During all this time, I was a patient as well. And the experience I had as a patient didn't fit with the picture of illness I had been given as a doctor. I have been ill for 48 years.

RD:  Had your doctor succeeded or failed in your case?

RNR:  According to what I was taught about healing, my doctors have failed miserably. It began to come to me that unless doctors engaged this thing that was growing in sick people, unless they addressed healing, which is always possible, even when cure isn't, we were failing people. I started talking about my theory, that we have been failing our patients for years. It was not very well received.

And I had gone to Esalen Institute. There are times when you're on some straight and narrow path, and something happens in your life, and you start off in a different direction. Sometimes we don't even realize it's happened. It may be one tiny little thing, like a single workshop, and your whole life path will be different.

The associate director of the medical clinic at Stanford came to me one day and put some colored papers on my desk-I can remember this very clearly because it was an important turning point in my life-and said "There's a place called Esalen Institute, and they want a dozen doctors to come down there. They're working on something called the human potential movement, and there's a woman down there who wants to see if these ideas have anything to do with health and illness and the recovery from disease."

At the time, Esalen was the center of one of the largest revolutions in thinking and perspective in the last century, but I'd never heard of it. That's how insulated medicine is. When he explained what Esalen Institute is, my first thought was "Oh, what a great way to meet men," because I had just broken up with my fella. And so I went.

If you had asked me at that time what my life path was, I would have told you: I was going to be the first female head of the department of pediatrics on the west coast who was a woman. Every move I had made professionally for 10 years prior to that was towards this single goal. And I think that if I had understood at that moment that this choice of going to Esalen Institute would mean giving up pediatrics entirely, resigning from the prestigious faculty position that I was in and being a medical outcast for about 12 years, I would never have gone down there.

RD:  So you weren't searching for a new course, or a new path.

RNR:  No, I wasn't. I was very much on track. But I think the soul takes us by whatever handle is sticking out, and moves us along in a direction that serves its purposes. And it may be years before we understand where we're really going-half that time we think we're going somewhere else. So I went down there to meet men. But that's not what happened.

When I went to Esalen, I met Sukie and Stewart Miller, who had a residency program in which, once a month, doctors spent the whole weekend with one of the seminal thinkers of the time, like Elmer Green, who wrote Beyond Biofeedback, or George Leonard. These amazing people would sit with us and talk about the growing edge of their thinking, stuff we had never heard of. We would practice those new ideas, like biofeedback or Aikido. Then we would come back to the Bay Area and have meetings to see how either the thing itself, or the principles behind it, might have something to do with illness, health and the recovery of health.

RD:  And you discovered it did, and that changed the course of your life?

RNR:  Yes, it did. The interesting thing is, there were 11 men in this program and me. At the end of the program, they all went back to their respective practices. And I quit Stanford and began doing what I do now. There was only one of us who went on. Isn't that interesting? It seems like the weekend with George Leonard, when he introduced us to Aikido, gave me a completely different sense of my own relationship to my illness. In western medicine, the opponent comes at you, and you either overcome the opponent or you are overcome by it. But in Aikido, you take your energy and you blend it with the energy of the attack, and you go off on a vector in a new direction with a new perspective that you would never have without the attack. And at the end of the encounter, the Aikido master thanks the opponent for the gift of his energy, which has allowed the new perspective, the new direction to be born.

That's what had happened to me when I became ill. It was like an Aikido encounter, and I learned that perhaps there's a way to deal with an illness as an honorable opponent and thank it for the new perspective, the greater ability to live from the heart and from the soul that it brought into your life. The minute George described this to us, it was like it all came together. I understood how all of the experiences in my previous 17 years or so related to this illness, and I saw that everyone around me who was ill was struggling to find this same way. They were struggling to use illness as a force for growth in their lives. And it's the nature of suffering to be a force for growth unless we get stuck in anger or self-pity or something like that.

RD:  You said earlier that even if someone is terminally ill, they can still find healing.

RNR:  Many people die more whole than they've ever lived. Anything can be used to bless the life in others, or anything can be turned into something that blesses your own life. I've seen people bless the life in others by the way in which they die. A blessing is not about butterflies and rainbows. It's about the power of the human spirit.

