The following is excerped from the book, Sing Your Own Song, Dance Your Own Dance.

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
— Matthew, 4:4.

Medicine has its limitations. Life force has none. — Paramahansa Yogananda, “Scientific Healing Affirmations”

How Life Force Heals

The Breath of Life

The book of Genesis has it that God made Adam of clay and breathed life into him. The clay, of course, represents the material substance of the body. The divine breath gives it life and energy.

The Vedic tradition tells us that, with every breath we take, we draw in prana through the medulla oblongata, the mouth of God. From there it flows into the spine and brain and on to all the organs and tissues of the body, infusing them with life and energy with the power and the intelligence to carry on vital functions, to regenerate, and to heal.

Call it the breath of God, call it prana, or call it chi: life force is the essence of all health and healing of life itself.

Restoring the Flow   

The flow of life force may be obstructed by physical injury, infection, improper diet, substance abuse, genetic factors, stress, lack of sleep, worry, and a host of other negative events, conditions, and patterns of thought, feeling, and lifestyle. Such impairment of the free flow of life force leads to physical and mental disability, disease, even death.

If the blockage is minor and its duration brief, then simply eliminating  the negative conditions or patterns that caused it in the first place may be enough to put you on the road to recovery. In time, life force reasserts itself and restores health.  Imbued with intelligence as well as power, life force knows just what to do and goes about doing it.

But when the blockage is prolonged or severe,  life force may withdraw, partially or totally.  Or it may settle into a pattern of reduced effectiveness.  It no longer suffices  to just re-establish the external conditions that allow life force to operate freely.  You may have to employ special methods and techniques to stimulate the life force and coax it back into its normal course. Such measures may be helpful for minor problems they are generally indispensable to recover from a serious injury  or chronic condition.

Aspects of Manifestation

It is customary to speak of just three aspects of manifestation body, mind, and spirit.  However, the pyramid above differentiates the physical body into energy and form, thus yielding four aspects. This fourfold representation frames the discussion of specific approaches, models, and methods of health and healing in the rest of this chapter as well as throughout the rest of this book.

To work its wonders of health and vitality, life force must flow through all aspects of being: from spirit to mind,  to energy, and finally to the physical form.  To maintain or restore health and vitality, you need a continuous flow of energy, and a balance among the different energies.  For  this, means and methods that focus on the physical form are not enough.  You must also cultivate mental and emotional harmony, engage the will, and connect with Spirit.

Approaches to Health and Healing   

Models and methods of healing are incredibly numerous and diverse. To make sense of this almost boundless profusion, it helps to keep in mind two important points.

1. All effective models and methods of treatment have something in common: one way or another, by design or by inadvertence, they all enhance the flow of life force. Most help to create, restore, and maintain the conditions that allow life force to flow freely. Some also seek to directly facilitate, enhance, or redirect this flow.
2. All models and methods of healing fall into one of four basic approaches, corresponding to the four aspects of manifestation.

Physical Medicine  works on the physical body directly; it affects the life force indirectly.  Clean a wound and protect it from injury and infection with a bandage, and it will likely heal. The physical measures establish favorable conditions, and life force does the rest. You can also use physical methods to set broken bones, pump poison from the stomach, remove warts with cryonic surgery, or correct vision with lasers. Chemical substances can address a wide range of problems:  antacids to neutralize an acid stomach, analgesics to reduce pain, antibiotics to combat infection, and so on. Often, physical and chemical interventions are but temporary, stop-gap measures.  But they can also help to establish the conditions that enable the life force to do the work of healing and to maintain vital functions.

Energy Medicine seeks to unblock, harmonize, and balance the bodily energies. Here the focus is less on correcting or compensating for specific physical conditions and circumstances, and more on restoring and enhancing the free flow of life force. Thus, for example, in dealing with your acid stomach, Chinese medicine will not bother with antacid pills to neutralize the excess acid.  Instead, it will seek to restore the balance of energies perhaps soothe the liver with herbs, or use tuei na to change the flow of energy in the meridians and thus stop the excess production of acid.

