Meeting Aesclepius

This was a very emotional guided exercise for me. The person I chose to focus on was my grandfather, only I didn't know he was my grandfather until after he died. I was raised to believe that he was my uncle or my godfather. From the time I was a young child until the day he died he was known as 'Daddy Cliff'. He was the kindest, most open-hearted, loving man I have ever known. No matter where he went, no matter how beautiful or how homely the people looked he always found a kind word to say about them. Women could be waif-like or obese, have long hair or no hair, have a beautiful smile or no teeth and he would still say they were beautiful. He always saw the good in people. Being around him always made me feel safe.

When I brought his image into my mind he looked the way I will always remember him - sitting on his living room floor wearing a button down shirt, cardigan sweater, dark trousers and black socks with no shoes. We used to sit on his floor for hours and talk or play. When the beam of white light went from his head to mine I immediately got a warm feeling and then I felt energized. When the beam of white light went from his throat to mine I felt a tightness as if to say, "Only say good things about people." When the beam of light went from his heart to mine I began to cry because I miss him very much. I never got to know him as my grandfather and that is something I wish for more than anything. I think if circumstances were different I would be a different person than I am today. Feeling the light emanate from him to enter my forehead and then spread throughout my body was like receiving a big, warm hug from him. I loved this man so much and when I first went to college after I graduated from high school, he was my savior. He was my sanity. Feeling him become a part of me will make me strive harder to be more like him. Again, he was the best man I've ever known.

"One cannot lead another where one has not gone himself.” (Dacher, 2006) This means that a health and wellness professional must first do the things he wants his patients to do before he asks them to do them. In other words, walk the walk before you talk the talk. A health and wellness professional cannot expect their clients/patients to meditate when you have never meditated. How do you know meditation works to lower blood pressure if you've never tried it? We have to be able to definitely say that we have tried the exercises we are prescribing/suggesting and they work because we have used them. As health and wellness professionals we definitely have an obligation to our patients to continue practicing our exercises in an effort to reach human flourishing because it would be hypocritical to suggest they do something we haven't tried or don't believe in. We must be the teachers and the knowledgeable ones.