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Transformational Learning & Medicine
An interview with Matthew Budd, M.D. (HQP 2001)
by Raz Ingrasci, President (Edited
by Shawn McAndrew)
Member of the Hoffman Institute’s Board
of Directors, Co-author with Larry Rothstein, Ed.D of “You
Are What You Say,” architect for the first Behavioral Medicine
Department at the Harvard Community Health Plan which has been adopted
by 29 HMO’s nationwide. His work has been featured on National
Public Radio, in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times plus
numerous articles in the medical literature.
Raz Ingrasci: For 20 years you were a professor
at Harvard Medical School. Now you are a pastoral care giver and
instructor at Andover-Newton Theological School. Please tell us
about this transition.
Matthew Budd: The medical profession is based
on the diagnosis and treatment of the physical body isolated from
the mind and the spiritual context in which the person lives. Although
the interventions of traditional medicines are powerful, they are
incomplete in that they leave important parts of the system unattended.
We’ve learned in the last decades that the perceptions and
projections of the mind and the emotions effect the physiological
body in direct and important ways. For example, people who project
a sense of being attacked and are fearful or angry a lot of the
time have a high incidence of heart disease. People who project
a hopeless future as a mental phenomenon have somewhat disabled
immune systems and get all kinds of illnesses. In the last 10 years
we’ve learned that there’s a unity between the emotional
functions of the body and the physical functions. Medicine is just
now beginning to gather that knowledge and implement it in treatment.
It’s still at a very early stage.
As I practiced medicine I moved more into mind-body medicine and
developed treatments to help people become more aware of their emotions,
to see the thought patterns that generated those emotions, and to
dismantle those thought patterns. But there was always something
missing for me. That missing part is what I call the part of human
existence that we call spiritual.
RI: Do you see the spiritual dimension as a healing
force?
MB: When people are able to access the spiritual
dimension of their lives, they’re able to move with a greater
sense of possibility through the barriers that captivate them. When
they move through these barriers that hold them captive, their bodies
tend to heal.
One of the things that most people aren’t aware of is that
healing is a perfectly normal and natural phenomenon. When you cut
your skin by accident or when a surgeon does it by intention, the
surgeon may sew it up, but that isn’t healing the wound. The
wound heals as an expression of a natural phenomenon. Healing is
natural and normal. I think that occurs not only on a physical level,
healing forces also restore balance and harmony. What many of us
do is impede our own healing.
Healing is a birthright of the organism. I’m talking about
the physical, emotional and relational restoration that is the relationship
of intimacy; a contextual healing of harmony and trust in which
a person feels at home in the world. Those things are impeded by
certain barriers. An infection in a wound, the growth of bacteria,
would be a barrier to physical healing. The barrier needs to be
treated and removed before the healing will occur.
Once we leave the physical realm, the barriers that we need to
remove are barriers of perception that generate negative mood states
like anxiety, fear, anger, depression and negative connectional
states like isolation, lack of relationship, anger, hostility, arrogance,
so that we can experience our connection with other people, with
nature, and with the whole of creation. So our healing possibilities
lie in identifying and removing barriers at all these different
levels rather than in doing anything. If we turn our attention to
penetrating, experiencing, understanding, and seeing the delusional
nature of these barriers and moving beyond them, then healing will
begin to happen.
RI:At its root, the word “heal” actually
means wholeness.
MB: Yes. When you look at a baby, there’s
nothing missing. The child is totally at peace and harmony in the
world. But as a child begins to make distinctions, see things and
develops habits of thinking and patterns, things will begin to show
up as missing. Food will be missing, mommy will be missing, and
then the toy that their friend has that they don’t have will
be missing. Then money will be missing, then sex will be missing,
and so on. Before you know it, this totally pure and whole human
being will be suffering from the perception that there are major
parts of themselves that are incomplete. Healing involves the restoration
of that sense of wholeness and completeness. Joseph Campbell talks
about the two monsters that guard the gates of healing and keep
people from healing - fear and greed. Fear that life is dangerous
and you will be hurt, and greed that there’s something missing
that you don’t have. As we begin to develop a life of satisfaction
and a life of trust and willingness, then healing occurs.
RI:You often hear about people even healing into
dying. So healing is not only about being cured physically.
MB:No, healing is a state of harmony and balance.
The human life exists in many domains - there’s the physical
domain and the emotional domain, as well as the spiritual domain.
