-Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories

-Goethe

It was a death sentence. The doctor predicted she would not survive the year. Her muscles wasted away. She felt, she said, “like a bowl of Jello in a wheelchair.”[1]

She hated her body for all the ways it had let her down. For a few months she stewed, depressed and angry. But after enough time had passed, she couldn’t help but remember what she often taught others about the connection between the mind and the body—and she got curious. What could she do to make the most of her last few months?

She decided she needed to change her relationship to her body. All her life, ever since a childhood bout with polio left her disfigured, she had hated her body. This couldn’t be good, she realized. If her mind and her body were connected, what chance could her body have if her mind hated it?

So McDonald got to work. “As I sat in my wheelchair, six months from death, a single, passionate desire pressed to the front of my mind. In my last months of life I wanted to experience unconditional love. I wanted to know that sweetness.”[2] She decided she needed to love herself, unconditionally, and she needed to start by learning to love her body. Her first step was to notice and write down all of the negative thoughts she had about her body each day, and all the positive ones. When she added up the numbers, her self-hatred was obvious. So she determined that every day she would sit in front of the mirror and identify one part of her body that was acceptable to her—no matter how small or apparently insignificant. She countered every negative thought with a positive one. With that, she began rewriting her life’s script. She sat in front of the mirror every day and spoke words of love and affection to her reflection. At first, she had to fake it, because no love would come. But soon enough the self-acceptance became real. “Eventually,” she wrote later, “I found myself completely content with me and my physical body. And as my experience of love for myself deepened, I was finally able to love others as well as accept their love for me.”[3]

And then something miraculous started to unfold. McDonald began to get her body back. Slowly, she recovered. Completely.

Much later, in 1994, McDonald and her colleagues published a study exploring how mental outlook affects ALS outcomes. The research team found that even when controlling for variables such as length of illness, age, and severity of symptoms, people with ALS who demonstrated psychological well-being had a longer survival time than those in psychological distress.[4] This was quite a monumental finding. What it meant was that McDonald was on to something fourteen years earlier when, faced with death, she decided to figure out how to love herself.

I first heard McDonald’s story as a participant in the HOPE (Healing of Persons Exceptional) support groups back in 1989 when I was very ill with chronic fatigue syndrome. (To learn more about HOPE, click here: Healing of Persons Exceptional.) HOPE founder Ken Hamilton, MD, told our little group the story, and I, for one, never forgot it. Lately, I have been finding myself telling this story to some of my clients.

It’s been 31 years since Evy McDonald was first diagnosed with ALS. I emailed Ken for help filling out the details of a story that had hidden away in a nook of my brain for 22 years, and found out that Evy McDonald is still alive and kicking, the pastor of a church in the state of New York. In her picture, she looks full of life.

[2] Bernie S. Siegel, M.D., Peace, Love and Healing, Harper & Row, New York, 1989, p. 31-32.

[3] Evelyn McDonald, R.N., M.S., M.Div., “Another Perspective of ALS,” Holistic Medicine, March/April 1988. http://www.ahha.org/articles.asp?Id=55

[4] Evelyn R. McDonald, M.S., Sue A. Wiedenfeld, Ph.D., et. al., “Survival in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: The Role of Psychological Factors,” Archives of Neurology,  Vol. 51, January 1994.

-Carl Jung

-Plato

-James Hollis, from What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

She opened the book to its preface and began to read.

When people sit in Circle, wrote its author, Christina Baldwin-when everybody’s voice is of equal value, when people speak and listen from the heart-monumental changes can happen. She called it “Circle Process.” The idea was simple, really, but profound. Landon-Malone bought the book, took it home and read it cover to cover, and when she finished reading, she put Calling the Circle up on a shelf. Not yet. She knew a day would come when she could practice the principles laid out in this book, but not yet.

Every story of a successful change movement begins with the same phrase, says a management consultant Baldwin quotes in a second book about Circle Process: “Some friends and I started talking….” When Landon-Malone and some of her friends started talking, what they envisioned turned into True North, a healthcare center in Falmouth, Maine, where relationship is considered central to healing.

One day, a few years after that fateful moment when Calling the Circle first dropped into her life, Landon-Malone and two other nurses—Kristen Lombard and Chrissa Evans—decided to form a holistic task force. They called a meeting, open to anyone at the hospital who wanted to attend. People from almost every department showed up to that first meeting—physical therapists, occupational therapists, people from dietary, the chaplain, a secretary, and even a custodian—twenty-two in all. “And the energy was huge,” says Landon-Malone. “There was a lot of excitement.”

But the energy lacked focus. And that’s when Landon-Malone realized it was time to pull that book back off the shelf and incorporate circle process into the vision and practice of this group.

They began each Circle with three breaths “and then we checked in with each other one by one, listening with and speaking from our hearts,” says Landon-Malone, thinking back on those early days. “We became a community united in a common vision and on a common path.”

Circle process—which is consciously non-hierarchal—leveled the playing field. Each voice matters in circle. Leadership is shared.

“A lot of our work was about learning to have relationship,” says Landon-Malone. “It grounded me before seeing patients. Everybody felt their practice gaining in depth, and their ability to be in relationship with their patients…. We called it reverent participatory relationship.”

Everything from the light fixtures to the carpet was decided in circle. There was a shopping circle, a decorating circle, a library circle, a vision and mission circle. They read wide and deep about integrative centers—what worked and what to avoid. Thousands of Circle hours later, in January of 2002, True North opened its doors for the very first time.

Ten years later, MDs, DOs, naturopaths and nurse practitioners work alongside acupuncturists, massage therapists, mental health and substance abuse counselors, shamans, and more, sharing the wisdom of their modalities with the larger circle of practitioners, enhancing patient care by treating the whole person.

Here is just a taste of what makes True North special:

• Its system of governance, based on Circle Process, is non-hierarchical and features rotating leadership that values each person’s gifts.
• Decisions are discussed collaboratively and made by consensus.
• Medical consultations allow time for collaboration, relationship, and story to be a part of treatment.
• In CircleCare case presentations, practitioners from a broad range of disciplines share their wisdom as they review specific patient cases.
• Every practitioner who signs a contract with True North commits to providing 10% of services to low-income people at no cost or for Time Credits (See http://www.hourexchangeportland.org/ for more information about Hour Exchange Portland.)
• The Reiley Fund helps low-income people access tests and treatments they would otherwise be unable to afford.

“Our story,” says Landon-Malone, “is one of community. In order to change the world, we must be in community first.” It is a story of gathering forces. It’s a story about the power of the Circle.

-Willard Gaylin, writer

-from the movie, I Served the King of New England