Conscious Choice: A Human Potential Pioneer

September 1998

A Human Potential Pioneer

by Bobbye Middendorf

One of the Chicago area’s living treasures, Dr. Rosita Rodriguez has lived and worked many decades on the front lines of the alternative healing and human potential movements. Her unassuming Oak Park offices house a learning and meditation center that reflects two currents — first, practical strategies for living successfully and healthfully in the world; and second, training and exercises for expanding conscious awareness and spiritual growth.

Over the years, she has helped many thousands of people around the world, including Gregory Bateson, and her teachings have influenced such medical body/mind pioneers as Carl Simonton. She and a core group of teachers train people in the fundamental universal principles of consciousness, enabling patients and students to make dramatic changes in their lives, experience "miracle" cures, all by becoming aware of these laws and using them. While she outlines step-by-step practices, responsibility for actualizing them rests squarely with the individual.

Through Arche International, a not-for-profit organization with additional teaching centers in Massachusetts and Nevada, Rodriguez and her staff devote their energies to helping individuals raise the quality of their lives and better control their personal environments through self awareness and understanding. Many of the tools and courses help people on a day-to-day basis - releasing pain, coping with stress, getting the body to heal itself. But her emphasis rests on the primary importance of one’s spiritual growth. "We’re not taking this body with us when we go. These are just tools to help people function better in the world, to give them time to pursue a spiritual path. We want to give people something of lasting value. The bottom line is, people need to look for spiritual development."

The term Arche comes from Revelation, meaning the Divine principle within. For Rodriguez, spirituality is defined as the way you express the Divine within you. The name of the organization reflects her commitment to providing an unexpurgated reading of texts based on the teachings of Jesus the Christ. She acknowledges a common thread of truth in all spiritual traditions. "The Truth and Divine Love run through them all. It is the belief systems and doctrines that have corrupted their original intent. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition is probably one of the least corrupted."

I first became acquainted with Rodriguez and her pioneering work in 1985, when I began her series of weekly personal development and philosophy courses. The series starts with an eight-week course called Reincarnation. In this course, she teaches the principles of consciousness, reviews karma, and offers simple exercises for relaxing and increasing concentration. The series of weekly courses remain the core of her work, and have been enhanced with intensive weekend seminars that bring people up to speed with meditation training. Arche International’s regular series of classes, seminars, and workshops are designed to help each individual attain their goals and reach their own highest potential.

Rosita Rodriguez was born in Austria, and a hint of an accent remains in spite of her many years here, and her travels throughout the world. She grew up learning about stage magic from her father and did premedical studies at the University of Vienna, spending eight hours a day in school, lab, and library. "It was very academic, and much less social than here," she observes. Her intensive schooling prepared her well for medical school here. She took admitting placement tests for the medical school at the University of Chicago, and despite the language barrier and a U.S. "premed" curriculum that was several years longer, she found the rigor of her European education admitted her one and a half years into the medical school program. "But most of the alternatives I learned from so-called primitive people, or from metaphysics, or from the kahunas. In med school, they don’t tell you that patients are supposed to take responsibility for their bodies."

She left medical school when her second child was on the way, as she faced a two-year internship, which would have resulted in little time with her young children. "There were no allowances for women at that time," and so she looked around for an opportunity to use her skills while maintaining some control over her life. "I took a pilot training program in surgical technology at Rush, and became among the first surgical technicians employed outside of the military. And later, I trained as a midwife as part of my work with primitive tribes." She acknowledges that her medical training gave her a basis to understand healing in the broader sense, as she began explorations beyond what Western medicine served up.

With her premed and surgical technology training, she became a medical missionary serving the Tarahumara tribe of Northern Mexico. "We came with Western style medicine, yet these people were able to stop bleeding, to stop pain. They had high values and ethics. They were friendly and kind. Even traveling in the wildest areas, we never felt threatened. I began to think,‘Who’s primitive here?’" This intensified her search, encompassing comparative religions, metaphysics, and a Ph.D. in psychology from Far Eastern University in Manila.

As a trained medical professional, she was skeptical when she met Dr. Tony Agpaoa, a psychic surgeon from the Philippines, when he was in the Chicago area in 1966. "I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I certainly was not prepared for the impact he would have on me and my family and friends." With a simple laying on of hands, he cured a heart condition in her mother-in-law, an allergic sinus condition and painful arthritic spine in Rodriguez, and a tumor on her son’s toe. "I witnessed numerous other healings during those few days, but they did not mean as much nor appear as miraculous as those we experienced firsthand. I had long been interested in spiritual and psychic healing and asked Tony if I might visit him and study his work. He said he had been waiting for me, and so started an experience and a relationship which would transform my life forever. I was still skeptical, but I had a basic working knowledge, both of stage magic and of surgery, and I was well qualified to detect fraudulent practice."

