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“I Can’t Not Pray”
An Interview with Larry Dossey, M.D.

by Mary Grace McCord

Larry Dossey, physician turned metaphysician, has marched in bloody boots as a decorated Vietnam veteran. He has sprinted in the bloodstained scrub suit of an emergency room physician. As 1963 chief of staff at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital, he was there, onsite, when a priest performed last rites for America’s youngest president.

Dr. Dossey admits that back then he would not have understood a spiritual “calling” to pray for assassins and other mortal enemies whose hate-filled violence he witnessed firsthand.

Not that prayer wasn’t part of his life.

In his younger days Dossey remembers becoming so rattled by a Southern preacher’s hellfire-and-brimstone weekly rants that he left a familiar church and began to study the powerful science of prayer.

At first the young doctor would pray for his patients only on occasion, and only under dire circumstances. In those cases he prayed for their survival and he asked God to guide his medical team’s decisions and actions. He prayed to be an instrument of healing.

Then one day his prayer-life opened wide and his intuitive healing abilities took a quantum leap when he decided to devote his medical practice to the practice of prayer. From then on he prayed regularly, for each and every one of his patients.

Armed with the growing conviction that prayer does heal, he decided it would be unethical for him not to pray, individually, for each patient. He felt it would be like withholding treatment if he didn’t pray for them.

Gradually and with the added prayer-power of his wife, a holistic nurse named Barbara, the Dosseys began praying together for an hour before going to work. In this time of devoted contemplation they concocted prayer rituals using incense, chanting, artifacts from nature and soulful, spirit-led music.

The couple actively cultivated and maintained prayer lists, realizing again and again that healing miracles come more freely when science and art (heart) merge. “We chose to engage and honor this ‘medical magic’ rather than intellectualize and analyze it,” he said.

“We all know that miracles, by their nature, defy explanation.”

During the materialistic 1980s, this doctor and nurse answered a higher calling and started writing books about the role of spirituality and healing. With topics as diverse as “Four-legged Healers: The Power of Pets” and “Music Can Bring Miracles” their path has taken them around the world, as keynote speakers and co-presenters for the medical establishment and military organizations, church groups and teachers’ associations, among others.

AIHT staff members were delighted to meet Dr. Larry at a mind/body/spirit conference in Atlanta, and even more delighted when he granted us this interview.

Vibrations: You said, today, that you wish you could revise Healing Words and loosen up the notion that there are rules for prayer. How do you mean?

Dossey: Prayer is such an open-ended miracle worker, regardless of what form of prayer that a pray-er chooses. Although my own style is open-ended prayer, in which we praise our Higher Power and affirm with gratitude that “Thy will be done,” there are others who want to pray for something specific: the healing of a child or the healing of a relationship, finding the right mate, finding their true calling.

Studies prove that both approaches work fine. What really does tip the scales, I think, is the sincere depth of love, concern, devotion and compassion that we can actively offer up in prayer.

I think that one person’s authentic, heartfelt prayer can be much more powerful than an entire roomful of people who mindlessly recite The Lord’s Prayer by rote, without being in the moment by focusing on what those words really mean.

Vibrations: What about intercessory prayer, in which prayer groups are “assigned a task,” such as to pray for others outside their congregation, maybe even for strangers in other countries?

Dossey: Most definitely each pray-er’s focused intent is what matters. In a number of prayer studies, individuals from all over the world pray for other individuals who have HIV or cancer, or who are infertile. In double-blind studies these strangers who are being prayed for often recover quicker and more fully than other patients who are in a control group, those who are not being prayed for.

Prayer is a win-win because, alone or in groups, the individuals who pray with a purpose can feel the strengthening of their own spiritual relationship with their Higher Power.

There are also the tangible benefits of what we call “helpers’ high.” There are body, mind and spirit rewards for volunteers, far beyond the physical endorphin rush, and especially when the helper actually does something—rather than helping out by mindlessly writing a check because you feel pressured to do so or you’d feel guilty if you don’t.

Vibrations: Onto a lighter but also miraculous subject, I loved the story you told about a “curandera” named Maria.

Dossey: “Curandera” is a Mexican word for ‘folk healer.’ When I was five we lived on a cotton farm in Central Texas and that summer, screwworms were rampantly attacking and killing the cattle. What to do? The few local large animal vets were scurrying to stave the epidemic—scurrying to the more affluent ranches.

