The Philosophy of Natural Healing
Holistic medicine offers a rich, almost overwhelming array of treatments and possibilities. Underlying all, a series of fundamental principles that are the root of all we know and practice in holistic medicine.
1. Disease is an absence of health, and vice versa: Health is an absence of disease. But health was here first.
2. Disease is a process used by nature in an attempt to get itself healthy.
3. Degenerative disease is not caused by nature. It is an aberration of nature (caused mostly by -- man).
4. Cancer is nothing more than a severe aberration of nature manifested in and by the body.
5. Sickness is an excuse to get healthy.
6. Don't mess with Mother Nature!
7. The mechanism for healing is already built into all individuals. Healing therefore occurs most rapidly when we realign with the natural laws governing that mechanism.
8. Pure health is spontaneous healing.
9. The immune system functions maximally and at peak efficiency in its totally unaltered state.
10. The degree to which we have to work toward health is directly proportional to the amount we have messed it up in the first place. Health is simple; disease brings in complexity.
11. Generally, it's not what you put into the body that restores health; rather it's what you let the body eliminate.
12. Physically, health isn't everything, but without it, everything is nothing.
13. Food, including the necessary vitamins and minerals, was intended not to improve, but rather to maintain, the body. Therefore, the need for treatment reflects the degree to which the individual has strayed from nature.
14. The body does not have to degenerate or age nearly as quickly as we presume. Each body cell as the ability to replicate itself 100 percent, and the process should continue for longer than we currently expect if we minimize deleterious effects on the cellular structure. It is only what we choose to do the body, both consciously and unconsciously, that leads to the premature aging we experience.
15. Genetic predispositions to disease are only predispositions and do not have to manifest if health is maintained. Once a genetically predisposed disease condition appears clinically it can be reversed, although with more difficulty, as a course toward health is taken.
16. Nature and the being itself are the true healers. The practitioner, in the guise of being the healer, is truly the guide. Or: Physician, heal thyself!
17. Nature uses disease to establish balance. Only when our bodies are out of balance are we subject to disease, and if we can just endure the natural healing process, the disease will soon abate, having restored us to the balance that is optimal health.
18. In the holistic perspective, there is no such thing as coincidence.
FORCE OF LIVE- Energy medicine
AROMATHERAPY PAST AND PRESENT
Aromatherapy should be based on an energetic framework, rather than on the pharmacological actions of essential oils. It's strife that using essential oils involves the handling of pure energy.
Why?
Because aromatherapy is fundamentally an energy medicine. This is a truth that we all experienced. And yet most of us find it difficult to justify it on an intellectual level. You may wonder why it's difficult for us to verbalize just what it is that makes essential oils more than mere cluster of chemicals thrown together. Even more importantly, think about the nature and dynamics of essential oils, and consider how hard we find it to explain these in any terms other than those we already feel comfortable with - basically, the terms of science. Whether we're trying to describe how an oil works on body or soul, or whether we're trying to explain why a particular blend had such a miraculous effect on a certain client, we always tend to fall back on those trusty old stand-bys - essential oil chemistry and pharmacology. And yet, aromatherapy is essentially and energy medicine.
ANCIENT OILS
For most of recorded history, essential oils and the fragrant plants they come from have been used in three ways: healing or medicine, creativity or aesthetics, and spiritual or religious practices. The process of essential oil distillation is not the relatively modern invention it is often thought to be. About thirty years ago, Professor Paulo Rovesti discovered a simple terracotta steam distillation unit in a north Pakistan museum. It was around 5000 years old! Oil distillation was apparently practiced by the Mohenjo Daro culture on the River Indus around 3000 BC. You may well ask why this knowledge didn't survive, or at least spread to the other ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Malta, Egypt and Crete, where we would surely have found written records of it. The answer is simple. The Mohenjo Daro culture suffered repeated invasions and at some point was completely wiped out, along with the knowledge of steam distillation. It is my personal conjecture that steam distillation was repeated discovered, lost and rediscovered throughout history. For example, there are records of a Jewish physician and midwife, Miriam, who lived in Rome in the first century, who practised steam distillation. This was a thousand years before the Persian alchemist Ibn Sina (Avicenna) worked on his distillation unit.
EGYPT: FRAGRANCE AND THE GODS
The whole of Egyptian civilization is testimony to the fact that spiritual practice, medicine and aesthetics were inextricably linked. Let's take an unguent vase (4000-5000 BC) in the shape of the goddess Hathor as an example. Hathor was one of many incarnations of the great cosmic mother, who was considered to be the source of all life in the matristic cultures of those times. The vase also testifies to the importance of aromatic substances in daily life, as it was crafted to hold an aromatic ointment ready for use. So we can interpret the Hathor vase in two ways. Firstly, the goddess Hathor represents the divine source of all fragrance. Equally, however, we can see the vase as an emblem or image of fragrance as the divine mother of all life. Whichever way we interpret the Hathor vase, the indivisible, primordial link between fragrance and divinity, between earthly aroma and cosmic creation, is clear.
RELIGIOUS FRAGRANCE
In most of the world's religions, fragrance has multiple functions and meanings. Aromatic plants are an offering of recognition and thanks to the divine. In Indonesia and India, fragrant flowers, wood and spices are lavishly used in ceremonies, rituals and temple worship as an olfactory celebration of the divine amidst the very humdrum routines of daily life. Woods and resins are particularly prominent in this connection, and include aloeswood, sandalwood, camphor wood, cedarwood, benzoin, cinnamon, amber, myrrh, labdanum and frankincense. Flowers such as jasmine, tuberose, champaca, frangipani and pikaki are also used as aromatic touchstones for divinity. In Western traditions, fragrances such as myrrh, frankincense and cedarwood are also seen as physical carriers of prayer to the divine, creating a fragrant bridge between human need and divine compassion. A fresco from Ethiopia clearly shows the successful result of this bridging: the process of herb production, cultivation and distillation is supervised by the Christian saint Rocco in a setting that is nothing short of paradise! The harmonious energy between the plants, animals and humans, as well as between the sacred and the secular, speaks for itself. The message here is clear: the production and use of fragrant oils is a blessed activity, and an expression of the divine spirit inherent in human life. Another fresco depicts the Coptic Christian paradise, framed by Aramaic writing stating that God will protect and recompense he who uses nature's gifts for making fragrances and medicines. This painting again clearly demonstrates the seamless connection, in the realm of fragrance, between spiritual insight, aesthetics and medicine.
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