Since working with Lilly, I've come to realize how many ways such healing can be applied, not just in the context of psychiatry but in everyday life. The comfort it creates can benefit us all. If we become upset for any reason, simply placing our hands over our heart, with a calming intent, will settle us down. We can transmit love to ourselves, as well as being able to communicate it to another person. Doing so, we generate tranquillity during stressful times. Love is the universal balancer. It has the power to soothe us like nothing else. By consciously calling on it to help us, we gain strength and a belief in our capacity to heal. The truth is, we can all do this, though many of us don't realize it. We too easily reach out for physicians, nurses, therapists; we forget to look within. Being able to heal with our hands is a great gift, a natural asset. Once we gain access to it, a long-buried potential becomes realized.
My aim is to teach patients to care for themselves and others, to find their own resources to heal. Contacting this love, discovering how to be compassionate, is the essence, an attitude about life that can be conveyed through touch. If we can all generate and communicate this love, we can create a more cohesive, more supportive community, even a better world. But, always, we first have to find that love in ourselves.
Shortly after Lilly's last session, my alarm clock awakened me from a familiar dream. It had recurred many times since 1983, when I began my practice, but had never before come to a conclusion. That morning I knew I would never again have that dream.
It always started out the same. I would be standing in my office at twilight, gazing out a window that faced the ocean. A pale sliver of a moon graced the western sky. When the dream first occurred, the water on the horizon next to the Santa Monica skyline appeared as it really was: a few miles away. Over the years, with the repetition of the dream, the waves gradually drew closer and with them came a flock of seagulls. I watched them glide through the air, riding the early evening updrafts, eighteen stories up. But this last time the dream occurred, any separation between myself and the sea was gone. There was water shimmering on all sides, but it didn't pose a threat. I was as comfortable with it as I had finally become with my inner union of medicine and the psychic. My office building and the ocean had finally merged.
F
EMALE
L
INEAGE
Around the ancient tower, I have been circling for a thousand years.
—R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE
Mothers and daughters. I was now forty years old. Over the last decade, I'd been a practicing psychiatrist, a member of the faculty at UCLA Medical Center, Saint John's Hospital, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. That I was devoted to a profession my mother understood and respected meant a great deal to her. It had taken compromise by us both, but we initially had found safe terrain by talking about medicine. My mother referred patients to me, and we discussed their treatment. It was easier to stay away from more personal subjects like our relationship or my boyfriends. In her eyes, no one was ever good enough for me: They were too old, too young, not Jewish, not financially secure enough.…Otherwise we'd argue—get defensive, take strong opposing positions, and then a blowup would inevitably follow. So we learned to use our discussions of medical issues as neutral ground where there was mutual trust.
As time passed, when I'd go to my parents' home for weekly Shabbat dinners, my mother and I grew able to talk about everything. We had found a more tender way of relating. Increasingly, she became my close friend, my confidante. Now more sure of myself, I no longer felt overshadowed by my mother's strength. I could be giving, express my feelings, and listen without always being on guard. Realizing how important my parents were to me, I was determined to savor the love we had for each other. As for my mother, she had been afraid of my anger, how fiercely I could lash out and wound her when we disagreed, and she had learned perhaps too well to avoid these clashes. Over the years, sensing that our time together was finite, she risked reaching out to me.
In the winter of 1990, my mother became ill with cancer. Twenty years before, she had been diagnosed with a slow-growing type of lymphoma, but her symptoms—small lumps in her neck—had been treated with minimal doses of radiation. Recently, however, she had been having low-grade fevers, indicating that the disease had progressed.
One February evening while my mother and I were drinking tea on the living room couch, chatting, feeling particularly close, she began to talk to me about her mother, Rose Ostrum. Though my mother had in the past spoken of Grandmom as a free spirit and ardent feminist, Rose lived most of her life in Philadelphia, and my parents and I moved to Los Angeles when I was six, so I never really knew her until her later years.