Each domain has certain regularities and recurrences and there are
certain properties of the physical domain that are even subject
to reversibility. If a person has an emotional and a spiritual healing,
some of the physical abnormalities may actually reverse. There are
others that seem to be more resistant to the return of balance and
homeostasis. A person could have spiritual and emotional peace and
equanimity in healing and still be ill and die. Part of the balance
of life is that we all, when our time comes, run out of life. But
that doesn’t mean that we run out of spiritual life.
RI:An example of that could also be permanent
injuries that people sustain.
MB:Exactly. I have a friend who, through an accident,
is blind. He lived a lot of his life fighting his blindness and
trying to overcome it. His whole life was about a wrestling match
with his blindness. But even as a fighter, although he was fairly
successful as a blind person, he still had enormous angst, and a
sense of needing to keep moving forward and striving. It was almost
like, ‘If I do enough, then I’ll be able to see again.’
As he’s gotten older and begun to develop a spiritual dimension,
he’s come to peace with his blindness and with that he’s
able to see much more. But he doesn’t see through his eyes.
He sees through listening, through relation, through understanding.
Not through battling his blindness.
RI:Tell me about your experience with the Hoffman
Process, and your path of learning about healing, and your quest
to participate in other people’s healing. You seem to have
followed the adage of “Physician, heal thyself.” What
kind of a healing was the Process for you?
MB:The Process was an intense bringing into my
awareness some of the distortions and perceptions and limitations
of possibility that I had adopted along the course of my life, from
my parents and from other people who had a major influence on me.
These barriers were all the “have to be’s” that I
had adopted from the people around me. Life has to be this way;
the right kind of mate has to be that way. You have to have a certain
kind of this, a certain kind of that. Or you need to fear this or
fear that.
In the Process, I became aware of how I had simply adopted a lot
of those “have-to-be’s” from other people. As I began
to see them for what they were, sort of learned delusions, I began
to feel my gaze expand to the kind of peaceful connection with other
people, things and the totality of life that is part of a spiritual
experience. For me, even though I had this kind of work with patients
and had been through a lot of learning experiences, this was perhaps
the most powerful experience of “releasement” that I’ve
ever had from some of the learned bondage that I had lived in. What
was a tremendous learning for me was to see how my spiritual being
arose hand-in-hand with this learning. As I began to dissolve some
of the barriers, and the Process is brilliant for that, the connection
with life began to grow.
I’ve always been perplexed by the notion of human living systems
as being structure-determined systems. That is, the structure of
our brains, being the most complicated organ in the body, determines
a lot of the behavior that we manifest. We really are biologically
structure-determined systems. I’ve always been perplexed with,
if that is truly the case, how are we able to change? In order to
change attitudes and behavior we have to change our structurally
determined responses to external stimuli, not alter our environment.
This means that we can’t play victim and blame others for the
ways we react. Our brains are structured by our experiences, our
history, and we are conditioned by our past.
In order to change we must intentionally change our structure.
How can an organism that is structure-determined actually change
its structure? It’s almost self-contradictory. What I experienced
in the Process is that by releasing my gaze from the structure-determined
behaviors, I began to see possibility outside myself that I can
access and change. I remember that almost immediately when I got
home from the Process, it was patently obvious to me that there
were certain things that I had never thought of that I needed to
change. They came to me naturally, not by struggling. They came
to me as part of this healing process that I began to access possibility
in my life, rather than the certainty of repetition.
RI:In the Quadrinity Process you encounter a different
structure of self that opens up an array of possibilities that didn’t
previously exist. A whole lot more of who you really are becomes
available.
MB: What we see is determined by the structures
of perception, or language through which we experience. As a doctor
I was taught to see diabetes as a lack of insulin and all the physical
chemical things that happen as a result. When a patient came to
me and said they were diabetic I immediately thought, “Insulin,
sugar.” Then with time I began to see that people don’t
just get diabetes randomly. They seem to get worse under stress.
When they’re not getting what they want or when there’s
something missing that they can’t have. We call that stress.
But in the Hoffman Process, the model through which we see ourselves
is expanded to include that which isn’t manifested physically
yet, but could be. That’s one of the ways that I speak of spirituality,
that which hasn’t manifested yet, except it’s potential
and could be. We begin to look at life through that new lens, which
includes possibility. It’s universal possibility in the sense
that it’s shared by all of us and in all of us. The model of
the Quadrinity Process allows us to begin to see that domain of
existence that exists just as clearly as the physical domain and
the emotional domain. We just didn’t see it before. We didn’t
have a model through which to look.
