PATH Method in Medical Practice
After 20 years in general medical practice, I found what was missing in my integrative medical approach: a psychotherapeutic intervention that could effectively explore the hidden world of the subconscious. It was essential for my evolving medical approach to integrate this into my medical practice as I became clear that medicine and psychology needed to be re-united into a unified psycho-medical approach. This modality called Psychophonetics was developed by Yehuda Tagar as a counselling modality and required modification to fit into my medical practice. Over the past 20 years, I have been able to successfully modify and integrate this approach into my medical practice as the PATH Method.
Patients consult me for a wide range of physical and psycho-emotional problems. In the course of the interview, attention is invariably drawn to psychosocial factors which may be connected with the clinical problem. Using simple preparatory PATH Method techniques, the patient may be invited to experience his or her physical symptoms on a deeper level. For instance, if the complaint is abdominal pain, the patient is asked to focus on the bodily sensation of pain and then to gesture with the hands and then the whole body the character of the pain. The patient then steps away from the gesture and observes imaginatively the body form that was created by the gesture. This imaginative picture frequently unveils for the patient new and sometimes overwhelming insights into the nature of the illness which he or she will wish to explore in a follow up PATH Method session.
PATH Method methodology provides a wide range of techniques which enables the practitioner to deepen the diagnostic and therapeutic picture. The specific process that emerges during each session through the dynamic interaction between client and counselor will determine which methodological utilities are used.
The client carrying his or her own unique life experience is entrusted to steer the ship and thereby gives direction to each session. He is inwardly equipped and carries the innate guidance for his own life journey. The counselor accompanies the client as a well traveled voyager and will help to navigate the ship and coach the client through the uncharted seas until he/she has learned the skill to travel alone. For in the end it is the client’s higher self that is challenged to take charge of the ship of life and to create his own truth and meaning for his own unique destiny.
A PATH Method Session
Each session has a unique form in which various processes are utilized.
- The session begins by setting the mood and creating safety for the client. This sets up a trusting atmosphere which is conducive to the sharing of intimacy.
- The conversational phase allows the client to share the presenting issue in a warm caring open heart space. The content is mirrored back with progressive clarity, a specific focus may be found amongst a number of issues, challenges are made for taking personal responsibility and the life situation of the client becomes contectualised. Using the technique of parallel processing the practitioner is able to observe and clear his own soul responses thereby liberating his higher perceptive faculties to shed new light on the problem. In this way a common picture emerges which represents the essential crystallized elemental problem or deeper pathology lying behind the outer presenting issue. When this diagnostic picture is sufficiently clear, the higher wisdom of the client is called upon to formulate a wish that would resolve this issue. It is this wish that will give direction to the unfolding journey
- The action phase that follows allows the client to enter more deeply into the hidden depths of body and soul. Using the non verbal techniques of body sensing/ feeling, visualization, gesturing and sounding, the client engages with deeper layers of experience which dramatically opens up the memory of past experiences. The sequential entering of such experiences and the subsequent disengaging and returning to adult I awareness, as well as the dramatic action of playing the parts of any possible body, soul or spiritual entities, provides the opportunity for new insights and new resolutions. The client to a greater or lesser extent engages in this new paradigm of invisible realities naturally and effortlessly by virtue of his/her direct and real experience.
- These new insights and resolutions when applied in the client’s life situations will provide a powerful impulse for transformation.
I have used this methodology on a wide range of physical illnesses and have found that it adds significant value to the nature of the diagnosis and the therapeutic picture. Working in close partnership with Yehuda Tagar, the founder of Psychophonetics, we have found for instance that Auto Immune Disorders are invariably connected to a personality that that has self destructive tendencies