Redefining Health & Healing

by Mark Mincolla, Ph.D
The Spirit of Healing
Over the past 16 years as a nutritionist and wholisitc therapist, I have worked with nearly 50,000 patients. With each consultation, I have become increasingly aware that nature has equipped each of us with the ability to heal. It has also become clear to me that somewhere in the extremes of modern life we have lost this ability. But just exactly what is healing and why does it seem to elude us?

I believe the answer has something to do with the quality of the lives we are living. If, for a moment, we take a break from our everyday attitudes and look deeply within, we can see beneath the surface of life to a force inside us that animates us, and lifts us up, and fills us with energy. Although we aren't often conscious of this inner aspect of our being, we unconsciously acknowledge it when we remark that a particular person is "full of life," or "has a lot of spirit." Clearly we recognize a transcendent, spirit-like quality in other human beings, even if we don't realize it.

I believe it is just this spiritual essence that holds the key to our healing potential. Although many of us talk about spirit, the truth is that as a culture we have lost touch with it, along with our wholeness - the awareness of ourselves as spiritual, as well as, ph ysical beings. In order to heal, we must become whole. Yet without a spiritual sense of ourselves, we are left less than whole, disassociated, and out of touch with a most integral part of ourselves. It's easy to see why this has happened. Our culture has an extremely materialistic bias which maintains that only physical things are real, while it invalidates internal realities based on feelings and beliefs. Because of this, people often respond to spirituality with misunderstanding and mistrust. A good many of us believe that spirituality can only be found in religious institutions, or that it is something mystical or mysterious.

But spirituality is simpler than all that, as much a part of daily life as the air we breath. Spirituality is all around us everyday. It is the Divine inspiration we feel at the birth of a child, the joy that moves us with the coming of Spring, or the grief we feel at the death of a loved one. Spirituality is reflected in the unique, unseen energetic quality of each and every human being. Spirit is everything that is not material: unseen life-force, dreams, hopes, beliefs, and emotions.  Intuition, too, is a type of internal, spiritual phenomenon that science can't measure and our culture doesn't value.Consequently, we don't trust ourselves or what we know in our hearts to be true. This results in a separation between the mind and the heart. We may even say we care about soulful and spiritual phenomena, but often the bottom line is that we don't believe that things we can't see can affect us. This separation between our hearts and mind - the denial of our spiritual nature - creates a terrible rift in the fabric of our beings that has resulted in a grievous lack of self -intergration and self-esteem in a vast cross - section of Americans. But how can we possibly find the key to loving ourselves if we are disconnected from our true nature?

Herbert Maslow, the esteemed human behaviorist, taught that the greatest of all human needs is self-esteem. Greater than our need for food, shelter, or clothing is our need to establish a "true self identity." Without this, we cannot determine our values our priorities or our reason for living. Yet, to love, to be whole, and to heal we must know and be who we are. The truth is that who we are is not just our material bodies, but also souls and spirits and minds. Not everything can be measured by science; not everything can be known or understood or treated from the outside. Human beings are a miraculous complex of physical (material) and non-physical (spiritual) energy system. Like the electricity that causes a light bulb to become illuminated, we, too, are powered by an unseen life-force.

To maximize our true healing potential, we need to begin by acknowledging this unseen power as it expresses itself in the subtle energies of our minds, spirits, and souls. These parts of ourselves - our beliefs, intuitions, thoughts, feelings - must be cared for with as much attention as we devote to our physical, visible bodies. We need to acknowledge that the body, mind, spirit, and soul are connected in a practical sense. We cannot hate or resent our boss and pretend that those feelings have nothing to do with our hypertension and indigestion. We can't keep a stiff upper lip when our heats are heavy, refusing to express our grief, eventually the grief will find physical expression. Emotions are real and have the power to affect the workings of the body.