Thought  Medicine  helps you to overcome a problem or challenge by changing the patterns of thought and feeling that set it in motion.  It helps you to connect with Spirit and transform the mind, and thus open pathways for the life force to heal the body.

Spiritual Healing, or Causal Healing, touches your inmost Self to unlock the flow of life force from spirit and heal all aspects of your being.

Over the ages, these four basic approaches have given rise to many models and methods of health and healing.  Each model derives from a particular historical and cultural context.  Each one understands the nature of man differently.  Each  has its own definition of health and illness, and its own methods and techniques of treatment.

Journey Into the Real Self

With holistic psychology, we take a journey into the real Self. The elements of holistic psychology provide us the means to plan the journey and to carry it through.

• The Holistic Paradigm is our map to the territory. It reveals to us our true goal.
• The Holistic Principles flow directly from the Holistic Paradigm. They guide us along the path. * The transformational processes and techniques take us step by step to personal unfoldment and fulfillment. The Holistic Paradigm. The Holistic Paradigm reframes the terms of our existence and helps us to understand our multidimensional nature. It has four facets.
• The Transformational Processes and Techniques take us step by step to personal unfoldment and fulfillment.

The Holistic Paradigm

The Holistic Paradigm reframes the terms of our existence and helps us to understand our multidimensional nature. It has four facets.

1. Our Multidimensional Nature

   We are unitary yet multidimensional beings, with physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects, manifesting in a physical, social, and cultural context.

   Material manifestation is but one aspect of reality, one aspect of our multidimensional nature. Figure 5 depicts the multiple levels of manifestation: Spirit/Soul, Thought/Mind, Energy Body, and Physical Form. At each level there are specific effects that correspond to personal goals.

2. Connection With Spirit

   We encounter Spirit within ourselves, and in all creation.

   Our powers of thought, concentration, and consciousness give us the ability to go beyond material awareness and experience transcendent levels of reality. Figure 5 suggests the pre-eminence of Spirit, the source of our being.

3. The Flow of Manifestation

   We manifest Spirit as thought, as energy, as activity, and as material form, in that sequence.

   Each of us creates things in the world. We also create our own self. This personal creation follows the same laws and patterns as the cosmic creation described in the Bible. In the beginning was thought (Logos, the Word), then came energy (“Let there be light”), and then finally the material universe took form. Nothing comes into manifestation without this three-step process.

   Thought is the starting point of all manifestation. Thought can generate any condition — misery or bliss, love or indifference, poverty or prosperity, illness or health. Thought determines the form and nature of any object — face or figure, script or statue, train or toaster. When thought has formed the blueprint, the stage is set for energy to flow, and then finally the material form takes shape.

   All methods of health and healing — physical, mental, and spiritual — rely on the flow of life force. Life force is the essence of all health and healing — as it is of life itself. It maintains and restores all bodily functioning and physiological processes. Imbued with the intelligence and the power, it knows just what to do, and goes about doing it. To allow life force to flow freely, we overcome or remove physical, emotional, and mental obstacles. To enhance its flow, we focus conscious awareness and will. Various methods of healing address different aspects of manifestation. Figure 5 shows the four levels of manifestation and the corresponding approaches to health and healing. The closer it comes to the apex of the pyramid, the more effective an approach to healing is likely to be. Physical methods can be helpful, but they cannot go to the source of a deep-seated problem. The results are often superficial, transient, and characterized by untoward “side effects.” Methods that act on the level of energy are still limited in scope and duration, and may require repeated application. For healing that is fundamental and long-lasting, you must change the patterns of thought.

Holistic Principles

The Holistic Paradigm not only sets the basic direction for holistic psychology and holistic health, but also gives rise to the holistic principles, which provide form and substance. The holistic principles guide us in our search for the Self. They illuminate our path to holistic health and healing— beacons to both seeker and guide

1. Wholeness — I am a whole person, one body-mind-spirit, existing in dynamic relationship to others, to my family, social, and cultural context, and to my physical environment.
2. Uniqueness — My unique way of being is the key to my authenticity, my transformation, and my healing.
3. Causality/Meaning — I attain true healing and freedom from disease by discovering the sources of illness and by changing the patterns of body, mind, and spirit which produce it.
4. Empowerment/Responsibility — I have the power to overcome illness and difficulties of every kind, and to realize higher levels of potential. I accept responsibility for my health and for my life.
5. Working With Nature — I support my healing with methods that are natural, non-toxic, and non-invasive.

