Tag: Holistic healing

What is Holistic Activism – Part 2

(This is the second part of a short series offering my thoughts on holistic activism. I welcome responses and your own contributions to this subject.)

Processing the News with Body, Mind and Spirit

                                                                               ~Alan Levin

Every now and then it hits me like this: “the news is making me sick.” Using the term “sick” in this way, people generally mean disgusted. But I want here to emphasize the literal nature of “makes me sick” with reference to how following the events of the world can cause mental, emotional and physical illness. Additionally, I’d like to offer some suggestions from a holistic perspective for maintaining health and well-being in the face of the horrors streaming at us through the media.

A basic understanding of the holistic orientation is that the body, mind and spirit are a unity, not separate from each other; they are ongoingly inter-dependently relating. Whatever is happening in our mind effects our body; whatever happens in our body effects our mind. Further, both mind and body are nourished and regenerated by the spiritual sources of life within us. Body-Mind-Spirit, All One. We can be unaware of or ignore this inter-connectedness, but our life experience will move us in the direction of waking up to it.

Take a moment when you are hearing any thought, perhaps what you are reading right now.  If you resonate with the thought(s), you will feel a positive emotion and perhaps a tingling or exciting energy in your body. On the other hand, if the thoughts challenge your previously held views or opinions, you may feel angry or defensive or afraid, and your body will contract, get tense, even if just a little. We all tend to do this.

When we read the newspaper or listen to the news on the radio, tv or social media, the same thing happens. Usually the ideas and events are presented so rapidly that we don’t even notice our internal reactions. If we do recognize that we are getting angry or afraid, we probably don’t notice the physical correlates to those feelings; the tension, stress or pain in the body. Unaddressed, as the weight of these experiences continues to accumulate, we may find ourselves depressed, in chronic anger or anxiety, dis-ease. Many folks today are suffering in this way from hearing the news.

This is not to say that anger or fear are in themselves unhealthy or unwarranted. They are natural reactions to threats to our personal safety or the safety and well-being of those we care about. When what we love is threatened, whether it is our family, other humans or other species, a mountain, river, forest or ocean, we are going to find ourselves reacting. This is natural and universal. What’s important is how we relate to our reaction and what we do with it.

From all the research on mindfulness meditation, we’ve learned that being fully aware and non-judgmental towards our feelings, begins to lighten their intensity and loosen the tightness with which we hold them in our body. It involves not pushing those feelings away, but also not feeding them. What’s important is that we are fully aware that there are these feelings and they are in us, not out there.

Returning to the experience of listening to the news: we therefore recognize that what is happening out there is triggering a reaction inside here, and we respect our feelings for what they are, whatever they are. In a sense, we become the observer and don’t personalize the reaction; our feelings are a part of what is happening in the whole of the experience. Just as there is rage and fear, conflict and competition out there in the world, something like that is happening inside us as well. We are moved to humbly accept our part in the pain and suffering in the world.

From a holistic perspective, the spiritual aspect of our nature is the source of love and empathy, whether for ourselves, our family, humanity, other species or Mother Earth. It is this love, however lost from our conscious awareness in the moment, that is truly at the root of our reaction to injustice, war or the damage to the natural world. It’s why we care. Our frustrated, impatient, justifiably righteous, egoic self may distort the flow, but at the source is generosity and love. Just remembering this can shift the way we feel because we are reminding ourselves amd getting back in touch with the healing force of that love. The focus of our attention is then on healing, healing ourselves and whoever or whatever we were disturbed by. We shift towards the motivation to respond to the situation creatively and skillfully.

Just as the holistic healer takes time to work on themselves, the holistic activist needs to take time to work on their own consciousness. As Ghandi said, “be the peace you want to see in the world.”

A few suggestions for relating to the news:

Process: Recognize that your body and mind are deeply impacted by events in the world and you need to take time to digest, metabolize and assimilate what you are letting in as information.

Step away: Humbly admit that the world will not be any the worse if you don’t listen or watch the news for a day, or a week. Take a news fast now and then. We need time to process the undigested material, refresh and renew our consciousness.

Act: In addition to what you are learning about yourself, your reaction may be your soul calling you to actively respond. Learn to communicate and act in ways that are in harmony with your nature, both the loving essence of your soul, and the gifts and talents of your personality. This will be the topic of the next piece in this series.

What is Holistic Activism?

It has become increasingly clear to most people that individual health is not separate from the health of the community, nation and world. Just as we take responsibility for our personal health and the welfare of our family, we feel a calling to be responsible citizens. We are part of the body politic and we feel emotional reactions to what is going on in the world. 

Transforming our emotional reactions into mature, responsible action is something that more and more people are finding themselves called to learn and practice. I have joined with others in creating the Network of Holistic Activists in order to bring the insights and practices of holistic healing towards our social and political problems. You can see our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/366558880455897/

The following post will be the first in a short series sharing my thoughts on Holistic Activism and inviting you to consider how it may relate to your own life journey.

# 1. What is “Holistic?”

I first encountered the word “holistic” in the 1970’s. It was the term being used to describe many of the alternative healing modalities, ancient and modern, which were springing up and spreading into what are now mainstream phenomena: acupuncture, herbalism, homeopathy, therapeutic bodywork, etc.. Holistic was used in conjunction with the phrase “body, mind, spirit,” and it was understood that integrating all three components was essential for true healing.

At the core of the holistic orientation is the understanding that there is a wholeness (holos means whole) that has self-healing, self-regenerating qualities. These attributes of the whole are not available to us when we focus only on a part, usually the diseased part, which has been the focus of Western allopathic medicine. New understandings of systems theory and ecology helped us recognize how this was operative on both small and large scale organisms, e.g.: the whole mind/body/spirit of a person has the healing potential that repairs any of the parts when brought into balance. Similarly, the Gaia theory suggests that the whole of planet earth, as a complete living system, is always working to bring itself into balance, restoring life, demonstrating a kind of “intelligence” of its own.

When practiced, a holistic healing approach involves cultivating awareness of the whole and it’s healing attributes while also focusing on the particular manifestation(s) of disease or dysfunction. This kind of awareness has a deeply spiritual dimension, calling forth the energies of what is sometimes called the soul, spirit, essential Self, or whatever one calls the aspect of being that is transcendent to the personal sense of self.

Further, the holistic mindstate involves an attitude that approaches problem areas without judgmentalism, aversion or expectation. Holistic healers, therefore, work on themselves to be in an appropriate mindstate or state of consciuosness. They work to clear their perception and also to make their own mind/body a more open vehicle for healing to take place. Practices such as meditation, yoga, and tai chi, are utilized both for the healers own well being and also to help them in their work.

While there are many different tools, techniques and processes that a practitioner may use, holistic healing can be said to involve at least these five elements: 1) attention to the inter-relatedness of the body with the mind and Spirit, 2) an orientation to the self-healing whole, 3) openness to the spiritual dimensions and sources of healing, 4) a nonjudgemental attitude, and 5) non-attachment to the outcome of the process. As previously stated, it is part of the healer’s task to develop not only the skills for their practice, but also to cultivate the awareness, attitude or state of consciousness required. 

In the next segment, I’ll discuss how this relates to activism in the social and political sphere.