The Spirit of Wholism

Just as we need to claim our wholeness and right relationship with ourselves as a physical, mental, and spiritual being, we also need to claim our rightful place in the world as a unique part of a greater whole. This awareness is all but lost in modern technological life. Once our ancestors lived in tune with Nature. They knew who they were because they recognized their intimate relationship to the big, consistent cycle that brought seed in Spring, growth in Summer, bounty in Fall. We Westerners, however, live as though we can conquer and dominate Nature with no detrimental effects. Our technological prowess has led us to believe that we are in no way dependent upon or connected with the great cycles of birth and growth by which our ancestors lived and died. But we are part of nature, and nature lives within us. We cannot prosper and remain separate from the natural world, for to do so is to remain severed from our own true natures. If we are to claim our power to heal, we must reclaim our awareness of "whole-ism". As these fundamental changes in awareness filter down through our lives, we begin to change the way we think. As we become whole, we will begin to question many of our previous assumptions.

Another result of living in a materialistic, externally focused culture is that we have lost our belief that we can affect our own healing. Instead, we think that only an external agent, a doctor in most cases, can fix us when we're sick. Yet study after study, as well as the many personal histories being published today, shows that people who take an active role in their own health care protocols tend to have far more positive results than those who don't. Again, the problems involves changing the beliefs which denigrate our subtle energy by denigrating our own experiences, feelings, and intuitions.

This disinclination to trust our own healing instincts has been fostered by a mechanically- biased culture and its medical philosophy which denies that any kind of spiritual life-force energy can have an effect on our health. And, while some of us may believe our emotions wield some power in our every day lives, it's likely that we still don't understand how they can influence healing. To most of us, an inflammation remains an inflammation; a cyst a cyst.

Just as we must acknowledge our need to be good stewards of our physical life-force, we cannot ignore the effects of our emotional life on our health. We can't expect to be healthy in body, mind, and spirit if we don't pay attention to each of them. We must give our bodies good fuel and regular exercise. We maintain our mental health by exercising (in other words, acknowledging and releasing) our emotions, and by stimulating our minds. We nurture our spirits with music, meditation, or spiritual practice. However we choose to live our lives, we cannot remind ourselves often enough that these three elements - body, mind, and spirit - are inseparable elements of the whole human being.

Vitalistic And Mechanistic Belief Systems

Our healing systems differ vastly from one culture to another. Although we have been steeped in the modern material worldview, luckily we have another model; we can look both to our own past and to the healing systems of Eastern cultures, most notably ancient Chinese Medicine. This system of thought is rooted in a belief that all life is endowed with a special vitalizing life force which both animates matter and forms it. In this system, human beings are seen to be part of the natural world and subject to its laws. Vitalism, as this belief system is called, holds that although man participates in the process, it is nature that ultimately heals. Health, then, is a matter of complying with Nature so as to most beneficially cultivate the life-force that flows through us.

Perhaps you can remember your grandparents or the women up the street or the old family doctor as vitalists. When you were sick they would have wanted to know what was going on at school, how you were feeling, whether you'd gotten a chill at recess. They might have questioned you about what you'd eaten for breakfast, weather you'd been properly dressed for the weather, what was happening at home before you left for school. They understood, innately, that human beings were whole mind- body systems comprised of subtle interwoven energies which profoundly affected health. They ministered to your feelings and questioned you about your interaction with your world. They knew that good health was the result of adapting to the dictates of nature - both inside and out.

On the other hand, modern materialistic philosophy can be described as a mechanistic system. Mechanism is distinguished by it belief that people are separate from Nature and, like machines, can be analyzed and treated in isolation from the greater whole. Just as mechanism separated people from nature, it separates the human mind & spirit from the body.

Although mechanistic philosophy (which formed the basis of the Western scientific medical model) still dominates our thinking, modern science continues to move beyond it. The advanced study of physics has established that all of life can be reduced to a common element billions of times smaller than an atom. Quanta, as they are called by physicists, are neither matter nor energy, but a kind of basic essence from which both are formed. When reduced to its smallest parts, then, the entire phenomenal world is comprised of the same basic "stuff." Put another way, the science of sub-atomic physics has established that we are not separate from each other or from Nature, but connected in one vast energetic field. This is quantum field theory and it is a first cousin to vitalism. Science, then, has proven what the ancients intuitively knew to be true. This mechanistic validation of vitalistic principles is but a greater validation of whole-ism.