Holistic Principles vs. Medical Myths

Holistic psychology affirms the integrity of the person as a multidimensional being embedded within larger wholes — the family, the community, the planet, the cosmos. Thus, health is not just a matter of tissues and organs, but reflects the functioning of the whole person, in context. True health means that Spirit flows freely through all aspects of our being, and we freely exchange energy with the world around us. When this flow is blocked or impaired, we experience alienation, powerlessness, depression, even despair and mental imbalance. And we succumb to physical disease.

Western medicine takes a very different approach to health and illness. Its materialistic mindset is narrowly focused on our physical aspect. Its professional ethos emphasizes “medical necessity” — applying medical technology to the physical circumstances.

Modern medical practice is a complex socio-cultural system. It is informed by biological science and other relevant technologies, and it is governed by laws, regulations, and formal codes of conduct. But its dynamics primarily reflect the history and the economics of the profession, and the belief systems of practitioners and public. These belief systems feature a number of cultural icons and myths. These medical myths, and the practices that flow from them, contrast sharply with the holistic principles and with holistic practice.

1. The Myth of the Disease-Dragon reflects preoccupation with disease and the attendant disregard of the person. Standard medicine is focused on the body, which it regards as the site and the source of illness. In practice, however, its primary focus is not really even the body, nor any other aspect of the person afflicted, but rather the specific disease process. Holistic psychology focuses on the person as a whole, not on the disease. All aspects of a person — physical, mental, and spiritual — enter into and reflect the state of health or illness. Physical health is not separated from mental or even spiritual health. The specific health issues are of one piece with the person’s total existential and environmental situation.

2. The Myth of the Silver Bullet reflects the desperate but forlorn hope that external agents can be found to overcome any given disease. Standard medicine seeks after remedies and protocols specifically tailored to destroy particular maladies, or to palliate their effects. Holistic psychology puts the focus on healing the person rather than on destroying disease. It celebrates health, and even deviations from health, as unique and meaningful manifestations on the life path of a unique person moving toward a unique goal. To bring about healing, you need to understand yourself as a person, know your goals and the obstacles in the way, and find out how a particular manifestation of illness fits into the overall picture.

3. The Myth of Medicine Works Wonders pictures the body as a besieged victim to be defended with sophisticated technology. Standard medicine sees illness as a pointless aberration from the norm, caused by external forces buffeting a system that is inherently weak, unstable, and vulnerable. It seeks to shore up the body with the right wonder drug or procedure. If none exists, it will be, must be, developed forthwith. Holistic psychology sees illness as an individual expression that manifests when means of expression consistent with health are blocked. A true remedy addresses the blockage, not just its consequences.

4. The Myth of Doctor Knows Best invests the medical practitioner with the technical expertise and the responsibility to determine the best response to illness. Only those with proper training and certification may select and apply the appropriate remedies and protocols. The doctor is in the know, and in charge. Holistic psychology guides you and empowers you to use your own knowledge, your own resources, and your own power to heal.

5. The Myth of High-Tech to the Rescue is the notion that all human problems await a technological solution. Standard medicine seeks to apply more and better technology, not just to ill health, but also to normal physiological processes throughout the life cycle, such as birth, death, sexuality, menopause, and aging. It does not even shrink from medicating normal psychological processes, such as grief and mourning, anomie and anxiety, and the emotional fall-out from developmental and existential crises. Holistic psychology sees you as the primary resource for health and healing. Methods that are consistent with Nature, and with your own particular nature, are best suited to potentiate your efforts.

Transformational Processes

As the Holistic Paradigm gives rise to the holistic principles, the holistic principles in turn give rise to processes for transformation and healing. Three such processes have been developed within the framework of Mindful Repatterning. All three take you in the same direction, but each one picks you up at a different point along the path and takes you a shorter or greater distance further, depending on the process, the specifics of the situation, and your own “travel plans.”

