The Truth About the Term “Holistic”

What does the term “holistic” really mean?  The term gets thrown around more and more.  It seems like the term piggy-backs on both the green movement and the growing arena of eastern exercises.  What I see happening is a commercialization of the holistic movement, which is good for introducing concepts to the mass population, but as with most things, the other side of the coin also spins and what spins is a watered-down version of original meaning.  I want to briefly highlight 3 points about the term holistic and what it implies specifically to a larger perspective of humanity’s relationship with people, environment and self.

When we were first introduced to the term holistic we probably came across the snappy phrase “mind-body connection”.  But again, this precipitates an understanding that rarely exceeds acknowledging that emotions and mental habits ‘may’ have something to do with your body.  Holistic, first off is experiential, not intellectual and requires you to acknowledge some difficult truths.  There are many, but I will only introduce three major ones.

Truth 1: Your internal environment creates your external experience.  Your response to external experience reflects your level of awareness of your internal environment.

What this means is that if you accept a holistic perspective, then you must take full responsibility of your self created drama, difficulties and chaos, which are representative of a series of choices over time that eventually got you to where you are right now, pleasant or unpleasant.  Choice, being a causative factor; a universal law that grants experience as a consequence of free-will.

Truth 2: There must be a paradigm shift from seeing self as a “victim” of life events to a life with purpose and destiny.

There is a huge difference in the experience of life with a “fatist” perspective vs. a “destined” perspective.  One relates to the environment and self with the internal dialogue saying, “I have no control over what happens in my life”, while the other says “I have a pre-determined path to manifest my will”.  These operate on a long continuum of awareness.  When we begin to manifest a greater proportion of synchronistic experience and “destiny” derived perspectives, you know you have began to shift into the destined perspective.

Truth 3: There is a weaving of consciousness with physical reality. Therefore each participant acts as a co-creator to that reality whether it be passive participation or active participation (i.e. Path of the victim, or path of the destined).

We must accept that we are part of a collective whole.  Yes, we have individuality with individual thoughts, etc., but we also operate as a single collective consciousness.  Just like an individual manifests their corner of “reality”, so does the collective conscious manifest theirs.  We observe how our country deals with conflicts, which is very similar to how many people deal with internal conflicts.  Suppress it, destroy it, ignore it, etc.  We experience this truth as it plays out in world events, natural catastrophes, and cultural or ideological wars, to name a few.  So there must be a level of collective evolution in order for the individual to also succeed in spiritual growth.  Likewise there needs to be individual growth for the collective to evolve.  It is rarely an “either-or”, and almost always an “and”.

So what does this mean for disease and health?  Well, everything!  Holistic medicine is about participation, transformation, and long-term growth.  These things take constant effort.  Holistic medicine sees the patient and their disease as an inseparable entity of a manifested imbalance.  Disease isn’t something that happens “to you”, it is you.  This is where the journey is!  Go inside, find the kinks, neuroses, and fears and transform that incoherent static into music!  Your body and consciousness are a metronome that needs to swing with the universal song!  Disease is the guy clapping off-beat at a concert!