Many years of study, along with a commitment to continuous learning, close observation, and assisting Tony and the other healers, resulted in her chance to see and take part in hundreds of thousands of healings, some highly successful, others providing some degree of relief and comfort. Rodriguez followed the huna tradition in which Tony Agpaoa practiced. In this tradition the healer, with knowledge of the three levels of consciousness and the particular role of the subconscious in taking care of the body, helps guide and direct the energy and focus of the patient. "Healers facilitate your own healing power," she notes. "What we discovered taking case histories was that there were no incurable diseases, only incurable people. And they would come in by the planeload."

"What came out of the Philippine experience for me was that some people would go home healed, and then would come back with the same or another health problem. We discovered there was a relationship between the type of illness and the type of stress people were experiencing in their lives. We found if patients went back to the same emotional situation, the same circumstances, that the healing would not be successful. So we started giving some seminars before people went home, so they could take back some knowledge and maintain their health."

In the mid 1960s, she founded Arche International with Tom Hanauer, to offer classes, tapes, and workshops that would make this understanding available — and preventive. "Why should people have to get sick in order to learn how to step out of these stressful circumstances that make them sick? Let’s get to them before disease strikes — and show people how they don’t have to let the stress in their lives cause illness. Eventually we designed seminars and produced tapes to help people get well and stay well. The theme of these lessons is an understanding of the subconscious and how it interacts with our body, and our conscious and spiritual being."

Even today, one of Arche’s popular ongoing programs is a stress care clinic. Stress, she emphasizes, is the major cause of heart disease, which in turn is the nation’s number one killer. Stress is also a major causative factor in hypertension, ulcers, and many other health problems. The Stress Care Program enhances students’ ability to reduce stress and deal with it constructively, thereby improving not only the quality of people’s health, but of their lives. "This was not widely available information 20 or 30 years ago," she points out.

Rodriguez was also a regular lecturer at Esalen in the‘60s and‘70s. A monk who knew of her healing work came to her one day and asked her to come help a friend, a professor at UCLA, regent at San Francisco General Hospital, psychiatrist and author of The Psychology of the Mind, who was dying of lung cancer. "What on earth could I say to this fellow?" she laughs as she recollects her introduction to Gregory Bateson, a "compulsive scientist," as she describes him.

"I knew this man was dying. His upper lungs were nearly liquified, and he was given three weeks to live. So I knew I had to talk fast, as he was weak, and I couldn’t waste any time. I didn’t realize at the time that he was the first husband of Margaret Mead. But as I outlined the three levels of consciousness, and the role his subconscious could play in his healing, he recalled that he’d heard something like that before, from his wife who had worked with primitive tribes. He wanted three more months to live, to finish the book he was working on. He had an open mind and a very strong reason to want to live. We gave his subconscious something to live for besides work — limiting his work to six hours a day. I worked with him to rediscover something his subconscious considered fun. As it turned out, that was getting him to take up nature photography again, and making goals to see his children and grandchildren. He lived for ten more years, and died without a trace of the cancer. What I did for him was to help him give his subconscious something to live for. With everyone I work with, I show how the subconscious works."

Unassuming in our conversation, Rodriguez brings up almost as an afterthought encounters with people like Bateson and Carl Simonton, the medical pioneer who was among the first in the medical establishment to acknowledge the mind/ body connection in healing, and use it to decrease surgeries and chemotherapy. In the late‘60s, she and Tom Hanauer were making a presentation to a symposium at a gathering of The Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine at Stanford University. It was an event for 500 physicians looking at alternative medicine. As they made their presentation about their healing experiences and using visualization to help people heal themselves, some of the audience snickered, while others expressed interest and asked questions. About a year later, Simonton, who had asked some questions at their presentation, called to ask Rodriguez several follow-up questions. As it turned out, he had begun using visualizations, and had in fact created some of his own techniques and was teaching other physicians. "He found he started getting better results working with his patients on the exercises, visualizations, and radiation, rather than performing surgeries and using chemotherapy. I’m glad someone paid attention and started using these techniques."

For more than 30 years, Rodriguez has pioneered in "alternative healing," which she has rediscovered is helping patients tap into their own ability of their body to heal itself. Today, with the growth of holistic healing and alternative modalities, it doesn’t sound radical. Thirty years ago, Rodriguez and Arche were way out ahead of even the cutting edge.

But healing for Rodriguez is a means to an even greater end. Make no mistake: it is following that spiritual path of growth and development, expressing the highest of the Divine within you, that is the real purpose we’re here.

In this worldly world, her message of following a spiritual path and taking time to express the Divine within, resonates as radical, even after 30 years of an alternative culture emerging. Things of a spiritual nature have a funny way of colliding and conflicting with the priorities of the moment. Following a spiritual path does shift our paradigms, maybe in part because it’s not what we really want to hear, not what we really want to do when the worldly siren sings its melody of enchantment and forgetfulness. Yet for those with the consciousness to be aware, this path resonates with a ring of Truth.

Bobbye Middendorf is a writer and artist living in Chicago.

Resources
For more information on the series of weekly Reincarnation and Spiritual Philosophy courses, weekend meditation retreats, health and healing seminars or stress care clinics, contact Arche International at 708-848-9191.

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