Healing comes not from medical interventions but from life.

What does this mean?

Life is virtually undefinable, but lets say its all the energies associated both with ourselves and with our surroundings.

What are these energies? Energy is a word which has the potential to sound like a new age mantra, but as mooted by Einstein’s equation linking matter and energy, everything must be regarded as interrelated.

So we and our surroundings are made up of energy and matter, and though we don’t think about it much, without the surroundings we’d only survive for a millisecond.

Without the heat from the Sun we’d snap freeze in a moment, without the air we’d last a few minutes, and without water we’d survive a few days at most.

It makes sense to think of ourselves as connected to our surroundings and universe in a way which, should that connection be broken, we’d perish. We choose most of the time not only to deny the connection but attempt to control it.

Hence we change the face of the planet for our own needs and worry about the inevitable consequences later, applying another usually temporary solution to the side effects. We prefer to think of ourselves as in control of our surroundings and in control of life.

This need for control is understandable given the obvious fact that we’re at a point of our own evolution that is capable of understanding the rudiments of our existence only.

Of course science is loathe to admit this and dresses up its understanding of us and the universe in terms which imply that we shouldn’t worry, that modern science has almost completed its understanding of nature and is well advanced in controlling it.

The Genome project in which much of the physical nature of the genes have now been mapped has been typical of this misinformation, the implication being that we are on the brink of understanding and rectifying all human disease.

This attitude sells careers, scientific papers and of course, newspapers. But is it true?

It might be the case that the human brain has evolved only far enough to understand a few elementary aspects of its own existence. The rest it makes up.

We have evolved due to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We didn’t create them nor dictate them. The marvelous body physiology which we possess, miraculous in its breadth and itself constantly evolving with the planet and the universe, is all but beyond us.

Whenever human beings are unable to explain or even measure something, theories take over from facts and become, in time, the accepted truth.

For a while at least, no-one looks for any alternative explanation as the matter has been decided upon by someone, usually an expert committee, and as far as they’re concerned, the matter has been put to bed.

It has become fact. Iconoclasts who see it differently are excommunicated, or like the “round earthers”, declared insane.

Nature however, is rarely represented on expert committees.

Nature is evolving away, keeping us alive, trying to rectify our follies and basically being denied any role in our healing and being abused for the symptoms which it produces to alert us to the fact that there is an underlying imbalance requiring correction.

Nature is annoying and recalcitrant. Nature does not understand our time lines. We need to be made better and we need it now, and in order to make that happen, we rob Peter to pay Paul, creating an additional burden for our healing mechanisms in order to remove the symptoms of our suffering and for which we must later pay.

Nobody is going to do anything about this until something happens which alerts him to the process and in order to achieve a greater healing, looks at things differently.

It is very difficult to eschew the values with which we have been raised and which society demands of its members.

Transgressions of thought and action by members of society invoke sanction and reprimand, even if those actions and contributions are in the interests of everyone.

But let’s say our member of society has been alerted to her need to invite some healing capability into her life which she has hitherto rejected or been unaware of.

What can she do? Does she just need to become aware of the healing power of nature and nature will do the rest? Does she have to assist nature in some way? Does she have to eschew all conventional wisdom and perhaps conventional treatment?

Does she have to do anything?

The answers to these very real and practical questions is: “There are no answers to them”.

The nature of an enquiry and exploration is that answers arrived at too early tend to close off the exploration in exchange for a feeling of knowing the answer and the feelings of safety which come from that.

There’s an energy from living within the inquiry which cannot be described nor attained through effort. It is a renewed acquaintance with the life force, a new communication and penetration by life energies.

Maybe it requires no more than being prepared to declare and explore availability. Am I available? What does that mean? We often hear people say that the older they become the less they know.

The old joke “Give a teenager a job whilst he still knows everything” is indicative of the same understanding. It can be infuriating to have someone say that within the “not knowing” arises healing, that within the uncertainty of life resides the grace of living.

But then again, what would m3health know?

