Pain, Sleep, Seizures: Windows to Healthy, and Imbalanced, Wakefulness 

The beginning of August offered a powerful experience for me when a wide-ranging group of anthroposophic doctors, nurses and therapists gathered for a conference about “Transforming Chronic Pain–a Spiritual Task for Our Time.” The meeting included very inspiring presentations from several doctors in Europe, especially one with deep experience in palliative care and another with very poor and challenged patients in central London. After coming back to practice in Denver, I’ve been struck by the many different variations of pain and how it represents an imbalance, or a kind of distortion, of normal wakeful consciousness and of waking and sleeping processes. This has happened to me before: I go to a meeting and learn about special topic, then I come back and find a whole group of people who are struggling with just that kind of illness or injury and need this knowledge.