspepsia, heartburn, that kind of thing. All of the work-ups and diagnostics were for upper GI problems, and they were looking particularly at the probability of gallbladder problems.
Even though Betsy and I were both nurses, our interests and approaches to medicine took some divergent paths. By this time I had become interested in complementary and alternative medicine, whereas Betsy was very pragmatic, no-nonsense, scientific approach only kind of gal. I had been learning Healing Touch and offered it to her for pain and anxiety management, but her response was "thanks but no thanks." So I just said, "Let me know. You may get to the point where you might want to try this."
Soon after her first surgery I was visiting her at the hospital, and she was in pain crisis and emotional crisis because of all the decisions that had to be made around chemo and treatment, it was just a highly emotional situation. So finally she agreed to the Healing Touch, and I did the treatment right there in the hospital. She liked it, and that's what started the deeper connection between us and regular Healing Touch treatments right up until she died ten months later. I did energy work on her every day for the last ten days of her life, and actually kind of moved in with them for the last three days.
When it became obvious that she wasn't going to recover, Betsy decided that she wanted to die at home. Her husband and the hospice nurse set up the environment, the equipment, and the medications exactly as he wanted. He and their daughter learned how to run the machines and deliver the IV medications. I served more in a support and advisory role, like talking to the family about pain management, suggesting when it seemed advisable to consult with hospice on that and other issues, being the go-between for family members, friends and colleagues, telling the family when the signs were suggesting that the end was near, these sorts of things.
That whole question about good death, bad death ... it was probably as good as many of them get. Really, the only thing I can say that was bad about it was that it was a 44-year-old woman who really was not ready to leave life and her family and her roles. For both of us the question: "Why does this have to happen?" It was so sad, so sad. The hardest thing for me about Betsy's death was she was never ready. You know how you read and you talk about the good death, one where the person comes to terms with it, they're ready to leave, they've taken care of all their unfinished business, and it's this peaceful death. Well, that's not what I felt for her. Her family might say differently, but some of her last words were, "This is not fair, I am not ready to leave you guys." And you know, I came to terms with that pretty easily because of course I was thinking of myself. We're the same age, two kids, like looking in the mirror. I would also be thinking it's not fair. There's a lot in life that's not fair, but I would still be thinking that, and thinking "I don't want to be leaving here."
From a professional perspective, Betsy's death was the kind of experience I would strive for, for patients, the kinds of outcomes I would look for. I don't think she was in a lot of pain. She had incredible love and support, and except for her ambivalence about being ready to go, I think it went really well. So, in terms of creating a comfortable, and I would say spiritual environment for somebody who was leaving, it was pretty darn good. Both Betsy and her husband were people who needed to have control over their environment. They needed information, and then they needed permission to make the decisions about what was best for them. From a health care perspective it's important to remember when you're interfacing with people who are coping with whatever, is to not draw conclusions without enough data, and to really sit back and let people be individuals unless it's harmful. When Betsy was in pain or agitated, the family and I would discuss what we should do, and I would always say, "What do you think she would want? What do you want for her? She trusted us to manage her symptoms at home." We knew what she wanted, she wanted to be kept comfortable.
What some would consider to be a good death would be totally different from Betsy's experience. For example, I've always believed that people should not die alone, but there are probably some people who would choose that. In fact, it's not uncommon that a person will hang on until everybody has gone for lunch, or coffee, or a break of some kind, and then the person dies while everybody is out of the room.
Even though Betsy fought until the very end, she was a full participant in plans for the final stages of dying, and plans for the memorial service. During the last couple of weeks of her life, when she was still aware and coherent, her husband got a big piece of wood and a frame, and brought out the shoebox of family photos. They went through it and made a collage of just their family, just the four of them. On the back he took excerpts from cards that people had written to her at the end, mostly people from her work, who talked about who she was. That was very healing, and it turned out to be a phenomenal picture. Her hospital bed was right in the dining room, and the area where people worked on the collage was right there where you went from the living room into the dining room. It was in that area, too, that Betsy's daughter, son, and his girlfriend and I sat on the floor and made safety pin bracelets. So we had the collage out, we had the beads out, it gave us something to do. We all wore our beaded bracelets at the memorial service.
When they came and took the body away, that was really hard. I wish it had been done differently. At our local hospice, when someone dies, the staff and the family walk the body out to the car, they stay with the body. We just stayed in the living room, looking out the window, just holding onto each other as they put the body into the back of the van. It was a very cold experience, really hard, and then she was gone. Looking back, I wish we had walked the body out, having it be a little more ceremonial, a more reverent transition.
Betsy was not religious, but her mother is Catholic and wanted her to have last rites, which was not anything Betsy wanted. So Mary, the hospital chaplain who knew her quite well through her professional role, mediated a meeting with Betsy and her mom to come to some sort of compromise, and did just an incredible job. What Betsy agreed to was that when she was getting close to the end we would call Mary and she would come to the house and do a ritual with us. The ritual was just this profound experience for everyone, because everyone at that point was ready for her to let go. I don't know about Betsy, I have my hunch that she wasn't ready, but everyone else was telling her "Mom, Betsy, we'll be okay, you need to go, we're going to be okay."
Mary did this blessing where we talked about who Betsy was, as a mother, a friend, a nurse, all her different roles. Then she went through parts of her body and invited all of us who were there, her husband, her two children, her mother, and me, to bless that body part if we felt drawn to do so. So you know, it was her eyes, her ears, her hands, her feet. It was very, very intimate, a wonderful way for the kids to say goodbye to their mother. It really allowed them to touch her and be with her and really say what they wanted to say in a safe way, with people they trusted. It had been about 24 hours since Betsy had said anything, and during the blessing the subject of yellow roses came up. Her favorite were yellow roses, which she wanted at her memorial service, so yellow roses were mentioned at one point during the blessing. Betsy whispered, "Yellow roses are my favorite." I believe the ritual woke her up, she was there, she was connected in that moment to what was happening. And certainly I felt she was very connected in energetically through the whole experience. That was profound, and not the kind of thing I've ever seen happen in a hospital environment. Maybe it has and I just haven't seen it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Gift of a Peaceful Death"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Kathryn F. Weymouth, PhD.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Healing Touch Overview, 1,
Anne's Story, 5,
Healing Touch Interviews, 12,
Mary, 12,
Debbie, 22,
Elaine, 33,
Ben, 39,
Elaine, 47,
Mary Kay, 59,
Jane, 65,
Marty, 70,
Terry, 79,
Lilli, 89,
Marjorie, 96,
Jean, 104,
Annie, 113,
Carol, 121,
Massage Therapy Overview, 128,
Massage Therapist Interviews, 131,
Gayle, 131,
Mary, 139,
Acupuncture Overview, 150,
Acupuncturist Interview, 153,
Gwen, 153,
Aromatherapy/Essential Oils Overview, 163,
Aromatherapist Interview, 167,
Dorene Petersen, 167,
Music Therapy Overview, 184,
Music Therapist Interview, 187,
Gabe, 187,
Palliative Care Overview, 198,
Palliative Care Physician Interviews, 201,
Dr E., 201,
Dr K., 212,