Holistic Healing

• Holistic Healing refers to a complimentary healthcare movement which considers health as a dynamic and unified state of the human being. It is based on the principle that symptoms of a disease may be found in certain tissues or organs however, the health and wellness is not a mere removal of such symptoms by the treatment of the affected tissues or organs, but a wholeness of multidimensional experience.
• The body, mind, spirit and environment are in a state of continuous interactive balance and the maintenance of this balance in an optimum state is the definition of 'health'. Sushruta, an authority of Ayurveda who lived 4,000 years ago, defined a healthy person as "He (who is) in balance, whose digestion, assimilation, and metabolism are good, whose tissues and wastes are created properly, and whose self, mind, and senses remain full of bliss." It is a sense of unified well-being as opposed to dis-ease.
• The living force within all creature is the 'consciousness', however, this consciousness is unconscious of the complex and dynamic physiological and psychological process which result from 'consciousness' and mind dwelling in a physical body.
• Most of these processes continue without any conscious input at all. There is, for example, a gap in consciousness between mental intention to walk, and actually walking. The individual consciousness is quite unconscious of the complex nervous, muscular, chemical, electrical, and may other biological processes that are involved in 'simply' walking.
• All the intermediate process between the conscious decision to walk and walking itself are unconscious. Even the brain function associated with original intention happen automatically and unconsciously. All this is due to the presence of the life essence, Prana, controlling and activating all bodily processes.
• Prana is directed by the mind, and the mind is activated by consciousness. In other words, the consciousness or Dweller in the body, functions through mind energy. Prana unites or links the mind to the form or body so that it can function in it. Mind then utilizes this form and functions through the senses, and gains satisfaction, experience and learning through pleasure and pain.
• Prana is thus the intelligence or cause lying behind the tremendous order and organization of all body functions, as well as the universe at large. It is not visible to the physical sense organs, and thus can be describes as a subtle form of energy. In the perspective of holistic healing the dis-ease is manifested when pranas in our body-mind-consciousness become unbalanced or out of rhythm.
• Holistic health does not reject the orthodox system of western medicine but complements it. In the case of infectious diseases, nutritional and hormonal deficiencies and bodily defects which need surgical intervention, it follows the western system. Psychosomatic dis-eases such as stress, hypertension, peptic ulcer, allergic asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic back-aches, headache/migranes, etc., can be helped by holistic health practices. Holistic health provides a way of life which prevents the recurrence of some of these ailments.
• Holistic health practices gives the responsibility of health in the hands of patient because that is where the awareness and control of the key aspects (diet, stress, exercise, action, emotion and medication) reside. The one person who knows about the patient more than anybody else is the patient himself.
• In the Holistic Model, the cause of any disease is understood in terms of the whole person and not in terms of a particular organ or tissue. Plato remarked that "the treatment of the parts should not be attempted without treatment of the whole". Most of the holistic health practices are based on the model of unified life, i.e. unified body, mind, spirit and environment.