As we discussed last month, I was very fortunate to
receive healing services from a Naturopath and her team, who also offered
guidance on living in our fast-paced world. Since this time of year offers an
opportunity to rethink, reframe and reboot our lives, I’d like to share some
thoughts.
In Naturopathic medicine, a person is considered a human
being and the whole presence is considered (mind, body, spirit and emotion),
which is called Integrative Medicine.
In today’s everyday chaos, however, as a society we are no longer going toward
integration. With so many interjections to our day, we are, instead,
experiencing scattered thinking and frustration, which causes our body to
become off kilter and disjointed – we are always on. When our lives are so scattered, our brain waves are actually
in what’s termed chaos, which means
our left and right brain are not working together well. Being constantly on, trying to meet all the demands,
impacts our health down to the cellular level and has caused people to no
longer experience REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, so vital to our health and
wellbeing. The good news is, studies done on people who meditate show their
brain waves are coherent, the state
of being synchronized on both sides.
Meditation can take us to a place within where there is a
sense of wholeness with access to love, wisdom and inner strength. I consider
this my soul – a place of peace and harmony. As humans, we have a deep, inner
longing for wholeness. When we are pulled in so many directions, we become fractured and have to actively cultivate
wholeness. Think of your soul as a circle of total pureness, with an outer circle
containing the stuff we experience in
life (frustrations, fears); tiny fissures break into the outer ring of our
being, which causes us to experience confusion or the feeling of being lost or
disconnected. In this state, it is very hard to hear or feel our
intuition.
Meditation helps us to cultivate wholeness by creating an
awareness of our self and our environment; it develops patience and opens us to
all of life’s offerings instead of only those blaring at us through technology.
Our body, at any given second, is responding to our every need; the more we
live in a fractured environment, the more we waste needed energy. Meditation helps
us to meet chaos with calm; it helps us to find clarity in situations, instead
of responding with knee-jerk reactions. Meditation also brings acceptance of
our self and others. This does not mean we have to agree with everyone, nor do
we have to condone everything; acceptance allows us to just let it be.
Remember to honor the being
in you; take really good care of you and find healing through meditation.
I wish to acknowledge Dr. Susan Godman, Dr.
Cheryl Kasdorf and Ms. Paula Zuccarello of
Partners in Health Care, Naturally,
Prescott, Arizona
"In Mind-Body Integrative Medicine, we listen to the symptoms and to the story behind them as our guide to treat the cell and the self. We work to cure the biology as we simultaneously heal the biography. Only when both the cell and the self are tended to, can we find authentic, deep healing." Dr. Paul Epstein
