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of his divine love profoundly impacts the way I understand the meaning and purpose of all relationships and the way I practice psychiatry. Swami’s love shows me that love is the most vital element in all our relationships and is the element that heals and unites us. It inspires me to reflect this love to others. To begin understanding how love transforms psychiatry into saichiatry, let us look at how I have experienced Swami’s love and how it has affected my approach with patients.
His Intimate Love
Early in our relationship,
Swami told me that he would
enter my practice of psychiatry;
I didn’t know what he meant.
Would I feel him directing me in
responding to patients? Perhaps
I would better understand how
to apply his teachings to relieve
the suffering of patients. Perhaps
I would become more aware that
God is the healing force in all of
medicine. Perhaps he would help
make my professional life more
consistent with my spiritual life. Of course, I had the fantasy that he would miraculously cure all my patients.
At that time I wondered how I would survive. Many professionals in the community knew of my interest in Swami and my belief in his divinity, and they were suspicious. Where would I get referrals? Somehow the referrals kept coming, and my calendar seemed to take shape as if kept by an unseen director. At times I would put aside a few days or a week to take care of a personal task only to find that when the time came, a Sai activity would crop up. In some mysterious fashion, I had set aside the necessary time even beforehand! As you can see,
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