“I want to tell you something about Grandmom,” my mother began. “You know, she was always flamboyant. A whirlwind of energy, wildly opinionated. She walked with her head high. She managed the family pharmacy. And at a time when women didn't go to college, she sent two daughters to medical school.”
I suddenly noticed an undertone of urgency in my mother's voice, as she paused before going on, seeming to compose herself for what she was about to say.
“Judith, I don't know how to put this.” Several moments passed. “The point is…your grandmother had an unusual reputation in the neighborhood, a reputation for…for being a healer.”
“What?” I blurted out. I couldn't believe my ears. “You must be kidding.”
My mother pushed on with what she was determined to say. “Grandmom also had a knack for predicting events that came true. She was raised Jewish and kept a kosher home, but she believed that her abilities to heal and see into the future were separate from religion. These talents were passed down through the generations, from woman to woman. It was during the Depression. Many of her neighbors couldn't afford doctors. They would come to Grandmom when they were sick. She would take them back to a tiny, unheated wooden shed behind our home, would lay them down on a wooden table and place her hands on their body. Warmth would radiate from her hands, going deeper than the skin. When they sat up, my mother would give them herbal tea concocted from medicinal plants she grew herself. These were recipes that had been passed down from her mother.”
I felt dizzy, an intense heat rising into my face. My grandmother a psychic and a healer? “Mother,” I exclaimed bitterly, “why didn't you tell me this before?”
My mother's terrible look of anguish stopped me short. “Try to understand. I only wanted the best for you. Your grandmother was eccentric. Though she was beloved by most of our neighbors, some people thought she was weird. I was afraid for you.”
“But couldn't you see it would have helped me to feel that I wasn't alone?”
She noticed the struggle in my eyes, reached over to touch my hand. “Oh, Judith. When you were a young girl and I found out that you were psychic, I didn't want to encourage it. I didn't want you to be ridiculed like my mother sometimes was.”
I was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. I was flabbergasted and hurt. I felt cheated out of the closeness we could have had. How much difference this would have made to me as a child. To learn it now seemed far too late.
“Maybe I made a mistake,” my mother went on. “I was only concerned about your happiness. I was torn, so I downplayed your abilities to protect you.”
“So what made you bring this up tonight? What changed?”
“Judith, dear, please hear me out. Our lives are so different now. You stuck to your beliefs, carved out your own path, even though it's not the one I would have picked for you. But I respect your choice. We're not at war anymore. And I have so little left to risk.”
I was reeling. An old emptiness was being unearthed, a terribly familiar unnerving sensation that I had lived and breathed so often as a child. As these dark thoughts coursed through my mind, I fought back my tears. My greatest fear was that my rage would cause my mother to stop talking. I realized what an extraordinary moment this was, that my mother finally felt compelled to place my psychic abilities in context, to show me my true lineage—also that she wanted to clarify her own position, to set the record straight. Finally, of course, she had done everything but make explicit that she was really ill, with all that might imply.
My mother and I quietly watched the brilliant flames of the fire cast long shadows on the corner walls. I tried to collect myself. Looking over at my mother, now so tiny and frail, I felt my anger undercut, replaced by compassion. I would gain nothing from lashing out or blaming her. As she lay her head back and rested in front of the fire, I made a decision: I refused to allow my anger to poison whatever time we had left to be together.
By now, in my spiritual search, I had learned that everything in life has a time and a purpose. It was no mistake that I hadn't known about my grandmother before. I had had to struggle, to grow, to gain strength, in order to become the woman I was now. I began to comprehend that my battle to make the psychic my own had been crucial to my growth. It had been arduous, a fight I could have lost. To win, I had been pushed to my limits and then beyond. It was also true that my mother had been one of my greatest teachers. Her uncompromising dedication to her convictions had over and over again forced me to take a stand. Nonetheless, I had waited a lifetime to hear these words.
