I recently came across this beautiful and apt summary of the history of healing. It describes how we have come full circle when it comes to our understanding of, and use of, natural or alternative healing.
Some of you may have come across it before during wellbeing workshops, seminars, retreats, or meditation sessions.
This really resonated with me. I hope it does for you too…
A Brief History of Healing
5000 BC—I have an earache and go to see the village healer who gives me herbal teas and holds his hands over the ear. I feel better.
500 BC—I have an earache and go to the Greek dream temple where there is a drama about my problem with a chorus of advisors, known as theraps (the root for today’s word “therapist”). All help me to feel better.
1870 AD—I have an earache and am advised to go to a surgeon who drains out the infection and I feel a lot of pain, but later the ear is better.
1970 AD—I have an earache and am given antibiotics and soon feel better.
2021 AD—I have an earache but the bacteria are resistant to all the antibiotics they can give me. I’m instructed to see an herbalist who gives me herbs and teas. I also visit a therapist who releases emotional issues related to the earache and consult with an energy medicine practitioner who passes her hands over my ears and body. I feel much better and also gain new insights about preventing future earaches.
— adapted from an anonymous quote circulated in holistic health meetings
We certainly do appear to have gone full circle, returning to traditional and hands-on interventions when medications do not work.
Alternative medicine, also known as complementary medicine, is emerging as a challenge to Western reductionistic approaches to healing.
Western medical science separates body and mind; alternative medicine unites them.
Western medical science focuses on the physical symptom; alternative medicine on the whole system. On the symptom in the context of the whole person.
Western medical science presumes that it is science that does the healing; alternative medicine presumes that we use our own resources for self-healing.
Western medical science says take a pill, and go back to whatever it was you were doing before you got ill; alternative medicine gently guides you to the realisation that returning to the same lifestyle that contributed to the creation of the problem is ludicrous.
Each and every individual has an innate ability to self-heal, but the goals of alternative and modern-day medicine are sometimes in opposition to each other.
Energy medicine, which is a relatively new profession, is one of the fastest-growing areas of medicine and is one of the approaches used to bring balance and harmony to imbalances in a persons energy systems.
The goal of alternative touch and energy healing methods is to restore harmony and balance in the individual's energy system, which firmly places you, the client, in a position to take responsibility for self-healing. This often conflicts with the modern-day tradition to look to drug companies and doctors to provide an external fix to a specific symptom.
Practitioners working with what is commonly called vibrational medicine or vibrational healing are bringing this ancient healing back to life using the 'tools' and 'medicines' of sound, colour, crystals, herbs, aroma, light, electromagnetics as well as other energetic modalities
But it is only now that science is catching up to what the sages and natural healers have known for centuries.
And sure, I get that you are sceptical. Surely energy healing alone isn’t always going to solve all of your problems and lead to perfect health and wellbeing?
Well no, sometimes you do need surgery and the drugs that only doctors can prescribe.
But what harm could possibly come from being open to exploring other options to healing as well?
What harm could come from exploring ALL options to healing and wellbeing?
To combining the worlds of conventional medicine with those of complementary and alternative medicine? To bringing together the best of both worlds and using all means at your disposal to work towards the best outcome for you and your health and wellbeing?
Surely nothing is more important that that?
“Quantum physics has now proven that everything we see is an illusion, that the physical world is an illusion. Everything is made up of interacting energy. Energy interacts on a subatomic level to form energy fields which physicists call subatomic particles. These subatomic energy fields interact to form atomic energy fields, atoms, which interact to form molecules. Everything in the physical world is made up of interacting atomic and molecular energy fields. There is no such thing as separation in the physical world.”
