Spiritual Research in Medicine & Therapy

By Adam Blanning

How do we engage in spiritual research, especially for medicine and therapy?

Should we start with substance or with process - should we begin with attention only for spiritual beings or focus most on their physical manifestations? What helps structure our work so that we are being both honest about our capacities as well as accurate in our perceptions?

These questions come up regularly in teaching anthroposophic medicine. What is interesting is that we often approach these questions already having a favored starting point. That’s because something already came alive for us in our own biography, an experience that spurred us to study spiritual science.

When you ask people about their own “spark” experience, some share how they first encountered anthroposophy by finding Steiner’s lectures in a library, or being handed one of his books by a friend. Through encounter with Steiner’s teachings the power of thinking begins to shine - so brightly and so purely that the study of anthroposophy, as a vast body of knowledge, then becomes a central task in many people’s biographies. Such power of thinking brings deepened soul forces and new perceptions. Once we meet enlivened thinking - the lifting of physical perceptions back into process, “what is now perceived in the strengthened force of thinking is not pale or shadowlike at all - it is full of inner content, vividly real and graphic”. 1 We study, which helps lead us to spiritual truths.

For other people, the fire may have been lit in quite a different way. It may not have started with ideas, but with a singular experience; an experience that falls outside of usual descriptions about the world. It can be direct perception of spiritual realities, like the companionship of nature beings as a child, or the journey of a neardeath experience. Those impressions are powerful, yet sometimes so different from the conversations of everyday life, that it may be hard to put them in context. Who can one share these things with? But then, a person hears the descriptions of anthroposophy and feels a kind of homecoming. “Ah, that is what I was experiencing. Now I know what it is.”

It is common to hear some variation of these two kinds of stories with people who begin studying anthroposophic medicine. Both approaches are important pathways into the work.

While we naturally feel most comfortable with our own starting point, and may even argue that it is, in fact, the best way to approach anthroposophy, the truth is that medical spiritual research stands in between the two - between carefully formed thought and broadly open perception. Sometimes we need to study so that we can better perceive. Sometimes we begin with the perception, then study to understand our experience.

The place we practice this most in medicine is the therapeutic encounter between a patient and practitioner. This space really lies at the heart of this kind of spiritual research. We may engage in other kinds of medical research as well, ranging from statistical clinical analysis to karmic patterns of illness. But in speaking with patients we receive reminders that we must, indeed, move back and forth between these two paths.

Let’s look at some examples.

From my own experience, I can share that after finishing my medical training (many years of intense study and memorization) I had a chance to begin working with a Waldorf school as a new “school doctor.” It was an opportunity that came without any preset expectations; I was new to the work and the school had never had a doctor work with them before. One day a month could now be devoted just to observing children in Waldorf classrooms. Preparation for the visits consisted of reading about particular constitutional descriptions from Steiner and then writing something for the teachers. This seemed a good way to learn to better observe children. What was amazing was that every month, for a whole school year, the process we planned to discuss (and which had been carefully studied) showed itself beautifully during classroom observations! There was always a clear example, it was remarkable. This was so different than the book study of medical training.

I now realize it was being given as a gift, a kind of whispering from the spiritual world, saying “look closely, for you can actually see the spirit working all around you all the time. It is not so far away!” Surely the preparatory work was an essential part. It opened a space for seeing the role of the astral body in sensing, and the relationship between bodily etheric growth forces and thinking and memory forces. Each monthly meeting felt like a small moment of “breakthough.”

Since then, child observation has proven to not always be so straightforward, though years of practice and repetition have refined those kinds of observations and proven their lawfulness. On many days they even feel self-evident. But study was the initial starting point.

Yet, not all aspects of encounter can be prepared ahead of time. Sometimes we just have to be open. Indeed, really good listening often depends on whether you can set all prior knowledge, all preconceptions, to the side. When that can be achieved, strong pictures may emerge. The pictures are not easy to describe. For some practitioners they come as colors, as movements, tones, smells, or stories. Once a picture is found, the therapeutic task then becomes to bring the picture, the gesture, back into words—words which can be communicated to the patient or to a colleague, as well as specific therapeutic steps, which for a doctor might include choosing the exact potency for a remedy. That “translation process,” from picture to specific steps, sometimes pours through quickly and can be done right there on the spot. Sometimes it’s necessary to say “I need to think about this a bit more, but I will let you know the plan later today or tomorrow.” From my own personal experience, there seems to be a time limit, however, for the translation. The picture needs to be taken hold, usually during that same day, otherwise the immediacy of the impression begins to fade. Full logical justification for a therapeutic intervention may still not fully emerge even then, but only become clear weeks or even months down the road. But the potency of the therapeutic picture is clear. Steiner shared: “We must begin from processes, not substances, from events in progress, not finished products. And when we speak about substance, we must picture that the substance appearing in the outer world to our senses in nothing more than a process come to rest.” 2

Medicine offers regular feedback about how well you are moving between them. It’s important not to get stuck too much on one side.

Steiner cautioned - actually almost scolded - a group of young doctors, when asked if it was really necessary to carry a “will to heal” as part of medical studies. He makes clear that study, without the wish to make it practical and helpful in the world could only arise out of a “hypertrophy of knowledge”, and that actually your will to heal should be so great that you need to restrain yourself so as to “not break loose in such a way that I want to heal all the healthy people!” 3

On the other side, Steiner cautioned and emphasized how important it is to also not engage in “dilettantism,” especially within the field of medicine. 4 Dedicated training and vocational responsibility push you to study not just your own perceptions, but how those experiences relate to larger established patterns of health and illness. If a spiritual perception is true, it will also be observable in physiologic patterns, in biochemistry and blood tests, even in a tissue biopsy or x-ray. Spiritual process flows down into its manifestations. If these levels do not match, then we best look again and reconsider whether we have the right view. Sometimes our own emotion, metabolism, or sensation will cloud our perception. 5 This means that a first impression made during a medical visit may provide true spiritual insight, but that it is good to use the rest of the conversation and physical examination to make sure the perception was accurate and not a distortion.

In this way we can experience spiritual research in the realm of medicine. Other forms of anthroposophic work may focus on the relationship of the human being to the stars, to the soil, to the spoken word. For medicine, therapeutic potency and insight can unfold in that space between substance and process. 

You can hear a new podcast series Extending the Art of Healing Through Anthroposophy, with Dr. Adam Blanning and Laura Scappaticci, online at this address: healingandanthroposophy.transistor.fm

1 Fundamentals of Therapy , Chapter One, CW 27

2 Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and Medical Therapy , Lecture 1, 11. April 1921 (CW 313)

3 Course for Young Doctors , Lecture 2, 22. April 1924, Dornach (CW 316)

4 Steiner speaks several times about the importance of full medical training as well as not blurring vocational tasks. See Fundamentals of Therapy , Chapter One; Pastoral Medicine , Lecture 1, 8. September 1924 (CW 318)

5 See Steiner’s discussion of the sense of smell and mystical experiences, 8. August 1920 (CW 199)