Fall/Winter 2002-3 -5763 issue of Inside Out Magazine
Pg 8 Featured article Dr Jill Kahn-Healers and the High Holidays

A Chabad of Boca Raton Project-- The New Year Edition

Experiencing the Essence of the Days - Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur

On the surface, the mental activity associated with Rosh Hashanah focuses on what you have or have not done during the past year. And then despite any transgressions, you pray that G-d will write your name in the Book of Life.

Getting to a more profound level requires a more in-depth look -spending some time on past behavior but applying the bulk of effort on choosing and committing to do good for the upcoming year. What makes this difficult is that doing good isn't just a matter of not doing anything bad but rather looking deep within to find all the possibilities for good. It's a process of inventorying your unique capabilities and then deciding how to use them for the greatest benefit.

Every Rosh Hashanah offers the opportunity to recreate your life and to renew your commitment to making a difference in the world. Completing this task requires reconnecting with your quintessential self.

The work of Dr. Jill Kahn, a chiropractor by formal education and an intuitive healer by following her true path, reflects this basic process. She works closely with her patients helping them find the good within to regain their health and create the life that they want to live.

The philosophy behind her practice is that people should rise out of a sense of deprivation into a space of overflowing abundance. It's a process of seeing through problems and working through blocks to get to the essence of self.

Dr. Jill's first patient was her father, who 11 years ago was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer. Despite the dismal prognosis, the doctor recommended surgically removing the affected portion of his lung. Her father accepted his fate but scheduled himself for immediate surgery.

Prior to this turn of events, Dr. Jill had been studying alternative methods of healing cancer. She, therefore, had another course of action in mind. She convinced her father to postpone his surgery for two weeks during which she would work with him day and night trying to invoke his natural healing powers.

Their time together consisted of using various methods to reach and release the power within him that would help heal his body. In addition to detoxifying his body through diet, they prayed and meditated. They would do meditations based on looking at a blade of grass and realizing that the blade grass had everything within it that it needed to sustain itself.

The goal of these exercises was to get her father to a place where he realized that the G-d within him is what could heal him. And that it was his responsibility to take control of his life. At the culmination of this intense two weeks, her father submitted to the surgery. When the surgeon opened his chest, the tumor was no longer visible to the human eye. Her father has never had a problem since.

After her experience with her father, Dr. Jill expanded her practice to intuitive healing. A few years later, she again had to face life-threatening illness with a close family member, when her husband, 35 years old at the time, was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor.

Just prior to the seizure that led to his diagnosis, her husband had been feeling unhappy with his life and unable to make sense of his path. Over a longer period extending several years, Dr. Jill worked with her husband, Danny Kahn, all day, every day - working through his despair and inertia until he found the fortitude to start taking control of his life.

Although Danny hadn't chosen chemotherapy - the tumor reacted to the intense internal work he and Jill were doing as if that were the treatment. With each MRI, the tumor shrank. Now back to full health, Danny's tumor still measures 1 cm. He keeps it as a reminder that he has to take responsibility for his response to all that life throws at him.

On an annual basis, Rosh Hashanah offers the same chance for soul searching and renewal as a life-threatening condition. Leveraging that opportunity requires an honest look at personal hurdles and individual capabilities as well as what has the greatest need for improvement. Rosh Hashanah is the day to synthesize that assessment and commit to fulfilling personal potential applied for the greatest good.

Yom Kippur

While Rosh Hashanah focuses on finding a way to give to the world, Yom Kippur centers more on asking for forgiveness. Yet for most people, it's almost impossible to ask G-d for forgiveness until they forgive themselves; so, Yom Kippur is actually part giving and part taking.

Even though, from the time most people are children, they are told to forgive (and forget), adults find forgiving very difficult to do. In fact, forgiveness is so complex that people such as Dr. Robert Enrich at the University of Wisconsin have spent years researching it.

In his 13 years of study, Dr. Enrich and his colleagues have dissected the forgiveness process into four stages

Geri Willen, a psychology instructor at University of Maryland at Towson, guided a patient through the four phases as a means of healing her from slow but steady self-destruction through eating disorders, sex addiction and drug abuse.

When this woman in her thirties first came in for treatment, she didn't even realize the core reason for her behaviors. During the first few sessions it became apparent that the patient had very little recollection of her childhood and early adolescence. After several months of looking at childhood pictures and using various other therapeutic techniques, it became clear that the patient's father had been molesting her, almost nightly, since she was seven years old.

Not unexpectedly, the patient absolutely hated her father; but until she uncovered her molestation memories, she didn't know why. With this understanding in place, the patient could progress to the decision phase, where she could start to change her life in positive directions and begin to see that forgiveness would be an important part of her healing process.

Since everything had always seemed perfectly fine from outside appearances, what would have been ideal for this patient is for her father to have admitted what he had done. Unfortunately, her father would not verify her memories. And her mother, whom she had confided in when she was a little girl, had always denied the truth.

Yet for her to heal, the patient had to forgive her parents anyway. It's no wonder that Dr. Enrich calls this the work phase. According to Ms. Willen it was very difficult for her patient to move from hating to forgiving her father.

Crucial to this phase, was the patient's ability to look at her father differently. He no longer had complete power and control over her. In fact, he was aging and somewhat sickly, which helped her redefine her relationship to him. In this way, she could reframe the role of victim and perpetrator.

One of the inhibitors that come up in this phase is the feeling of giving something up - of losing. So the reframing needs to change the situation from win -lose to win-win.

Once the patient saw her dad as an unhealthy human being, who was a victim of his own life, she found it in herself to forgive him. From that point on, she could work on correcting her own behaviors and changing her life for the better.

While this story exemplifies an extreme case of finding forgiveness, the process follows the same general path for everyone - even when the focus is forgiving one's self.

The greatest inhibitor to forgiveness is letting go of the anger, the guilt and the shame. Once an individual can get past those, forgiveness follows relatively easily.

Once there is forgiveness, there is healing of the soul. On Yom Kippur, it's this feeling of healing and self-cleansing that allows people to ask G-d for forgiveness.

While the process on Rosh Hashanah leads to a change in external behavior, Yom Kippur changes things on a soul level. The progress that the soul makes on Yom Kippur adds to the commitment to change the world that occurred on Rosh Hashanah.

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