Interview with Bernie Siegel:

The Healer Within

By Judith Pennington

Bernie Siegel, bestselling author and visionary, advanced the medical profession by leaps and bounds in 1986 with the publication of Love, Medicine and Miracles and its claim that unconditional love is the most powerful stimulant in the immune system. A surgeon trained at Cornell Medical College and Yale University, Siegel was ill-prepared for the emotional suffering that would be part of his work, but he was willing to observe the world and educate himself in order to heal and be healed.

By 1978 a busy surgeon with post-traumatic stress syndrome and nowhere to go with his feelings, he began to search for solutions and found Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who had him sit with incurable patients and get in touch with his feelings. The famed author on death and dying also introduced Siegel to the writings of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the symbolic world of the unconscious mind, and the power of art to tap into higher, intuitive knowledge that could guide people in their quest for healing.

Having been an artist as a child, Siegel was quite intuitive himself and that same year went on to establish a related organization called Exceptional Cancer Patients. Its hallmark was and still is a specific form of individual and group therapy utilizing patients’ dreams, drawings and images to bring about personal change and healing. Siegel’s experiences with this group are the core of Love, Medicine and Miracles, which quickly climbed to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Siegel’s understanding of healing deepened profoundly when, after co-creating five children in seven years, he and his wife Bobbie grew exhausted and fell ill. Hospitalized for a severe infection, Siegel learned that factors like stress and change contribute to illness, and he began to explore with his patients the patterns associated with their ill health. Bernie, as he prefers to be called, also found that healing is stimulated by the willingness to express our feelings, change our lives and relationships, and address our spiritual needs.

Today, after his 1989 retirement as a surgeon and the publication of two more bestselling books [Peace, Love and Healing (1989) and How to Live Between Office Visits: A Guide to Life, Love and Health (1993)], Bernie is still a wayshower in the world of healing. He believes that healing comes from within and that the key to living between office visits is coming to know and appreciate our true value, worth and inner beauty. Contributing love to the world in our own unique way is another of his keys to health and healing.

The good doctor has observed that people struggle to get in touch with the intuitive self because many of us are just too busy thinking and are unwilling or unable to feel our feelings. He likes to say to people, "If you remain logical and intellectual, you become pathological: you can’t find your way in life. But if we get into feelings and into the body, then recovery comes, or at least the disease becomes a teacher."

In this interview, conducted in late 1998 and published here for the first time, Bernie Siegel talks in his quick, animated manner about the power of intuition in his own life and how the "inner healer" guides us to self-healing.

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Judith: You mentioned having lectured at the Association for Research and Enlightenment some 10 years ago (now 15), when you were just beginning your work. Did the information in the readings given by Edgar Cayce influence you in any way?

Bernie: What influenced me was just reading some of his intuitive statements. It wasn’t so much the therapeutic effects of castor oil and other remedies, but what he intuited about people’s bodies and illnesses and lives.

That fascinated me, because I saw it (intuitive abilities) in people’s dreams and drawings, you see. People would put on paper, or tell you, a dream and it would happen in the future. I would have this evidence and watch my patients and see how, six or seven months later, something would happen to them that they had already portrayed or put down.

Jung’s statement is that the future is unconsciously prepared long in advance and therefore can be guessed by clairvoyance. If you walk in to an Edgar Cayce* and he tells you what’s happening, then fine, it’s because you are creating your future and he’s able to read it. Now if you change, you can change your future. It’s not that we’re powerless.

J: You saw this with your patients?

B: Yes. Part of how I helped them was to get them to do drawings in my workshops. Some of the drawings related to choices in therapy. I would say, "Draw yourself in the operating room," and if it looked like hell, we might have a lot of trouble. So we’d say, "Let’s change the situation. You need a new doctor. Maybe you shouldn’t have the operation."

