This teleconference, symposium, whatever you want to call it has been very informative these first two weeks. I know I’m slow in getting my synopsis down onto paper (so-to-speak), there’s just so much information I want to do these discussions justice. I am sorry to say that I missed two of the recordings the first week as life inevitably got in the way.
As I stated in the invitation to the Wellness teleconference, the focus is on optimal wellness looking at the body as a whole: mind, body, heart, and spirit. Each speaker is addressed with what Optimal Wellness means to them and in particular their topic of discussion. While I can only portray so much of the information here from my own interpretation, I truly urge you to sign up and attend at least one of the teleconferences –remember they’re free- because, while I listen and type away I can only learn so much without further delving and research, and everyone’s interpretation of the information provided is different from my own. With that said, week one’s speakers that I was able to hear were: Marilyn Schlitz PhD and Anodea Judith PhD.
Dr. Schlitz’s discussion focused on the mind and delved into the idea of Transforming Healthcare from the Inside Out.
For Dr. Schlitz the road to Optimum Wellness from the Healthcare perspective has to do with relationships. The relationships between the cells within our body and the organs they comprise to the type of environment we provide through our relationship with food, stress, mind and body, other people, and spirituality. People who focus, or rather, have an intimate relationship with another person, with the environment; with a higher spiritual power that continues for an extended length of time have been shown to live longer and healthier lives. The combination of all these things working together creates optimal wellness.
Through an understanding of these relationships we can heal ourselves. For healing is a personal definition, different from curing. “Curing is a technical piece, whereas healing is the whole system.” Personal definitions of health and healing are dependent upon an individual’s view point: world view, relationships, daily life, etc.
Healthcare is a larger system and one that can and often is its own nemesis; which occurs when someone gets ill when going to the hospital for another issue. Dr. Schlitz does not say that there is anything wrong with Western healthcare in fact there are a lot of advantages to the Western Health care system that are very positive. The complementary approach, such as the National Institutes of Health, supported by tax dollars, is disease oriented, meaning the focus is on treatment, sustaining, and curing of disease. On the other hand we know that our bodies are healing. Take a look at the placebo effect. This is a phenomenal and mysterious process that deserves more attention. When you talk about the research, the placebo tends to be the control mechanism rather than the test subject. Our consciousness, our world view, and view on health all impact how we view self healing. There are mental, psychological, spiritual practices that can allow the body to come into a state of rest which in turn allows the body to heal itself. Ultimately we should strive for less reliance on the pharmaceutical and destructive course of curing and into a holistic self healing approach toward riding the body of dis-ease.
Dr. Anodea Judith author of the book spoke on the soul through a focus on Chakra’s.
For Dr. Judith, the road to optimal wellness starts by being in the flow of grace, being where all parts embrace, i.e. proper alignment within the core, in other words the chakras which will allow for the alignment of the inner and outer world. Since the chakras exist at the core of our being and act as the interface to the outside world. The elements that exist outside our body (air, water, fire, earth) exist within our body as well in the form of cellular fluid, our breath, consciousness, and digestive fluids. It is the alignment of the inner with the outer through the chakra’s that creates optimal wellness.
According to Dr. Judith, people are not grounded. We are in our heads constantly through distractions such as work, the computer, pulled from our body at a young age when we’re supposed to be running, jumping, and climbing trees but are instead sitting quietly in a classroom writing letters. This constant “out of the body” existence creates illness within the body, as our energy cannot flow through us as it should, because we are not grounded within, we are not in alignment with our body, our chakras.
If you are unfamiliar with Chakras, they are wheels, balls, or disks of energy (however it is you perceive them) that rest at seven points within the body, each representing one of the seven ganglia that extend off the nervous system. Most often noticed when, say, you feel butterflies in your stomach because you’re nervous –that would be an activation of just one chakra. The mind and body can influence the chakras and the chakras can influence the body as well, i.e. the placebo effect. Interesting to see that come up again.
To break it down in more simpler terms, Dr. Judith describes the chakra-mind-body connection in this way: “if we consider our body the hardware, and the mind is more like the software, our beliefs, everything we've learned... what allows the body and mind to connect is the energy supply -life force energy -chakras. The energy is shaped by the mind and the body simultaneously.”
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