In the past 25 years or so, bolstered by the success of science in "proving" what had always been essentially intuitive knowledge, our Western world had begun to reclaim a more vitalistic model of living and healing. Many techniques from vitalistic medicinal systems have begun to filter into your everyday world, and alternative therapies and complementary medicine are becoming more and more common. Today, there are many programs at respected medical centers which use a variety of preventative techniques to treat illnesses. Nutritional therapy as well as mind-body medicine (which includes such stress reduction techniques as meditation, breathing, Yoga and Tai Chi exercises) have proven themselves effective in treating a vast array of medical problems. A host of double-blind studies - the only way we Westerners will really believe something is true - illustrate how cultivation and manipulation of the subtle life-force heal disease and create vibrant health.

A recent study of Finnish men indicated that those who didn't feel love or hope were 20% more likely to die of cancer than those men who did. Equally fascinating is the research being done at the Institute of Heartmath , a think-tank in Santa Cruz , California . Researchers there are monitoring changes in the bodies of subjects as they practice simple exercises that focus loving feelings in the heart. Not only does the actual heart beat change in a matter of minutes, but these changes dramatically raise the body's levels of anti-aging hormones, strengthen several chemical indicators of immune system functions, balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and lower a hormone that promotes aging and illness.

Every day the evidence is mounting to prove that a subtle life-force profoundly affects the course of the physical body. We are coming to experience what the ancient Chinese knew 5,000 years ago - health and illness are not random events, but largely the results of how naturally we cultivate our life-force. Of course, knowledge is one thing; incorporating it into our lives is another. Experience brings belief, and belief calls for more experience. In order to begin to harness our true healing power, we need to change our minds about how we view who we are and what we believe. Perhaps looking at the world through the eyes of a higher consciousness can be our greatest healing experience.

One of my patient's stories is particularly vivid in my mind - I will call her Kathy. At the time that I worked with her, she was a young woman in her early 30's. For the past several years she'd suffered from extreme food sensitivities. There were very few foods she could tolerate without getting sick. She became so congested when she ate dairy, wheat, and yeast that she couldn't function. She also had a number of immunological problems. I muscle tested her and weaned her from the foods to which she showed sensitivity. Kathy came to the office frequently - once a week for the first month, then every two or three weeks. During the four months I worked with Kathy, we got to know each other better. Eventually, she told me that she'd been living with her fiancé for ten years and wanted to get married, but he didn't. She never mentioned it, though, for fear of losing him. As time passed she began to feel increasingly bothered by the fact that she wasn't telling him how she felt. We talked about this, and I gently urged her to stand up for herself, her needs, and her feelings. I stressed that I thought it was important for her to express herself. Eventually, she mustered up the conviction and confronted him. Though he remained unmoved by this honest expression of her needs, she stood her ground and a short while later they split up. Although Kathy was initially upset by the turn of events, almost immediately all of her food sensitivities disappeared! When we met in the weeks following the break-up she was sad, but she felt free from the fear that had bound her for years. She had liberated her heart, and her heart had liberated her body of it's debilitating symptoms.

Our life-force resides in our hearts, in our cells, in our thoughts and beliefs. Whether your heart hurts from sadness and grief or from blocked arteries, it is all blocked energy. Natural healing involves cultivating and enhancing all your life-force, whether it's through the kinds of medicines you use, the food you eat, what you think, how you act, or what you believe.

 

Dr. Mark Mincolla Ph.D, is a natural health care practitioner who has transformed the lives of more than 50,000 patients over the last 20 years. In his private practice in Cohasset, Dr. Mincolla has ingeniously integrated ancient Chinese techniques with cutting edge nutritional science. Dr. Mincolla has authored three books to date: Maximum Healing: Your East West Guide to Natural Health, The Tao of Ch'I: Healing with the Unseen Life Force, and The Wu Way: a Path to Natural Healing. This article is an excerpt from Dr. Mark Mincolla's book Maximum Healing. You can find his books at Good Health in Hanover & Quincy. In addition, Dr. Mincolla hosts the Natural Health & Healing Show, which airs Sunday evenings at 8:00 on WATD 95.9 FM. You may contact Dr. Mincolla by calling 781-834-2728