Dream Healing Temples

What is holistic healing? It means treating the mind/body/spirit as one unit, and looking at health, psychology, thinking, lifestyle, nutrition, sexuality and more as intimately, intricately connected. Yet, even those of us who practice ‘holistic’ living or look for holistic treatments such as herbs, acupuncture, reiki, etc., have to do so as separate activities that we pick and choose from much as we pick and choose from vegetables in the grocery store. Using herbs to treat insomnia, for example, isn’t being holistic. It’s using herbs to treat a symptom. Even when we want to be holistic, our healing centers, traditional medicine and alternative, are set up as separate systems. We as individuals have to coordinate our whole self for healing, and that is difficult without a culture to back us up.

Last night Len Worley, Ph.D., gave a talk about the ancient Greek Dream Healing Temples, with pictures and descriptions of his visit to the best preserved of these temples, Epidauros. From what Len discussed, dream healing was widely practiced in the ancient world, in the West most particularly in Egypt, Greece and Rome. It’s foundation is holistic healing: treating the whole person, including the sleep state, in order to heal. Sick people would go to these temples, engage in extensive ritual including bath, massage, theatre, sports and religious ritual, then enter the sleep chamber. If they were lucky, they would receive a healing dream. In Greece it was believed that these healings came from the God Aesclepious, a man turned God according to Greek mythology, and from whom Western Medicine originates.

The healings came in one of three forms: a prescription for a cure, an understanding into the cause, or some other form of advice or healing.

Holistic healing is much talked about these days, yet as Westerners we still think primarily in terms of symptom and cure. We don’t talk as much about healing, and as far as I know have nothing as complicated set up to truly promote and address holistic healing in a central way. These ancient temples provide a model for us to follow, one that shows us how holistic healing could be supported by the medical establishment and firmly rooted in cultural assumptions, allowing people in pain to receive the integration and balance we all need.