Shifting from allopathic medicine and psychiatry has been a journey with many lessons. Conventional medicine sees the body as the basis for existence and its focus is limited primarily to physical issues.

Psychosomatic medicine and psychiatry extend this to include the mind and emotions as issues to address when people are ill, though the focus is still often on dealing with mental and emotional problems through medications.

Psychology takes us further along the wholistic spectrum into mental and emotional issues that and shape our lives, which can be addressed through talking therapies.

My training in all of these – over a period of a dozen years - was thorough and helpful… but in retrospect still limited. It was only when I got involved in spiritual healing that I appreciated the full potentials for myself and others to understand our relationships with other people, with the environment, with our own spirit and with the Spirit of All that Is – and to live much fuller lives through this full-spectrum living.

If you are concerned about making our world a better and safer place to live, you may find this fuller spectrum helpful. Personally, it feels essential that we in the Western world reconnect with our awareness of Spirit – that which imbues everything with consciousness and life.

If everyone, including myself, is a part of a greater All, then I cannot hurt another living being or the environment without, in effect, hurting myself.

Dry words are inadequate to express the oneness of wholistic healing. The icons at the top of the IJHC and WHR websites and the words linked to them convey more of this wholistic approach.

I find that I am not alone in this line of thinking:

The highest spiritual act in life is to see yourself in everyone else and everyone else in you, to surrender yourself and see everyone’s joy and suffering as your own, to detach yourself from you ego-need to be attached to the fruits of your labor, and to simply see everyone else in the world as part of you.

Wayne Dyer, “The Secret in the Center,” For the Love of God, New York: MJF Books 1997, p. 29

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

Joseph Campbell (attributed)

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." -- Mother Teresa.

Gaynor, Steven. From Physician to Healer: A doctor's encounters with spiritual healing, Center for Light 2005, p. 49.

If you look for the truth outside yourself,
it gets farther and farther away.
Today, walking alone,
I meet him everywhere I step.
He is the same as me, yet I am not him.
Only if you understand it in this way
will you merge with the way things are."

Zen Master Tung Shan

Sunrise

You can
die for it--
an idea,
or the world. People
have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound
to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But
this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought
of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun
blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

Mary Oliver,  New and Selected Poems
Beacon Press 1993 (reprint edition)

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE PITHY SAYINGS AND POEMS THAT SPEAK OF OUR WHOLISTIC ONENESS WITH THE WHOLE OF CREATION?

Blessings

Dan Benor
WHEE-MD