But the other work: when they would do things like scenes in their imaginations, we’d see past, present and future. If you said to me, "I don’t know where to move to," I’d say, "Draw a picture" and you’d put a certain city in a certain position. I’d say "This is where you’re heading and this is where you’ve been, you see?" And you’d say, "All right. I’ll stay on my path and go live there." You don’t resist it. If it didn’t feel right, then you’d say, "All right. Maybe I’ll say no to that job or that relationship."

J: So this is all about inner knowing. How does this play out in you?

B: Well, I stay open a lot and Bobby has had lots of precognitive dreams. You don’t say to your wife, "Honey that’s crazy," but you live it and see it happening. And the other thing is that science is now catching up with this, so that we can measure what goes on in the human body and how, when we have certain thoughts and feelings, it changes our chemistry. So all these things are really going together, you see. When you’re not liking your job or looking forward to the future, you are your body chemistry.

I call it "the energy." I don’t read auras, but I can walk into a room with patients and know who’s getting better and who isn’t. You look at them and you sense something about their energy. People walk up to me and I can say, "You’re getting better, don’t worry." You feel it. That’s the only way I can describe it. You see it and feel it, and it’s not about radiation or colors. I don’t know what I sense, but it’s there.

Others who may have wonderful tests, you look at them and you know this is not good. There’s no energy being given off. I look at them and say, "You know, I don’t have a good feeling. Something’s going on," and they usually say, "Yes, I know." They’re aware inside, even though the tests have been okay, that they’re not well.

J: You’re saying that your inner knowing picks up subclinical information?

B: Yeah. Especially as a physician in the office. Certain people just walk in and I know I don’t need to worry about this person: they’re just radiating health. Now, they may have had a life-threatening illness and things might still be happening, but you know they’re in a phase of getting well and that’s what you sense.

To me, the Cayce readings are saying that we’re all capable of this. I was just talking with someone about animals knowing when someone will have an epileptic seizure. Or when their owner is returning home, they’re sitting in the window 15 minutes before, yet can’t possibly know the owner is on the way home. You do it as an experiment, arriving at different times–walking, riding–and it isn’t that they hear you.

I see it at home when I’m not well or am tired: our pets come and restore me. And if I’m just sleeping late because I’m lazy, they don’t show up. So my comment is that we all have the same basic nervous system. It’s not that they have some special talent, but that they haven’t lost the talent. As we grow up, we become thinkers and you lose that talent.

J: Yet intuition is available to us through different psychic senses, isn’t it, so that everyone has some extant ability.

B: Exactly. I tell you, our daughter is very good at gambling. I don’t mean that she does it obsessively, but when she goes on vacation, she’ll tell her husband to play a certain number and they make hundreds of dollars. It’s fantastic. She gets a message.

When the phone rings, there are times that I know who’s calling and I’ll have fun saying a name and they’ll say, "How’d you know it was me?" I’ll say, "Well I knew." I asked my daughter: "So you know who it is, too?" She said, "No, dad, I know when the phone is going to ring."

That’s a whole transcendent step above what I’m talking about. I will be tuned in sometimes, and when the event happens, I know. But she knows when it’s going to happen.

I was in the airport the other day and everybody gave me the wrong information: "Where’s my plane leaving?" "Gate 25." Well, that plane was leaving two hours later and my ticket was made out wrong for this other plane. I really stopped and said, "Now are you supposed to be on the other plane? Is this to save your life? to meet someone?" This is where I’ll sit down and say, "Is this an intuitive awareness, is something happening in the universe, or is this someone who doesn’t know how to do their job?"

The feeling I got was that this lady didn’t pay attention to my schedule, because I’d changed it, and she gave me a morning and an afternoon flight, instead of one after the other.

J: Or this was meant to help tune you in to your inner knowing, your development of awareness.

B: Yes. And to say, stop rushing around through the airport and pay attention to which plane is meant for you. I do that every morning when I’m home–wake up an hour early. I always take that time. The day waits for me to be with myself, listening to the voice and the wisdom and all the things that happen.

