Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios

Holistic Health and Healing / Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios PDF File

The word ‘holistic’ defies definition. Different people use it in different ways.
In the field of health and healing, some people think of holistic medicine primarily in terms of taking the body and the mind of a human person together as a single whole entity and not as two. This is legitimate, since modern western medicine, when it went scientific in the last century, set aside the ‘mind’ as a separate entity to be taken up later by specialists like psychologists and psychiatrists, leaving the body for the physician and the surgeon.
The new psycho-somatic approach, or mind-body medicine, which as a scientific trend developed approximately three decades ago, was however only a stage on the way to what we now regard as holistic health and healing.
There have been important developments since medical scientists began taking the mind-body problem seriously. One has seen the widespread use by therapists of practices like bio-feedback, meditation, relaxation, and even alternative systems of medicine like Ayurveda, Homeopathy, Chinese or Taoist systems including Acupuncture and Acupressure, Tibetan medicine, Herbal remedies and so on. Another has been the development of new “cross-disciplines” like psycho-neuro-immunology. There have been many clinical reports of strange wart cures and placebo effects which cannot be accounted for by ordinary medical science, It is now fairly well established that factors once regarded as ‘purely mental’, like perceptions, beliefs, emotions, thoughts and attitudes, have a definite role in the healing process.
It seems, however, that we need to go one step farther, in order to get at what we mean today by Holistic Health and Healing, not so much to define, as to depict some of its main characteristics.
I. Planet, Person and Paradigm Shift
The first thing we have to note is that neither the human person, nor the planet earth on which the person is totally dependent, exists or can subsist in isolation. Neither one can be understood except as part of larger systems of which it is only a subsystem.
The very word “person” is a relational term. Human persons, as far as we know, can be formed and developed only through interaction with other persons and social groups like family, relatives, peer groups, societies, religious groups, national populations etc. Even if we take the human species as a whole, that whole is in turn dependent on other wholes – like for instance the system of nature or the biosphere as such, which includes air and water, earth and sea, mountains and rivers, sun and moon, and so on.
Similarly the very word ‘planet’ indicates that our earth is a satellite unit of the solar system, existing only as its subsystem, dependent on it for its very sustenance and energy, interacting with other planets in the system as well as with its own moon, and never in isolation from the system. In holistic health and healing we need to pay constant attention to the system of relationships, which play a most significant role both in the causing of disease and in the healing of persons.
So far we are on fairly undisputed territory, though current medical science does not take all these factors into account. We need, however, to go even further in our envisioning of the whole of reality of which we are a subsystem.
There is, as of now, no single paradigm of the whole of reality on which scientists and other theoreticians agree. This is especially so if we can step outside the bounds of western civilisation and western scientific thought in envisioning the reality process.
Negatively, we can say that mechanical or static models of person, Planet or Reality as a whole will not do. But even dynamic models are usually conceived in time-space, subject-object categories and frameworks. In fact our human language seems hardly capable of going beyond these. Past, though the present, to future (time), and locality (space) seem unavoidable even in a dynamic paradigm. Extension in time and space is an aspect of the reality we inhabit and experience. Change (in time) and movement (in space) appear to be foundational for person, planet and universe alike. Paradigms can only be maps; they should not be mistaken for the territories they map.
II. Quanta and Consciousness
But there are two interconnected aspects of our human experience where time and space take on unusual characteristics. In quantum reality and in the understanding of our own human consciousness, time and space behave extraordinarily. And these are quite important for any paradigm which should undergird the theory of a new medical science. I propose here about Holistic Health and Healing. But we shall refer in ordinary language to some of the unusual discoveries of modern physics which have relevance for medical science and healing therapies.
While mechanical causality may have helped us and can still help us understand many phenomena, there are other areas of experience where the cause-effect connection, within time and space, with the cause preceding in time and acting through space to produce the effect, cannot be established or even postulated.
In the area of health and healing too, not all healing can be causally understood or controlled. Or if causality is to be postulated, it has to be in terms of ‘non-local causation’, i.e. without any lapse of time between cause and effect, without the passing of any message through any observable medium from cause to effect.
Consciousness or mind cannot be spatially localized. The human neuro-biological system does not seem to have a centre either in the brain or anywhere else in the individual human body. It has a quality that transcends space and time; it is more corporate than individual, ultimately unitary, able to act at a distance, and to travel without lapse of time. The healing power of mind or consciousness has been clinically observed in all forms of healing by faith and prayer, in placebo effects, in some alternative systems of healing etc. The biological path by which the causal chain acts may not be directly traceable, but the healing effects are evident in too many cases to be dismissed as merely anecdotal. Any new revision of medical theory will have to take these factors into account.
Our growing acquaintance with reality in the quantal realm has not yet taken us to the point where we can describe that reality satisfactorily in our time-and-space conceptual language. We now know that we do not know reality itself, but only know our perception of it. All our descriptions, measurements and mathematical formulae relate only to the perceptions. Quantum reality cannot be adequately described in the categories of Newtonian mechanics.
Some things however, we can affirm, as paradoxical indications of our quantum experience. Reality is interconnected everything seems, ultimately, in immediate touch with everything else. Human beings cannot stand outside reality and look at it from outside; they are on the inside as participants; they are part of the reality they observe, and partially shape that reality in the very act of observing. Our experience of time and space and causality at the macro level has no validity at other levels of our experience. In the healing process too some of the observed phenomena have more affinity with the quantal than the mechanical realm.