Holistic Inquiry is a person-centered process to overcome specific roadblocks on the path of life. An illness or other life obstacle serves as a starting point, as well as a prime indication of what needs to happen, physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Problems are most readily apparent in the physical dimension. But to identify the causes and remedy them at the source, we go “upstream” along the flow of manifestation — to energy, to mind, and to spirit.

The Crowd of One is the royal road to personal synthesis. The immediate concern may be health, success, or harmony and intimacy in relationships. But the ultimate prize is personal coherence and transformation. The Crowd of One takes up where Holistic Inquiry leaves off. First you identify with, and affirm, the disparate aspects of yourself. Then you harmonize and integrate these subpersonalities around your center of awareness and volition. Thus you clarify your intentions and align your will. You may also explore side-roads, practice holding on and letting go, face your avoidance, and find empowerment.

As you attain a sense of wholeness and integrity within yourself, you also come to appreciate others as unique, imperfect, yet valued beings, with whom you share a fundamental unity through the Higher Self. This sets the stage for an expansion of consciousness. Thus you move seamlessly, from personal integration and individuation, to the quest for transcendental meaning and spiritual unfoldment.

Holistic Renewal incorporates both Holistic Inquiry and the Crowd of One in a process of integration and transformation that is at once structured and individualized. You progress to self- mastery, transformation, and healing, over a series of stages, and steps within stages.

First you explore the particulars of your existence: * Your body: What are its strengths, its vulnerabilities, its ways of coping? How are the energies balanced? * Your mind and your feelings: What are your buried traumas, your unmet needs, your habits, your quirks, your joys, your hopes and aspirations? * Your spirit: What does your soul yearn to express? * Your social context: How do you relate to friends, loved ones, family, and community? * Your physical environment: In what ways does it support you? How does it get in your way?

As you explore these aspects of yourself, and of your circumstances, definite patterns begin to emerge, then coalesce into an overall theme. Once you “get” your theme, you feel it in your gut. You have no doubt that this is you. When your life theme has crystallized, you begin to see yourself anew. You begin to make sense of all the wayward and seemingly pointless patterns and circumstances of your existence. Finding your theme brings a new energy, a new power to follow your bliss — now that you know what it is. You can begin to sing your own song. It was yours to sing from day one, but perhaps you got stuck playing somebody else’s tune instead. You may have put on a good show on the outside, while literally dying inside. Holistic Renewal helps you to reframe the way you live and experience your life. It reveals your true destination. It gives you the map and the tools you need to make the journey. It even teaches you to become your own guide. Once you know the score, you can play your own tune. These three processes have elements in common, yet they are separate and distinct. Part III presents a detailed exposition of each one, with real-life examples.

Techniques of Transformation

The transformational processes make use of many techniques, some adopted or adapted from other systems of psychology, others “homegrown.” Holistic Diagnosis is a prime instance of the latter. In fact, as the synopsis below suggests, it is essentially a straightforward application of the holistic principles. To determine your Holistic Diagnosis, your guide helps you to comb through all aspects of your being — your physical/medical status and history, your energy flow and balance, your emotional and mental dynamics, even your spiritual background. But all this in context. Your story remains your story. It does not become a disconnected bundle of facts, dismembered into separate domains relevant to different professions. It is not couched in technical terms only experts can fathom. Rather, the various aspects or strands of the story retain their relationship to each other — and to you. They even gather meaning in the process (Note: Wholeness). Next, you reframe the story into a meaningful account of the choices you made along the way, from early childhood on. You explore how these choices affected your consciousness, your personality, your health, and your life course (Causality/Meaning, and Empowerment /Responsibility). The patterns that emerge from this picture reveal your particular style of coping, as it manifest throughout your life at all levels — physical, energetic, mental, and spiritual (Uniqueness). For healing to take place, this unique pattern or style of yours needs to be understood and allowed to express itself freely (using Natural Methods).

