THE HEALING PATH

An immensely gripping, smartly paced cross-cultural survey of stays of death and ``miraculous'' recoveries from deadly illnesses, by a writer-producer who has survived for seven years the removal of his cancerous thyroid. Barasch was writing himself ragged editing New Age Journal with hundred-hours-plus weeks, and losing his girlfriend in his workaholism, when he came down with thyroid cancer. Where was the New Age now that he needed it? First refusing a biopsy, he fled to a spiritist surgeon in Brazil, but returned before seeing him and had his thyroid removed by a Boston surgeon. The thyroid being a seat of the emotions, its removal barely offset by a daily pill that left him cranky, he bottomed out. Two questions arose: Was his cancer the expression of an illness of soul, as so many told him? If so, what might he learn from those who had already benefitted from such an admission? ``How could disease become a catalyst for profound inner experience? Had the luminosity I had sensed in my illness been merely the delirium of the shipwrecked, mistaking a lambent bit of moon on a dark sea for a white dot of sail?'' Might not his illness ``contain its own potential for wholeness?'' Barasch's bedevilment leads him into a global survey of those rare recoveries that seemed to depend upon an unknown x-factor that magically led the body into mobilizing incredible resources in its immune system, or its ``neuropsychoimmunology.'' His interviews with survivors reveal guideposts or signs that repeat on the path to self-healing. Most important: bottoming out, the darkness before dawn, when the ill person gives up fighting the illness and in surrendering all hope is granted new energy by not focusing on his illness. Mind-body thoughts by an expert wonderfully schooled both in medicine and in the Deepak Chopra school of Quantum Healing. Some overloaded similes when straight statement would be stronger—but so what.