We all strive for balance perhaps without thinking much about what it is and what it implies. Perhaps this is because it means something different to each of us. A sportsman will say that to balance his life he has to train no more than four hours a day five days a week, play the game on the weekend and rest one day. To a parent with three young children, such a life would be totally unbalanced as she strives to accommodate lunches, school, sports, activities and her own part time job. A Tibetan Lama might say balance is when he can meditate for hours in the snow and think of nothing. What might be the advantages of balance should one achieve it? A state of balance is a place from which one can move. I f you’re playing football and the ball is passing your left side and you’re unbalanced, you’re not going to be able to make the move to cut it off. In order to achieve our goals, we need a state of relative equilibrium from whence we can move when necessary. How does one achieve a state of balance? Does a state of perfect equanimity imply balance, or perhaps indicate the end of exploration and therefore no movement at all? Life appears to be a journey in which matters which are not yet balanced rise to the surface and demand resolution and the restoration of equilibrium. Why so? The human organism has survived now some 15 million years and in that time genetic maladaptions and incompetencies were gradually replaced by genetic combinations best suited to keep us alive and reproducing. Those two aspects of evolution cannot be supplanted. If we’re not strong enough to resist disease, we don’t survive and if we don’t reproduce we die. So perhaps this is what balance in Human being is? A stable place of:

• Survival
• Procreation

Many people aren’t happy with this reductionist approach to humans, preferring a more romantic or religious understanding of our “reasons for being here”. Even they however, wouldn’t deny the two obvious functions above. However, there may be more to life than surviving it and reproducing. Many would argue that the development of the new brain, the cortex, means that Humans have capacities which go beyond the two basic requirements. The human traits of intellect, compassion, understanding, vision and empathy may mean that these things require as much consideration now as the basics. Perhaps establishing balance in the basics enables us to explore the remainder of our existence, an existence which is a work in progress, and perhaps in its infancy. Then there are those who concentrate so much upon the evolution of the new brain that they’re prepared to eschew the old brain requirements of survival and procreation. Many religious figures might be in this category. I guess in the matter of religion one might ask is a religious person running from the basics and occupying himself in ethereal pursuits in order to avoid resolution of fundamentals, or is he genuinely taking the concepts of self, not self, spirit and grace to higher levels.

Perhaps we can look to the state of the world for insights, taking account of the hundreds of wars currently being waged, the vast majority of which have a religious basis. Many of these wars appear to be the consequence of religion not having caught up with contemporary living. With balance in one’s life so difficult to attain, perhaps people retreat into religious can’t in order to make some sense of a life of which sense cannot be made. Now where does all this leave us? Balance is different to each person. There is a balance between old brain requirements, such as health, procreation, emotional expression, touch, nurturing and new brain requirements such as exciting concepts, stimulation of passions, intellectual pursuits like learning. This might be the first balance to strike, between the essentials of life and the things which make life interesting to an evolved cerebral cortex. Ignore one and the other suffers. It’s fascinating to watch the modern woman, educated that she can attain all that her male counterparts have attained for some time, and equipped with the skills to do it. She’s finding that the other imperative in her life, the biological imperative, won’t be driven underground easily by high flying jobs and personal acquisitions. Many men have similarly found the attainment of material wealth unfulfilling. Some women are choosing to put aside the “advances” that women have made and go back to caring for children, albeit with far superior assistance including help from their male partners. Other women have elected to not have children and find out if careers will fulfil their promise of happier lives than experienced by their mothers. Time will tell. In the meantime, our quest for balance has us looking both inward and outward. Inward balance implies a willingness to address whatever left over childhood issues cause us stress as grown ups. We can use our current circumstances to identify those stressors and use the current circumstances to resolve them. This is our attempt at internal balance, not dissimilar to our endocrine system struggling with billions of cellular processes and trying for the balance most conducive to the well being and survival of the organism. Outward balance implies a healthy connection with those elements of existence we might define as “not us”. Other people would be at the top of that list, the environment perhaps a close second. We need to be in healthy symbiotic relationship with ourselves and with others and our Universe. This is the function physiologically, of our immune system. Now we’re starting to get a major handle on balance. There’s a balance to be struck within the resources we allocate to each of these needs. That will vary over the course of our lives, but it could be helpful to have these two major matters, both requiring balance to be in consciousness for at least some of that journey. In the long run it becomes automatic.

