Not to employ prayer with my patients was the equivalent of deliberately withholding a potent drug or surgical procedure.

Hopelessness kills. Numerous studies in humans show that we can die as a result of dire beliefs and a sense of overwhelming futility.

Alan Watts, the Buddhist scholar, proposed the existence of a mental faculty he called forgettory, which is the flip side of memory. There are times, Watts maintained, when we need to forget things, to let them slip away into the unremembered past.

The modern tradition of equating death with an ensuing nothingness can be abandoned. For there is no reason to believe that human death severs the quality of the oneness in the universe.

Health and healing are about more than the eradication of disease. Health is related to wholeness and holy-knowing who we are and how we are connected with the world around us.

The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path.

Prayer is an attitude of the heart.