The Healing Path: A Soul Approach to Illness

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The Healing Path takes the reader on a daring new exploration of the realms of healing. It shows how the darkest passage of human life can also become a journey of the soul. At once self-help and self-revelation, the book is a great rarity: a tale so stunningly told, an idea so originally developed, that it has the power to transform lives. Marc Barasch was the editor of New Age Journal when he was diagnosed with cancer. Known for his ground-breaking articles on the new medicine, he was forced to use his talents to grapple with his own personal crisis. For seven years - from the white corridors of high-tech hospitals to the quiet retreats of Tibetan teachers, from sweat lodges of medicine men to the doorsteps of extraordinary survivors - he searched for life-giving lessons in the shadow of life-threatening illness. Barasch's dramatic story unfolds like good literature - rich in metaphor, woven with dream images, and alive with the immediacy of his own struggle. But it goes much further: Using his own experiences as a starting-point, the author interviewed dozens of others for whom serious illness had become a catalyst for change. He listened closely to their tales of hope and defeat, loss and triumph, and discovered a universal pattern, which he calls the healing path, with signposts others can use to guide their way. This is no simplistic guidebook, however. Like Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey, " it presents an archetypal map of a perilous transition. It honors the individual's need for physical healing. It champions the quest for authentic life. Artfully combining the patient's urgency with heartfelt spiritual wisdom, The Healing Path is a revolutionary reframing of the process ofgetting well. It is a book for anyone who has a serious illness, has a loved one who is ill, treats the ill, or simply wishes to live a more healing life - a companion for all who must travel over difficult terrain, searching for a hidden place of wholeness.