“There’s something wrong with me”

“I’m not good enough”

“What’s the matter with me?”

“I should have this sorted by now”

“How come everyone else has it together?”

“I’ll never get through this”

“I should be better”

Where do all these thoughts come from?

In any 24 hr period it is estimated that the average Western child receives several hundred negative messages and only 20 or so positive messages.

The negative messages needn’t be anything profound, but little things like “Now come on. I’ve told you before. Don’t wipe peanut butter on the dining room walls!”

Disapproval of one form or another might be a better way of putting it. Confronted with so much big person disapproval, the small child has little option but to conclude that “there’s something wrong with me”, since his presence on the Planet has not been met with universal bliss by both or either parent.

If the child were perfect he could make mum and dad blissfully happy, he may believe. He may conclude that in order to get what he wants he must adapt.

He must try and become as the big people around him appear to want in order to have his needs met.

The power of this is of course that he cannot keep himself alive, and so is very susceptible to the pressures he finds himself under.

These may not be obvious to an outsider, and may amount to the psychological confusion or irresolution of one or both parents.

Since parents aren’t perfectly realized beings, it is inevitable that they will pass on some of their unresolved issues to their offspring. This means that the environment in which the child finds himself is already charged with the incomplete parental issues and the child will pick these up and respond to them.

Because of this we often can’t think back to childhood and put our fingers on why it was that we have a certain adaptation, since we registered it at a non-verbal age. We were responding intuitively, from our need to survive. Because survival was the issue at such a young age when we were unable to keep ourselves alive, the matters with which we contend as adults may appear life threatening.

As a consequence we may be reluctant to address them since our experience to date in life is that whilst they’re uncomfortable, damaging even, at least we have a history of surviving them. Our original adaptation has gotten us this far, i.e. it worked, and we’re not sure we’re willing to take the risk of moving beyond it.

We prefer the pain and suffering of the certainty to the fear of the uncertainty.

Subject to the environment as a child we adapt and create our Second Nature or our Ego. We surround ourselves with beliefs, opinions, attitudes and answers of which we claim we’re certain.

We separate ourselves from everyone else, cocooned for safety within the perimeter of our adaptations and we become reluctant to part with them. Only usually when the pain of the adaptation exceeds the fear of letting it go will we be willing to risk experiencing something different.

Within this defensive perimeter lies the essence of who we are, unavailable to ourselves or anyone else until the protective mechanisms are released a little. Those defences not only protect us but they separate us from nature, thereby diminishing our healing response. That response is an unfettered set of thoughts, feelings and actions which represent a collision of current circumstances with past conditioning.

The more we can free our responses, the more our immune and endocrine systems are free to heal us.

This is the art of allowing contemporary circumstances to be the very vehicle of our healing from past adaptations which have caused psychological and eventually physical disease.

Our anger directed towards ourself and at others is a left over from the time when we were obliged to adapt to receive parental caring. The first response of the child to discovering that he had to adapt at all would likely have been fear, followed pretty quickly by anger.

Guilt, which is really anger directed at oneself, is one of the most difficult of human emotions to deal with and consequently, the one seized upon by religions worldwide to control the masses.

Courts and Governments use the same methodology. They understand that everyone is guilty about something and try and invoke that guilt in the service of their own needs.

Releasing guilt, which really comes from observing it and understanding it, as well as a freeing of the anger and fear underlying it, is one of the greatest healing experiences of the human being.

The containment of emotions and the repetition of thoughts which are given credence, confines the physiology and causes disease.

The pain and suffering justifies looking at ourselves and life differently and permits healing to begin. Along with the allowing of anger, sadness, fear and joy is the freeing of the thoughts.

This occurs by allowing ourselves to recognize that thoughts are collisions of firing neurones stimulated by our five senses in the present, with a left over remnant of a belief from the past.

They aren’t true, they aren’t real and they aren’t us.

We, as has been mentioned many a time, are being “thunk”.

The recognition of the natural pathway of human childrearing, leading to all of us believing that there’s something wrong with us, is the start of the journey back.

The first part of our life was spent acquiring the adaptations, the second part, the journey home, is spent releasing them.

Welcome to the journey home.