Illness, injury or disease can be an awakening, rather than a setback. Suppose you suffer what some people may call a misfortune, and you find yourself thinking, "Now I'm back to the financial state I was in five years ago," or "Now I'm alone again," or "Now I can no longer do my sport because I've broken my ankle." These are opportunities to discover who you are-who you really are-and what's important to you. They're opportunities to live life more passionately, more fully than you have ever dreamed.

RD:  Let's say you have a chronic pain that you didn't have before. And the pain makes you unable to hike in the mountains. And you loved hiking. How could that possibly be a rich opportunity to find your true self?  

RNR:  It depends on how a person reacts. For some people, it's an opportunity to be a victim for the rest of their lives. Other people will look at not just the activity that they can't do anymore, but why that activity is important. What's the meaning of it? And they will find other ways to have that meaning in their lives, usually ways that are much more profound than the way they've lost. I was thinking about a young man that I saw years ago. He was a football player, who no longer played football because of a sports injury. He spent about eight years trying to destroy himself with alcohol and cars and just about anything you can use. And in the course of our working together, he got a sense of what football was really about for him. He understood what it meant to be a part of a team, to have a passionate common goal with other people, to move past the obstacles to victory as he saw it. He realized he could still do those things, except he could no longer do them on the football field, and he became an innovative psychologist, whose name you would know. He has done a great deal of work with groups-in fact, a lot of what we know about groups and group process comes from his work. I think he'd probably be a retired football player living in the past, now that he's about 50. It's really all about the will to live. I think there's something in people that struggles towards wholeness. It's very much a part of essential human nature.

RD:  So it's more than just a will to live, it's a yearning for wholeness.

RNR:  Yes-the will to wholeness. The will to manifest one's dream of oneself. Even though you may not be able to say in words what that dream is, and it may exist deep in your unconscious. The Buddhists talk about the Buddha seed in an individual, that part of us that can become more Buddha-like, more whole. These are not static things. This is a dynamic thing. And the will to live manifests itself often as anger. When you wreck your knee, or you get a diagnosis like Crohn's Disease, anger is usually the first expression of your will to live. It was for me. I was enraged for 10 or 12 years. I hated all the well people. I was unfairly a victim, and it was all your fault that I was a victim.

I remember walking down a beach in the New York City area and feeling that this disease had robbed me of my youth and so many opportunities. I was thinking that other people my age had so much energy and power. And suddenly this rage came up in me, and I recognized it for what it was-that very deep inside me, I loved life. I wanted to celebrate life. And I had a power in me that wanted to do that. But I had been expressing it in the form of anger.

Some of the esoteric teachings talk about energy and energy form. The energy is chi, the life force. The energy form is anger, love, whatever it is. And I realized that I couldn't own my power if I kept running it through the energy form of anger. I understood that I needed to experience the will to live, the love of life, directly, and that I could not live my life as an angry person. I felt liberated, as if I had reclaimed my power from something that had held me captive, which was my anger. I'm seeing this happen to many other people now who are in the process of healing from a disease-not necessarily in the process of curing. Curing is about expertise. Healing is about a human relationship. We're all healers. It takes years to learn how to cure. And that's a very limited approach to something like an illness.

RD:  Do you think one's attitude, let's say of shifting from a reaction of anger to one of appreciation or gratitude, could change a medical condition?

RNR:  Sometimes. There is a connection between the mind and the body that works both ways. But if we look at that relationship and assume that we use the mind to cure the body, it's a limited view. This is not about a cure. Is there a change in the medical condition? Sometimes, sometimes not. Is there a change in the person? Always. Our real power may not be to influence our body. It may be to influence ourselves, to grow beyond the challenge of an illness and free yourself from it by living beyond it.

There's a funny little story in my book My Grandfather's Blessings called "Eggs." It has to do with my grandmother, Rachel, who came from Russia, a place where she and the family were often hungry. When she got to America, her kitchen was bursting with food. Even so, nothing was to be wasted. Even the tea bags were used twice. Her icebox was always filled to the brim, and if somebody opened the door without caution, an egg might fall out and break on the kitchen floor. And my grandmother would always have the same response to this: She would look at the broken egg and say, "Aha! Today we have a sponge cake!"