Healing Touch Hospice Care: Understanding and Treating the Troubles of the Dying

The image that most people have in their minds of the most blessed way to pass on from this world, involves being surrounded by one's loved ones, being given understanding healthcare for one's problems, and being free from worry for the way life will end. A hospice is a program at a specially designated place for just such needs. It is a caring center with caregivers that range from doctors who specialize in the problems of end-of-life situations, to nurses who are able to relieve the emotional pain and physical pain; it is a place that aims at providing emotional and physical support to the ill and the aged, and to their families.

The services at a hospice are not to be taken to be some sitting service for people who have no hope but to die. A hospice is not a place either that attempts to help people accept death with resignation. The mission of a hospice is to provide the hopelessly ill or dying, with a way to live the life they have left with as much satisfaction as possible.

The very old and the terminally ill often face grave health concerns that affect their day-to-day life: breathing troubles, restricted movement, pain, anxiety, or mere helpless unhappiness at being alone. If there are family members attending on the patient, there is little they can do to ease the situation; family members feel lost and in need of knowledgeable guidance into how they may bring calm and peace in place of suffering and pain. The caregivers at a hospice are skilled in medical, psychological and spiritual caring to bring assistance in just such a situation. At a hospice under the Healing Touch foundation all these are complemented with the skills of a trained Healing Touch practitioner. Healing Touch is a therapy method that is formed on spiritual principles to ease and dignify the dying process.

Healing Touch is not an alternative method of treatment - it is merely a way to enhance traditional medicine with compassion and spiritual understanding. It helps the dying understand their death as merely a natural part of life, a time of divine passage into another world. Healing Touch's ministrations aim at providing holistic care through caring touch, leaving out no part, the body, the mind or the spirit. The belief is that such gentle caring helps with anxiety, with difficulty sleeping, and with calming the mind, and through this, makes conventional treatment more effective.

A Healing Touch treatment session begins with a practitioner attempting to align with and connect to the divine, and with asking for guidance in giving the patient as much care and service as possible. The patient typically responds to this plea, by opening up freely to the effects of the treatment. The atmosphere is usually helped with the use of gentle, sacred music and incense. The treatment of healing with touch commences at this time and sends the patient into a state of deep relaxation and openness to Communion with a higher spiritual consciousness.

After experiencing such a state of higher consciousness the patient often confesses to being in touch with the souls of those that passed on before him; with angels who soothe his fears of death. Experiences such as these help a family cope with the dizzying happenings that accompany the serious life changes of disease and death.

People truly come to an understanding of what the divine actually stands for and they understand the power of love and compassion, as can be expressed through touch in the way Healing Touch does. An understanding that death is not the end of life, that it is merely change, as obtained through a Healing Touch program, changes the very life philosophy that people have. There are training classes run in many countries, to help people understand the philosophy of Healing Touch, to enlighten people even when life goes on well.