Healing occurs naturally, and love heals. We can use our thoughts, our hands, our hearts, and our higher consciousness to facilitate healing. In the following chapters, we will explore how our energies can be harnessed and amplified to bring about transformation toward health and wholeness in our lives and the lives of others. ​ In my twenty-five years as a physician I have developed a good sense of how illness can effectively be treated medically. However, it has become clear to me that the physician only treats; it is Nature that does the actual healing. ​ By this I mean that the natural impulse of life is to heal itself, to become whole again. Every time I performed surgery, I depended on my patient's own healing process to carry him or her to full recovery. Without this natural healing impulse, even the most skilled physician would be powerless to restore health to the patient. ​ I became interested in what healers did to help people get well before the days of surgery and antibiotics. What tools were available to them, and how did they address disease and healing? The answers varied from one culture to another, but there was a constant in all cases: the presence of someone to facilitate the natural healing processes, to focus attention on and encourage the patient toward recovery. In other words, the active ingredient was not surgery, antibiotics, or other mechanical methods. Rather, it was love: the impulse toward unity, nonseparation, and wholeness. In primitive societies, that love might have come in the form of dances, prayers, or songs offered by the patient's family, friends, and community. In our grandparents' day it might have come in the form of the well-wishing of family and friends and the supportive bedside manner of the kindly physician who made house calls. ​ Recent medical research has shown definite links between the intangibles we call bedside manner, love, and caring and the tangibles that we can measure, such as reduced infection, faster healing of damaged tissue, and the patient's increased energy. People who have close family and friends to support and encourage them have better recovery rates than do people who are alone in the world. These enhanced recovery rates suggest that the immune systems of patients who have close family and friends function more efficiently and effectively than do those of patients who are alone. ​ Intrigued with the idea that we can direct our healing capacities to affect predictable, positive results that can be replicated, I began my explorations into the realm of healing. Although at first I'd been somewhat tentative and skeptical, I quickly saw results that were medically incomprehensible yet astonishingly and undeniably effective. ​ In order to continue my research, I had to make a conscious choice— to trust my own experience, despite its limitations, and commit myself to finding what was true for me. I temporarily set aside what I had been taught to believe. In doing so, I recalled that some of the greatest discoveries in human history have come about because people dared temporarily to suspend beliefs that were accepted as true and irrefutable. After all, only a few hundred years ago people believed the world was flat. This is what I have to share with you—the experiences, principles, methods, and processes that have worked for me. I present this material not as a scientist insisting on hard data but as a clinician for whom results and effectiveness are measures of truth. ​ 1998 - Leonard Laskow