But our neighbors, the lowly sharecroppers, relied on people like Maria to come over and help the animals get well, and I will never forget what sounded to me like mystical chanting. Inside the stables and out in the fields, she was able to talk those screwworms right out of the cows.

The adults called her a folk healer but to me she was a folk hero.

Vibrations: Hmm, kind of like a bee charmer or horse whisperer? I think that animal wisdom is among God’s sweetest mysteries.

Dossey: No one doubts the innate healing capabilities of animals—be they pets in the city or barn cats hunting mice. Whether you’re rich or poor, when people take care of animals, anyone can suddenly feel like Someone—like a person whose life means something because they are needed, like a person with a purpose.

...in the grand scheme of things no one here knows God’s timing and no one knows what it all means. That’s the good news, and that's the bad news.

Animals can lift depression and take our minds off our fears because they surround us with profoundly deep, loving energy. Our pets are totally devoted to our happiness and you can see it in their faces and in their body language. They definitely sense our moods. You can also feel the gentle harmony of animal energy on a large farm.

Vibrations: Sometimes animals give us powerful messages in dreams. In dreamtime I have received many healing messages and while the real-life time frame doesn’t always tend to be linear I do get reassurance, in dreams, that things are working in perfect Divine order. Sometimes the abstract meaning in dreams is reassurance that even the experts don’t know everything.

Dossey: Dreams, visions and telepathic clairvoyant experiences certainly do prevent the hardening of our conceptual arteries. We are learning more and more about the healing power of dreams. Our dream-life can set the stage for healing, and sometimes it has given people dire warnings. Some people are even able to pray while dreaming, which is a mystic experience that we don’t control. It’s given as a blessing.

Vibrations: When one is overcoming traumatic illness, sometimes sleeping pills are prescribed. But doesn’t a large part of our healing come from “getting clear” with ourselves, going within and growing in self-understanding?

Dossey: Healing doesn’t always mean curing. Back in 1987 I suffered greatly from a herniated disk in my lower back. I was working too hard, not sleeping enough, and finally my body rebelled.

I tried all the mind/body modalities I could think of, while suffering unrelenting pain for more than a month. Some conditions just simply require a medical intervention, whether that means surgery or sleeping pills. We can’t let our thinking get so rigid that we suffer needlessly.

Sometimes we underestimate the variety of contexts in which both illness and healing occur. There’s a full spectrum of how to put healing into motion, and in the grand scheme of things no one here knows God’s timing and no one knows what it all means. That’s the good news, and that’s the bad news.

Vibrations: Last question, from one who is happily returning from a journey involving many doctors and many therapies. How can physicians learn how to address a sick person’s “meaning of life,” and don’t you think some doctors might practice differently if ever they could pause long enough to contemplate their own meaning of life?

Dossey: That’s an important question because it is often in the complementary/alternative approaches that patients can find meaning in their lives just when they need it most. Obviously, at times doctors become patients too.

Cure is cause for rejoicing and is a catalyst to deeper understanding. For some people, soulful revelation from a clinician is helpful but for others it might actually be damaging. Some patients respond to illness by withdrawing, to lick their wounds in silence.

In any event, emotions can put us in a state of constant flux—and one thing physicians fear is an emotional response. Some find it threatening.

Support groups and allied health resources such as pastoral chaplains can engage patients, their families and close friends in “meaning therapy,” and cancer studies show that group therapy to address questions of meaning can double the survival time following illness. Sometimes it takes rearranging one’s perception of “what it all means” in order to reclaim his or her deep, intuitive faith.

On questions of meaning and purpose, science is mute. And, meaning comes from inside. What’s meaningful to me may be meaningless to you.

There’s not one single way to do things. Finding creative solutions to illness is not the time to be dogmatic. Keeping the point of view of a patient who is trained as a practitioner, what I try to do is keep informed, keep an eye on all my options, and be willing to change my mind.

Most of all, whenever you’re going through healing, don’t focus too much on the externals. Go inside.

Larry Dossey, M.D. is the author of Meaning and Medicine, Healing Words, Beyond Illness, Prayer is Good Medicine, Recovering the Soul, Reinventing Medicine, and Space, Time and Medicine, among others.