Tapping the Soul's Healing Potential

Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicien

An Interview With Carlos Warter, M.D., Ph.D.

Anne H. Coulter, Ph.D.

EDITOR'S Note: The integration of various spiritual practices and beliefs into alternative medicine has spurred a number of physicians to investigate these phenomena. Carlos Warter, M.D., Ph.D., a psychiatrist by training, has migrated through many spiritual and healing traditions, including Sufism, Buddhism, and Native American (North and South) practices, and has determined that healing, in any tradition, can be accomplished by reestablishing individual can connection with the soul, the self or animus, that is the center of wellness. His attempt to increase awareness of this approach to medicine has added a unique and important dimension to the integration of spiritually based medicine into mainstream medical practice. To understand how Dr. Warter situates himself as part of the movement toward spiritually based alternative medical therapies, Anne H. Coulter, Ph.D., Alternative & Complementary Therapies" managing editor, interviewed him this summer.

ARC: There are a number of alternative practitioners who have emphasized the importance of spirituality in healing, including Larry Dossey, M.D., Deepak Chopra, M.D., and others. These physicians have published widely and are beginning to be heard within mainstream medicine. Your work has focused on many of the same issues as these practitioners but with a different twist. Could you describe what you perceive to be unique about the work you are doing?

CW: I am but one in a group of many that is making connections between prayer, spirituality, and the sacred with healing. Larry Dossey, for example, is an internist, who over the last several decades has observed the power of prayer. He has noticed and documented that people who believe and practice something of a religious or spiritual nature have experienced accelerated healing or recovery results that are more positive. In his books and his work, he has introduced the notion of nonlocal and local realities-healing that actually does happen, at a distance, from causes that may not be standard or even apparent in a traditional empirical model. Deepak Chopra looks at this phenomenon from the Indian perspective-through transcendental meditation. Using Ayurvedic philosophy, he emphasizes the need for a body/mind integration. Andrew Weil, M.D., on the other hand, has brought the rigor of allopathic research to herbs and substances that are natural in origin.

I see myself as introducing the next level in this shift toward spiritual dimensions to healing, that of body/mind/soul. I think that we have a more constricted- a more contracted-awareness of the reality of soul. A traditional model presents us as physical material entities who, with prayer, or through the experience of higher phenomena, achieve a third dimension, our soul. In my work, alternatively, I am suggesting that we do not have a soul; we are the soul. We are a non-local entity. We are really a consciousness that is taking form in this dimension, but our identity needs to shift from a head identification that is based on the object-referred culture to a subjectivity that goes beyond the mind and goes beyond the body and that is permeating and present throughout all phenomena.

Selected Prayer Studies

"Self-love is how we attain mastery in healing."

Integrating Soul Awareness into Your Clinical Practice

ARC: What are you doing to inform others of your techniques?

CW: I am working on several different levels to educate and inform clinicians of my work. On one level, I'm doing my own personal work with a corporation called Heartnet. The purpose of this organization is to bring the heart into healing-the heart into medicine. I'm also doing a few retreats, and a few seminars every year, here and outside the country. These seminars are designed to introduce clinicians to the possibilities of spirituality in the context of their own practices. A typical seminar will cover aspects of the following:
(1) practical techniques of spiritual healing and spirituality in daily patient care;
(2) introduction to beliefs and practices of major religious groups;
(3) techniques for spiritual history taking;
(4) overview of the individual spiritual evolution from birth to death;
(5) alternative medicine and medical practices or beliefs your patients will never tell you about;
(6) spiritual healing for the terminally ill patient; and
(7) recognizing spirituality in both clinician and patient.

I also attend different conferences of like-minded people to exchange information about the field.

"Spirituality is not "something out there" separate from reality but is a cornerstone in the notions of reality that patients have."

ARC: But much of this is preaching to the converted or those who are willing to be converted soon. What are you doing to introduce your ideas to the skeptics, the non-believers?

CW: There, my focus is on two things-patient/doctor relationship and reawakening of vocation. These aspects I am introducing in lectures to different medical schools. I will be speaking on spirituality in a spirituality and healing curriculum, a proposed curriculum, through the Healing Arts Guild, in Phoenix, Arizona, within the context of a hospital and a family practice program. In this program, residents, faculty, and interns will begin to learn that spirituality is not "something out there" separate from reality but is a cornerstone in the notions of reality that patients have.

ARC: What is the contribution that integration of mind/body/soul, awareness of soul-your nascent technique of healing-ultimately makes to medicine?

CW: When patients reach the top level of my pyramid of healing, when they have surrendered to self-love, they reach a frequency of coherence that is body, mind, and spirit-life itself. They reach the raw source of all healing. They wake up each morning grateful for life and the restoration of consciousness, and everything else in the day-they wake up well.



Pyramid of Healing

Who Do You Think You Are?: The Healing Power of Your Sacred Self

Healing Arts Guild Project

The Healing Arts Guild Project is the brainchild of Howard Silverman, M.D., M.S., the program director of the family practice residency at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center, in Phoenix, Arizona. Although the Guild, or forum, has not yet met, it is one of a two-part approach Dr. Silverman has toward integrating spirituality into the medical profession. In his unique position as family practice residency director, he has the potential to introduce a curriculum for spiritual awareness into the physician training program at his institution. This curriculum, which he developed following a formal needs assessment study he conducted, includes several very specific goals:
1. Establish and maintain a supportive (healing) environment at the teaching institution that values and nourishes the spirituality of patients, residents, staff, and faculty. Do this by discussing spiritual issues openly and without judgment
2. Residents, staff, and faculty will learn about health-related spiritual beliefs and practices of common faith groups.
3. Develop, evaluate, and teach practical methods for spiritual assessment, treatment, and referral.
4. Identify research questions regarding clinical issues related to spirituality and pursue investigations to resolve them.
Dr. Warter may be one of the speakers for such a program. Dr. Silverman envisions having him introduce the diverse spiritual approaches in our culture to practicing physicians through the Healing Arts Guild and to resident physicians through the spirituality curriculum.
The Healing Arts Guild itself is designed to be a forum of practitioners in the Phoenix medical community, who would openly discuss their own interest in spirituality. Dr. Silverman hopes to see its members come together to discuss: (1) why it is difficult to talk about spirituality; (2) what skills are lacking to develop this dialogue; (3) how to expand individual knowledge based on spiritual issues; and (4) how to develop their own spirituality.

Source: Silverman, H.D. Creating a Spirituality Curriculum for family' Practice Residents. National Institute for Program Director Development Fellowship Project, May 1996.

To order reprints of this article, write to or call: Karen Ballen, ALTERNATIVE & COMPLEMENTARY THERAPIES, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., 2 Madison Avenue, Larchmont, NY 10538-1962, (914) 834-3100.

Still Have Questions?

Mail your questions and comments to heartnet@doctorcarlos.com
Home