Our columnist on seeing the bigger picture
When we think of holistic health, we often imagine something airy, or perhaps spiritual, intangible and without any basis in ‘The truth’. We humans have tried to separate, categorise and divide things into individual components. When things are individualised and rationalised, we have been taught we can trust the science. The human body for example, is divided into parts. This ‘bit’ does this and that ‘bit’ does that. We think that if we have legs we can stand up, but have you tried standing up if you have tinnitus? Our balance goes completely, so standing up is really hard. Of course, we are also whole systems, and we can’t be split up and reduced to our constituent elements, we are the whole. Just consider the digestive system, which you may think of as being in our stomach, but it’s so much more than that. When we smell something, our mouths might water, which is the first step of digestion happening. The effort to reduce and divide has only resulted in a massive misunderstanding of how our bodies, minds, and the environment work.