Love

I will periodically be sharing excerpts from a GREAT blog/website done by the author of Sacred Work. His blogs continue to encourage and challenge me. Here is one about Love:

New Thinking About Love?
from Journal of Sacred Work by Baptisthealingtrust

The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think as nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Love One of the fascinating things about Love is that everybody sees it, most feel they know about it, but so few think of it in anything but conventional ways. As I travel the country speaking about the need for loving care in health care, I often experience a polite but indifferent response. "Yes, we know about love," many hospital executives say, "Of course, we agree with Love." And then there is the powerful, toxic backwash of the status quo and its companion, heartbreaking inaction.
The idea that Love might require a way of thinking that "nobody yet has thought" seems like a waste of time to many. Yet, what subject is more important than Love?...

Among the most important thoughts about Love is the idea of integrating its practice into regular medical treatment. But the medical establishment remains skeptical. Esther Steinberg is quoted in the New_medicine PBS book, The New Medicine, as saying "[Doctors] could not understand in scientific terms how something like a thought...could affect something as concrete as health." And this lack of understanding remains.
One of the goals of medical treatment is to restore our sense of well being. And what is our sense of well being but a pattern of thoughts under girded by hope?
Medical care can be delivered without Love and with a disregard for the role of thinking. Healing, however, is never advanced by such a disregard.
Today, thousands upon thousands of executives, doctors, and other health professionals will gather in meetings to discuss the health of patients. Will any of those discussion include the role of Love in the healing process?
For that to occur, it will be necessary "to think as nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees." It will be essential to think of Love as crucial to healing.
In the future, caregivers will be called to engage the forces of Love as a regular part of treatment protocols. In the future, caregivers will discover that treatment without Love is a shallow exercise. In the future, Love will be the underpinning of the New Medicine.
In the meantime, patients can only hope they are lucky enough to engage that rare caregiver who, in addition to curing tools, understands how to be a channel for Love's healing energy.

-Erie Chapman