III. Insight as Healing Agent
In psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the healing role of insight has long been recognized. The patient’s self understanding is what the therapist works on, in order to induce new insights which give the capacity to solve problems and predicaments in a new way.
In ordinary healing, however, the role of insight is not as widely recognised. The whole Indian religious tradition is based on insight as the way to deliverance or moksha through self-realisation. Even the insights coming from ordinary knowledge and from scientific enquiry can lead to stress reduction and thus contribute to healing. The disciplined pursuit of science, philosophy, law or other academic disciplines, of arts such as sculpturing, painting, music and so on, and even of practical arts like weaving, cooking, interior decoration, pottery etc., so long as they provide for some sort of disciplined total involvement, can be helpful in the process of healing.
A new medical theory should take into account the role of insight as well as that of aesthetic experience of true beauty, as positive factors in therapy.
IV. Relationship, Faith and Community
Relationships are central in Holistic Healing, and that at many levels. People are today talking about Transpersonal Medicine, as they talked yesterday about Transpersonal Psychology.
First, there is the healer-healed relationship, or doctor-patient relationship. Love, empathy and compassion on the part of the healer towards the patient and some response from the patient to that love can generate strong healing energies which make the work of healing quicker. Doctors and nurses who genuinely care make all the difference in the healing process. This may be the opposite of the time honoured idea of scientific dispassion. But healing is more art than science.
Much ill health is due to isolation and alienation – the loneliness of not knowing that others care. And our present civilisation which puts too much emphasis on each one doing his or her own thing, generates loneliness in havoc-wreaking measure. Bolstering the individual ego and enhancing the strength of the person can both be futile if these are not aspects of healthy and mutually self-giving social relationships, chronic loneliness, as distinct from cultivated and disciplined spiritual solitude, can be toxic and generate morbidity. If the healer, by his/her love, compassion and empathy, can bring the patient out of the morbid isolation of loneliness, the healing process would be remarkably accelerated.
The second area of relationships is the whole community around the patient. This includes the physicians, surgeons, nurses and the paramedical personnel in the hospital, the patient’s relatives, visitors, and even those who without actual face to face contact with the patient and often even without the patient’s knowledge, function as a community faithfully praying for the healing of the patient.
The attitudes of those in direct contact with the patient, even over phone or through other message, are very important, for these can generate healing energy. But the faith of a community and its fervent and sustained prayer can definitely exercise high therapeutic efficacy. The prayer of a single person, in direct contact with the patient or without such contact, can also be immensely effective. There are secular substitutes for prayer available to agnostics: like positive imagining, or intensely desiring and willing the healing of the patient.
Even in these, a fundamental faith in the positive or beneficent aspect of reality is a precondition. The joint effort in prayer of more than two people has always a special effectiveness. This is the mystery of community.
V. Touch and Ritual
The idea of the “healing touch” has recently come into vogue, especially in nursing literature. It can also be the “caring touch” that communicates to the patient as well as to members of the patient’s family the assurance of care and support. Medical practitioners and nurses have to break out of their self-image as technicians and become warm human beings, expending something of themselves in the act of caring. This cannot be mere mechanical touching, but the touch that communicates confidence, warmth, reassurance, support and understanding, as well as respects the personhood and dignity of the patient.
Touching is communication, a most intimate form of communication. Therefore it is important that the other person’s privacy and dignity is fully respected in the touch and that it does not become an intrusion. Nursing personnel have to be careful in keeping their professional dignity and yet being warmly humane, but the latter is an essential part of holistic healing.
Another very effective form of touch is “laying hands on by those who pray for the sick, and by faith healers. The hand becomes a medium through which healing forces transfer to the patient from the healer. Usually the right hand of the healer is placed on the forehead or crown of the patient and a prayer is said, silently or audibly. The patient, usually with closed eyes, with faith, and in a spirit of receptive meditation, receives the healing energies.
Ritual as a healing technique has for long been difficult to understand for the modern western rational mind. The European Enlightenment of the 18th century made western an rather anticlerical and antiritual. But new anthropological studies have begun to show that ritual plays a very major role in the social communication of modern humanity. Dr. Jeanne Achterberg, a forceful advocate of holistic healing and especially of “Transpersonal Medicine” as a new system of healing has written a very perceptive article in a recent (winter 1992, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 158 ff) issue of Revision on “Ritual: The Foundation for Transpersonal Medicine.”
Ritual is a participatory community act, in which words, actions and symbols combine to communicate to the participant meaning which cannot be expressed in words alone. Long before the human species acquired its language skill it has been using ritual as the mode of expressing meaning. In healing too, along with other forms of interpersonal relationships, ritual plays a significant role.
Jesus, the Great Healer, sometimes healed by the mere word, sometimes even without a word. At other times, he made mud with dust and saliva and applied it as salve in the eye of the man born blind, asking him to go and wash in the pool of Shiloam, or asked the paralytic to pick up his bedding and walk. The ancient churches developed special rituals for the healing of the sick. A modern surgeon in Medical City Dallas Hospital may light a blue sulphur flame in the operation theatre and recite an abracadabra to heal a patient whose disease could not be diagnosed or cured by all the complex techniques of modern medicine (See Larry Dossey, Space, Time and Medicine, 1982). The role of ritual in healing cannot be neglected in any new theory of healing and health.