RI:Sometimes the word “possibility”
is used interchangeably for “spirituality” and can conjure
up the idea that something is missing, like “we’re here
right now, but look what’s possible.” It still is focused
away from the here and now. One of the experiences people can come
to is their connection to all that is. Where everything is sufficient
just as it is right here, right now. Then, rather than going forward
out of need or desperation, one moves forward from fulfillment into
the total possibility of now.
MB: If one is able to live in this moment, there’s
nothing missing, it’s all here. It’s only when we think
of the past, or the future, where things might be missing that we
begin to suffer. So in this very moment everything is complete.
One begins to access this spiritual domain of possibility during
the Process. Once one has an experience of this, it’s like
an experience over which you can’t get. When I find myself
lapsing back into the certainty of repetition as a structure-determined
system, I know now that if I can let go of that, something else
will come to me. The Process is a practice in accessing the domain
of possibility.
RI:Tell us about your experience in the hospitals.
What are you learning?
MB: I’m back in the practical world with
a somewhat expanded notion of what’s available to human beings.
When I go to see someone on the ward at the hospital who’s
facing operation, or serious illness, or death, or physical disability,
I go to them with a different set of questions than when I was a
practicing physician. I go with the question, “How can I speak
and listen to this person in a way that he or she might see something
that doesn’t yet exist for them, but if accessed could expand
their life.”
I was once in attendance at the bedside of a man who was dying
after a liver transplant. His teenage son, Zack, was there and he
was overwhelmed with grief and said, “You can’t let him
die. You can’t let him die.” And yet the man’s condition
was deteriorating and he was on his way to death. I worked with
this young man through most of the night on which his father died.
At one point I said, “Zack, it looks like your dad’s
body is giving out, and the forces of nature are going to take him
from us. What would it take for you to accept, not with joy or pleasure,
but just accept that he’s going to leave us physically?”
With that he began to cry bitterly. I was asking a question intended
to help Zack look beyond what he was doing, fighting for his dad’s
life, so he could now accept his dad’s death.
His next statement was, “I can’t let go of the fact that
I killed him.” I said, “Zack, that just doesn’t make
sense. How did you kill him? He had chronic hepatitis and a liver
transplant.” He said, “Well, I’ve been doing some
crazy things as a teenager, and my grandparents said to me that
I had been upsetting him so much that it was killing him.”
And I said, “Oh, okay. So let’s ask this question—what
would it take for you to let go of that?” This was just after
I had done the Hoffman Process, so I wrote the word “guilt”
on a piece of paper and I rolled up a newspaper and I put the piece
of paper on the table and I said, “I want you to beat the daylights
out of that word.” He brutalized it and paper was flying all
over that room. When he finished, he sat down and began to cry,
but his mood shifted from one of resistance to one of sadness again.
I said, “So, Zack, what would it take for you to let go?”
And he said, “I need to go in the room and say goodbye to my
dad.” He went over to his dad’s bedside and said a prayer
of thanks and a prayer of farewell. So the whole room gathered around
the bed, and the patient on the bed was on a cardiac monitor, and
his heart just stopped and that was the end of his physical life.
When I walked into that room, the possibility of that behavior—of
Zack’s forgiving himself and letting go—was not present.
Zack’s structure was not able to manifest that possibility
of behavior until I interacted with him in a way that connected
with him and led him into this domain that I call Spirit of Possibility.
That’s the kind of thing that is available, not just in pastoral
care but in our lives. My first palpable taste of it in the Quadrinity
Process was very seminal for me.
RI:What would be the value of a practicing M.D.
doing the Hoffman work?
MB:The Process was for me a balanced sense of
who we are as human beings in a much fuller panorama than I had
ever experienced in any other learning situation. I had learned
very intensely parts of the human system, but I had never had the
whole thing spread before me like this panorama. As I look at it
now, I think that the earlier in a profession, or in life, that
one can have this panorama accessible to them, the fuller a person’s
life is going to be. So, not only for professional reasons, but
also for personal reasons I think that the more of life one has
ahead of them, the more valuable the manifestations of the Process
are going to be. ø
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