The Spiritual Psyche and Health by Wendie Colter

Wendie Colter

Wendie Colter, MCWC, CMIP, is a Certified Medical Intuitive, Master Certified Wellness Coach, and founder/CEO of The Practical Path^®, Inc. Her accredited certification program, Medical Intuitive Training™, has been pivotal in helping wellness professionals develop and optimize their inherent intuition. Wendie’s trailblazing research on medical intuition is published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and she is the author of the groundbreaking book, Essentials of Medical Intuition: A Visionary Path to Wellness (Watkins/Penguin-Random House).

The Spiritual Psyche and Health

by Wendie Colter, MCWC, CMIP

Excerpted from Essentials of Medical Intuition by Wendie Colter MCWC, CMIP and published by Watkins/Penguin-Random House, 2022.

Intuition may perhaps be best described as a way to access the interconnected nature of human consciousness. The term “nonduality,” also known as “nonlocal” awareness, comes from the Sanskrit word advaita, meaning “non-separation.”

Referred to as the quantum mind, entanglement, and even “cosmic soup,” scientific evidence of nonlocality suggests that human consciousness is not confined to our minds or bodies, or even to specific moments in time.[1]

In the Handbook of Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Mental Health, psychiatrist Eric Leskowitz calls this nonlocal wisdom “transpersonal” intuition, a type of consciousness

that operates “beyond the reach of the everyday personality, beyond the reach of the five physical senses, and beyond the limitations of space and time.”[2] The metaphysical belief in a higher self, higher source, or soul, is another way to frame this intuitive connection.

Sadly, our spiritual nature has long been ignored by biomedicine as a factor in health and healing. In 380 BCE, Plato wrote, “This is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body.”[3]

Tools and Skills for Expanded Perception

Over my years of teaching, I have noticed that medical intuition does not work better for one profession over another. A natural predisposition for intuition is also not a requirement. I have taught skeptics and true believers alike. Medical intuition can help wellness professionals do their jobs with greater discernment into the human condition. And certainly, we all have the ability to access intuition for our own wellbeing.

There are many ways in which medical intuitives gather information. Following are some fundamental components of the practice.

Life Force Energy: The Vital Spark

The belief in a vital life force energy that can influence and enhance our physical health has been a part of recorded history for thousands of years.

Ayurveda, a 5,000-year-old system of medicine from India, defines this vital force as prana, a Sanskrit term meaning “exhalation” or “breath of life.” The ancient Greeks theorized vital life force as pneuma, the connection between “breath” and the soul or spirit. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which dates back to the third century BCE, embodies this energy as qi (chi), meaning “air,” or “breath.” The movement of qi through a system of meridians, or channels in the body, is considered basic to human health.

From the 1600s, early founders of modern chemistry, biology and physiology defined the idea of a “vital spark” of life force as “vitalism” – the belief that “living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things.”[4] This non-physical element was thought to be a distinctive spirit or substance that infused all living beings.

Vitalism was founded on the holistic principles of the body’s natural healing ability, the role of healer as facilitator, and the influence of the mind on physical health. Prominent throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, vitalism stood in opposition to a growing concept that symptoms and diseases have a purely mechanistic and materialistic cause – what we know today as “biomedicine” or conventional, Western or allopathic medicine.

Both chiropractic medicine and osteopathy, founded in the late 1800s, are built on the philosophies of vitalism. Naturopathic doctors are still taught the foundations of vitalism, and it is considered an integral tenet of the practice.[5]

Contemporary energy healing methods, based on the rebalancing and restoration of vital life force energy, now use the term “subtle energy.” But, regardless of the name, people have long understood that there is an intangible form of energy that imbues, engages and animates all life.

The Biofield

Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss alchemist and physician, reported “a healing energy that radiates within and around man like a luminous sphere.”[6]

The biofield can be understood as containing both dense energy, similar to the electromagnetic fields generated by the heart and brain – as measured by electroencephalograms and electrocardiograms – and extremely subtle energy fields utilized in energy healing practices. Scientists are investigating the biofield to better understand its properties and functions, and theoretical foundations are still evolving.[7]

Also known as the “human energy field,” the biofield consists of the chakra system and the aura, or auric field.[8] The auric field is described as multiple layers of energy that surround the body. Medical intuitives may perceive the aura as a series of colors, energy fields, vibrations or frequencies.

The chakra system is derived from the ancient Hindu philosophy of spiritual energy centers contained within the human body. Roughly aligned with the glands of the endocrine

system, six major chakras are positioned along the spine, with a seventh chakra situated at the top of the head. Chakras are depicted in the sequential colors of the rainbow and as the

unfolding petals of a lotus flower. Each chakra governs an aspect of human awareness: physical security, emotional balance, self-identity, love, communication, intuition and the higher spiritual states of consciousness. The chakras also relate to various organs and body systems.

A medical intuitive can review disturbances and blockages in the flow of energy within the biofield. If one pulls apart the schematic of how an illness may develop, subtle energy

changes can be intuitively observed early in the process. A person may sense that something is “off,” but may not be able to identify what it might be. Trained medical intuitives may recognize anomalies or disruptions in a client’s biofield before an issue manifests, and can then refer the client to their licensed healthcare provider.

Author Bio:

[1] Dossey, L. (2014). One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters . Hay House Inc. (pp.xxvi, 189–194).

[2] Leskowitz, E. (2001). Chapter 13: Medical Intuition. In S. Shannon (Ed.), Handbook of Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Mental Health . Academic Press. (p.275).

[3] Jowett, B. (Translator) (2019). In Charmides: or Temperance by Plato (written 380 B.C.E.). Independently Published. (pp.154–160). Retrieved November 2, 2021, from http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/charmides.html

[4] Bechtel, W, & Williamson, R. C. (1998). Vitalism. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Routledge; Coulter, I., Snider, P., & Neil, A. (2019). Vitalism – A Worldview Revisited: A Critique of Vitalism and Its Implications for Integrative Medicine. Integrative Medicine (Encinitas, Calif.) , 18 (3), 60–73.

[5] Kaptchuk, T. J., & Eisenberg, D. M. (1998). Chiropractic. Archives of Internal Medicine , 158 (20), 2215–2224; Masiello, D. J. (1999). Osteopathy – A Philosophical Perspective: Reflections on Sutherland’s Experience of the Tide. Journal of the American Academy of Osteopathy , 9 (2), 22–39; Standish, L. J., Calabrese, C., & Snider, P. (2006). The Naturopathic Medical Research Agenda: The Future and Foundation of Naturopathic Medical Science. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine , 12 (3), 341–345.

[6] Chrisman, L. (2005). Energy Medicine . The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine (2nd ed.). Thompson Gale. (p. 687).

[7] Hammerschlag, R., Levin, M., McCraty, R., Bat, N., Ives, J. A., Lutgendorf, S. K., & Oschman, J. L. (2015). Biofield Physiology: A Framework for an Emerging Discipline. Global Advances in Health and Medicine , 4 (Suppl), 35–41; Jain. S. (2021). Healing Ourselves: Biofield Science and the Future of Health . Sounds True. (pp.160–168).

[8] Shields, D., Fuller, A., Resnicoff, M., Butcher, H. K., & Frisch, N. (2016). Human Energy Field: A Concept Analysis. Journal of Holistic Nursing , 35 (4), 352–368; Dale, C. (2009). The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy (Illustrated ed.). Sounds True. (pp.147–155, 251–268)