My mother leaned toward me, love radiating from her face. I had paid a price for her decisions, but I knew in this moment that none of them had been based on malice. She had done her best. As difficult as it was to accept this, as angry as I wanted to be, I couldn't deny that I also was experiencing a profound sense of relief. She was finally telling me the truth. I appreciated, too, that she'd taken an enormous chance that I wouldn't understand. She was, I saw, counting on the resilience of our love, on the intimacy we had worked so hard to establish.
As my mother and I sat there, silent, I remembered a recurring dream I'd had about my grandmother. Naked, her body soft and fleshy like a Renaissance nude, she would lead me through a labyrinth of dark underground tunnels. We proceeded down blind passageways without so much as a candle to light our path. I held on to her hand, trusting that she knew her way. There was a quality of yearning and timelessness in our closeness. I could now see that we were linked by an invisible cord. As long as I'd been having that dream, she had served as my guide.
“You know,” my mother said, bringing me back to the present, “when I was a child my mother would lay me down on a couch, and with a sweeping motion run her hand over me three times from head to foot. Then she would shake my feet up and down, making me giggle and squirm. And while she did this she'd repeat in Yiddish, ‘
Grace, Grubb, Gizunt.'
Through her hands she was imparting, as the words said, greatness, hardiness, and good health. She wanted to help me grow. She would only do this for children, to give them long life and make them beautiful. It was an extension of the healing work she used in the shed room with her patients.”
I was amazed. Suddenly I remembered my mother doing just this to me when I was a child. How I loved her to hold me then, the subtle scent of her perfume, the warmth of her touch, the tranquillity afterward. It was hard for me to take in, but my mother had known she was transmitting energy, although she refused to speak of it that way.
I realized that many parents are able to send love through their hands, but see it matter-of-factly, as a natural expression of their affection. They don't think of this as healing, but it is. When a mother holds her newborn in her arms, her joy and acceptance are directly communicated through touch. If our child is hurt, we rush to embrace her, to stay close and soothe her pain. Our impulse to comfort, our need for physical Contact, is predicated on an instinctual desire to give and receive love. This is the essence of being human: to share our hearts, to exchange warmth and be nurtured by one another.
When I was a child, sometimes just before I went to sleep, and always when I was ill, my mother would sit beside my bed and gently pat my stomach, creating a subtle rocking motion, until I either fell asleep or felt better. I found this sensation of love flowing into my body very soothing.
“Yes,” my mother said. “I learned this from your grandmother. I knew it was a form of healing, but I didn't want to fill your head with strange ideas,”
I breathed deeply and thought of Grandmom's death. At eighty, she had gotten Alzheimer's disease, losing her memory and regressing to a childlike state. Having moved to Los Angeles, she spent her last few years in a retirement home in the Pico-Fairfax district, a few miles from us. The night she died, I was the one they called, because my parents were traveling in Europe and couldn't be contacted. I was told that Rose had been sitting in her favorite rocking chair, eating a vanilla ice-cream cone. When she finished, she mentioned to her companion how delicious it was, and then quietly slumped over. No fanfare, no fuss. A perfect departure. Beyond this image of my grandmother, however, I barely knew her. I had missed so much.
Throughout that winter, my mother gradually opened up more about my psychic heritage. She told me that my cousin Sindy went into labor at midnight, with her second daughter. Melissa, her four-year-old, was sound asleep and unaware that her parents had rushed out to the hospital, leaving her in the care of Sindy's mother, Phyllis. At 2
A.M.
Melissa woke up, crying hysterically, “Something happened to Mommy!” No amount of reassurance would quiet her. The truth was that at exactly that moment Sindy's labor became complicated. The anesthetic had been too strong, she wasn't taking in enough oxygen, and a tube had to be inserted down her trachea in order for her to breathe. Although Sindy suffered no ill effects and the baby was healthy, Melissa had picked up the danger they were in. Because Sindy was herself somewhat psychic, she wasn't alarmed by Melissa's premonition. She recognized that Melissa might be psychic, too.