I just watched The Sacred Science, a film that traces the journeys of eight people with diverse, long-term diseases who each decided to take up the challenge to live for one month alone in a tented enclosure in the Amazon jungle and be ministered to by curanderos, medicine men who absorb their knowledge about healing from the plants themselves and administer specific plant remedies to each person for his or her condition. These included three types of cancer, parkinson’s disease, diabetes, alcoholism/depression, crohn’s disease, and irritable bowel syndrome.

Sitting or lying in solitude for extended periods of time, minus the frantic distractions of modern life, each of them endured a confrontation with uncomfortable shadow aspects within themselves — with varying results. Of the eight, the dis-ease conditions of two of them did not respond to plant remedies; another died part way through the month (not of the remedies themselves, but peacefully; as if that is why he had to go to the jungle); and the other five experienced remarkable healings.

The film feels authentic; no bells and whistles, lots of darkness and silence with flickering candles during ayahausca and other plant ceremonies; moments of excruciatingly intimate personal confessions. Several people, for example, realized that they were full of self-pity.

As I discovered at 26, when I (or, my higher self) “healed my body” overnight while hospitalized with acute abdominal peritonitis, upon hearing (and responding to) a loud voice boom, “Live or die! It’s your choice!” — these people come to realize that just as dis-ease ends up in the physical from its origin in the mind and heart, so too does healing begin in the mind and heart, and only then condense into the physical.

As we release the mental and emotional patterns that bind us into patterns of limitation that stifle aliveness, so does the body heal and the spirit soar.

This film is available through tomorrow, October 17, as a free offering.

The Sacred Science