Medicine, Health and Spiritual Hygiene
A human is the sum of many parts. We include that which is tangible, and that which is not. All philosophies and religions have their own way of putting into words this universal truth. Mind, body, spirit. Corporeal, intellectual, emotional, vibrational, astral. We can drill down further – Buddhism’s Abhidharma, Freud’s id, ego and super-ego, the chakra and meridian systems – but ultimately each operates with an understanding that we are holistic beings, and that there is much more to us than meets the eye.
Which means that our health and hygiene must – and traditionally always has – cater to more than just the physical. It would do us a lot of good to look at our spiritual, mental and emotional health – and, we think, make room for a little of the mystical, too (as Aldous Huxley put it: “a totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane”.)
What does this mean for us? Or, rather, what does that mean for the choices we make to nourish ourselves and maintain our holistic health?
So glad you asked. We believe that:
Emotional and spiritual hygiene is an act of nourishment
Illness is, in the most basic terms, a malfunctioning of the system. More specifically, it is a manifestation of a mid- to long-term malfunctioning; it might be the consequence of a harmful or unhealthy lifestyle; it might be the consequence of a harmful or unhealthy belief system, like negative self-talk or beliefs about ourselves. If we think poorly of ourselves, treat ourselves with negativity over a long time, our bodies will manifest illness.
Understanding that our systems include more than the physical allows us to understand that we can help prevent illness by attending to our emotional and spiritual hygiene: committing to developing self-awareness, to our emotional and spiritual growth, checking in with how we treat ourselves – as well as a daily meditation practise or vibration-raising practises such as group singing, ceremony or gratitude.
The more we take care of our emotional and spiritual wellbeing, the better our emotional intelligence becomes, and the more resilient we become to life’s ups and downs. These extremes, if we let them carry us away, can detrimentally impact our health. Think of it like any other fitness routine: through regular practise, we gradually build the muscles and hone the form and technique, and with it become stronger, healthier and less susceptible to injury in every area of our lives.
Food is medicine
This one is simple. A key health-boosting, illness-preventing measure we can take is ensuring our nutrition. And the best way to do this is through the organic, locally grown and lovingly cooked food we eat – that which natively grows in (and therefore best meets the needs of) our environment, that which hasn’t been processed and poisoned with pesticides, fertilisers, artificial flavourings and preservatives, and that which is packed with good energetics and intentions, grown and cooked with care. Read more about what we think about the food we eat here.
And what we need is usually right in front of us
As with our food, the medicine we need most often grows directly around us. The plants that have always helped us tackle everything from headaches to upset stomachs to sunburn grow everywhere – either easily cultivated in our gardens or wild, as “weeds”. You’ll find there’s a version, a plant for each ailment, growing naturally in every environment the world over, each intelligently adapted to the specific needs and prevalent symptoms of its climate and conditions. It goes back to the idea of accepting a little mysticism in the world around us – putting our faith in the fact that nature knows what it’s doing. Just as it keep millions of plants and animals cohabiting in perfect harmony in a forest, or planets orbiting in perfect harmony in space, nature takes care of all elements in its system, humans included, so naturally our medicines will appear right by us.
Humans have been using herbal remedies since prehistoric man, and we have incredible opportunities to heal ourselves with plants such as willow bark (the root source of aspirin), comfrey (used on inflammatory disorders such as arthritis and for treating diarrhoea) and clover (covering everything from indigestion to asthma). These are super-abundant, easily accessible wild-grown plants that tackle some of our most common ailments. Clearly, understanding the plants in our environment can easily empower us to help our own health. When it comes to prevention, ailments and minor illness, so much of what we need is at our fingertips, or on our doorsteps.
But we’ve lost the knowledge and the faith to take our health into our own hands
Instead of learning about and trusting in nature, we give ourselves over to big pharma. Like willow bark and aspirin, which contain the same compounds (one widely grown, one mimicked in labs), the origins of the active ingredients in so many of our pharmaceutical medicines are in the plants around us. We could forage for them, or help propagate and grow them.
Yet we’re out of practise; we feel disempowered to go and get some willow bark and make it into a tea – in fact, most of us grow up not knowing what the simplest medicinal plant might look like. So we go to the pharmacy and pay for powdered, processed, sugar-coated versions of what’s growing in our gardens… spending unnecessary money, adding unnecessary toxins to our bodies, creating unnecessary waste for the environment and removing the vibrational benefits of ingesting what grows where we live and the positivity and empowerment of working with nature to safeguard our health.
At the same time, while every traditional community structure features a health expert – be that a shaman or local village doctor; someone who knows the environment and the people they’re treating intimately – many of us now put all of our health into the hands of people who don’t know us, our story, psychology and holistic health, at all. While the intentions, intelligence and dedication of modern doctors is never anything but inspiring, a lot of these doctors are overworked, under-slept and under a huge amount of stress – short on the time and resources to truly tap into what our bodies need.
So what are we saying?
We are by no means questioning our need for western medicine, or disregarding the incredible knowledge and skill of its doctors, rather suggesting that in doing some of our own studying – in exploring our environments and becoming competent and confident in the gifts nature has given us – we can empower ourselves (thus taking some of the strain off our medical services). In our communities, we can share this knowledge, passing it on from generation to generation as it was passed by generations before ours.
That, paired with eating well, catering to our spiritual hygiene, and putting a little bit of faith in a little bit of mysticism, and we go a very long way towards preserving our health, wellbeing and happiness.