It’s incredible. Sometimes I’m upset with myself for not carrying paper and pencil to make notes, because it’s a trance state and when I get back home I’m back in my intellect and forget the wisdom. I know it’s in me and it’ll come up at some point, but it’s frustrating when you’re trying to stay aware of it. I keep writing, writing, writing, and when I have time, I sit down, look at all that I’ve noted, elaborate on it and keep tuned in that way.

J: What’s next for you, in your work and in your life?

B: I’d say it’s basically the spiritual journey, just trying to help people live, period. It isn’t always about physical illness and all the complaints we have: if you help them with the complaints, they live longer, healthier lives. So it’s getting back to the love and the age-old messages of what’s the point of all this and why are we here. Questions that, really, physicians should be answering for people facing their mortality, but you know, the spiritual and philosophical are not part of our training, so we work with the mechanical aspects but don’t help people with the other issues.

J: You’re seeing enormous changes, aren’t you, in the world’s recognition and awareness of–and even in the medical professional, I would assume–this inner knowing, these faculties of intuition, and how to use them to stretch the limitations of logic?

B: I wouldn’t use the word enormous with the medical profession; it’s always literally 10 years behind where I would like it to be; medical training is always mechanistic and not experiential, from the standpoint of what someone is living. But from other aspects, yes, I’m seeing the shift. And again, I think it comes from pain. The more difficult things get in life, the more we are looking at options and choices. They can be numbing, distracting choices, or they can be life-enhancing choices.

J: Did personal difficulty play a role in your own growth?

B: I became a doctor for a lot of nice reasons. Nobody in my family was sick, nobody was dying. I didn’t need to save the world. I just wanted to help a lot of people. I enjoyed using my hands, I was an artist as a kid and I loved science. I mean, this was just like a natural: all your love comes together.

That’s why I had so much pain and suffering, because I wasn’t ready for the death, for the illness, for all that I saw. I’m in here to love people and help them, and I couldn’t stop them from dying and being sick. Nobody had ever sat down with Bernie Siegel in the educational process and said, "Why do you want to be a doctor? How are you going to deal with all this stuff?" So I suffered greatly. But my parents and wife and children helped guide me. They were my critics and teachers.

I always loved, and I wish I’d come across it 50 years ago, a line by the Sufi poet Rumi, "Your criticism polishes my mirror." When I heard him say that, it was like, "Oh thank you. Now I know why they’re all telling me how to be better. It isn’t that I’m terrible. They’re trying to help me."

J: So it was compassion, but it was also love that carried you through and kept you going.

B: Yeah. But I used to be stung sometimes by patients who would tell me, one in particular, how angry I was. I said to him, "I didn’t like what I had to do to you!" and he said, "But you took it out on me!" And I thought to myself, what an incredible thing for him to do. He was to be sent home that day, but he waited in the hospital to tell me how badly I’d treated him. Now, when you think about that, why did this man wait to tell me? Because he saw the love and concern in my face and he knew I needed help. So he became my therapist. He sat and waited for me, to tell me.

When he finished, I told him I was sorry and he said, "Okay, I’ll give you that bottle of liquor after all." We laughed, but it was his desire to sit and teach me.

J: We’re all teaching each other, aren’t we? That’s the bottom line, isn’t it?

B: Yes, but most of us are not willing to listen to the teaching, to hear the criticism. We say, "Hey, you’re hurting my ego, it’s not my fault"; we can’t say I’m sorry. So we’ve got to learn to say I’m sorry.

J: Is there more of this awakening, because of you, in the medical profession?

B: Yeah, I think so. I confront people more, because they can’t say, "Well, he’s a therapist, a social worker." They have to say, "He’s a doctor." So it creates more agitation in physicians. Those who agree with you can be transformed by you, and there are many physicians who say, "Thank you for what you’ve done for me, for guiding me." Others are mad as hell at you, but it’s because of what you’re stirring in them, that they’re not willing to look at.

J: So that makes you a doctor of not only the body and mind, but also of the soul.

B: Yes. We all are!