Soul Medicine

Soul Medicine, by Edward Tick, Ph.D., offers an in-depth look at ancient Greek practices for profound, lasting healing.

It explores hidden soul-healing practices, including dream incubation and interpretation, as well as sacred pilgrimage. The book examines how dreams, visions, and other non-normative events reveal the conditions needed to restore the soul and facilitate healing. It includes successful healing techniques, practices, and case studies, revealing how healings are achieved with these methods.

The modern practice of medicine and psychology grew out of the ancient Greek healing tradition, said to be founded by Asklepios, the god of healing and dreams. For two thousand years, this system spread across the Mediterranean world, planting the roots of Western medicine and psychology by offering ritual and holistic practices that recognized healing begins at the soul level. However, since then, spiritually based practices have been cast aside, leaving only the scientific medical techniques that dominate healthcare today.

Edward Tick, Ph.D., resurrects and restores the sacred, mythological, and cultural origins of medicine and psychotherapy, exploring the soul-healing practices missing in our contemporary health systems. He delves into the dream incubation tradition of Asklepios, the sacred theatre of Dionysos, the oracle gifting of Apollo, and the special practices of warriors, tracing their roots back to Neolithic shamanism and indigenous traditions.

By demonstrating the ritual use of dreams, visions, oracles, synchronicities, and pilgrimage for healing and connecting to the transpersonal and divine, he explains how dream incubation is a technique in which you plant a seed for a specific healing or growth goal.

Using ancient wisdom and modern depth psychology, alongside stories of healing from his more than 25 years of guiding Vietnam veterans on Greek pilgrimages, Tick explores how we all can use ancient healing philosophies and practices to achieve holistic healing today. He examines the interaction between mind and body (psyche and soma) and between physical illness and the soul to heal PTSD and trauma, explaining the art of making accurate and holistic interpretations of signs, symbols, and symptoms to determine what they reveal about the soul.

Showing how dreams and other transpersonal experiences are essential components of soul medicine, the author reveals how the restoration of the soul facilitates true healing.