The System of Holistic Psychology

Modern psychology and modern medicine are elaborate edifices constructed to protect established interests. Their rules and procedures are designed to protect professional privileges and maintain the status quo, not to facilitate wellness, healing, empowerment, or transformation. Their technology is based on nineteenth-century materialism and reductionism — concepts abandoned long ago by physics as simplistic and limiting. With their narrow purposes and flawed premises, these professions do not, cannot, reflect the truth about you, as you, me as me. As now constituted, they do not serve us well.

Holistic psychology, on the other hand, offers an ideal framework for personal transformation and healing. Based on a true and complete picture of human nature, it responds more appropriately and more fully to our needs. The Holistic Paradigm leads us to a deep understanding of ourselves. The holistic principles guide us on the path of transformation and healing. The transformational processes and techniques provide the tools to get the job done.

The following is excerpted from the book, Sing Your Own Song, Dance Your Own Dance:

Holistic psychology is a new awakening. It sweeps aside the one-dimensional picture of standard psychology and reveals our true nature — multidimensional, yet unitary. It brings about a theoretical and practical integration that includes all aspects of the person: physical, mental, and spiritual, within a physical and social context. Thus it reorients us to the essence of our human nature, and of our personal identity. It paints the picture of ourselves in proper perspective — a picture of the whole person, the unique person, the person with will and consciousness, with potential for transformation and transcendence.

A New Science

Holistic psychology builds on what has gone before. Like Gestalt psychology, it insists on the integrity of the whole. Like humanistic psychology, it emphasizes realizing our full human potential. Along with Psychosynthesis and transpersonal psychology, it explicitly addresses the transcendental and the spiritual. It taps diverse sources to adopt, adapt, and elaborate techniques, incorporating them into its methodology of personal change, transformation, and healing. Though not new and distinct in every detail, holistic psychology as a whole offers a fresh start. It strips away encrusted notions from the past that are false and limiting, and points us in some radically new directions. It makes a clean break with the unbridled materialism and mechanistic reductionism of nineteenth-century physics —and twentieth century psychology. It replaces such narrow, misconceived, and dated notions with an epistemology that truly reflects and accommodates our human nature. Its conceptual framework forms a sound basis for a new science that opens the door to a richer, more complete, more meaningful, and more functional understanding of our world, and of our place within it. Its methodology for exploring and transforming consciousness leads us to a new world within.

A New Map of Consciousness

New Physics took us inside the atom to open up our understanding of the outer world. Holistic psychology takes us inside our own consciousness to open up our inner world. As the relationship of matter and energy was a defining issue for physics, so consciousness has always been the defining issue for psychology. Yet standard psychology has paid scant attention. In academic psychology, consciousness has to do mostly with degrees of awareness and responsiveness. Clinical psychology follows Freud and his coterie in posing a strict duality — the nice, tame, rational, conscious, social self, and the largely inaccessible, dark, inchoate, irrational, untamed, unconscious. This crazy, troublesome uncle in the basement is prone to make uncouth noises, crash the party, or cause damage, and therefore must be propitiated and closely monitored — perhaps even listened to, for fifty minutes at a time. Holistic psychology offers neither a bland gradation of activation nor a dark duality harboring a repressed atavistic threat. Rather, we enter upon a grand garden of exotic plants. There is plenty of space, light, and water, but perhaps the garden suffers from lack of proper planning and tending. Some plants are anemic and stunted, others grossly misshapen, overgrown, inter-grown, or choked with weeds. The garden awaits the master gardener to re-design, re-shape, prune, and cultivate. The resources are at hand. Holistic psychology provides the map and the tools. The choice and the plan are ours. And the work as well.

A Practical Discipline

Holistic psychology is meaningful and useful to everyman. It strikes a resonant chord within, and offers workable solutions to personal and social problems. Holistic psychology offers a fresh perspective on the “facts” of standard psychology. It reframes the prodigious knowledge-base of standard psychology to make it more user-friendly. Thus it bids fair to reform and revive the practice of psychology as a profession. Holistic psychology focuses on the central issues of human existence and experience. Such as happiness — How can we experience life as meaningful, productive, and joyful? Such as love — How is loving different from being in love? Such as health — What is it, how can we attain it? Holistic psychology is a science, a technology, and a healing art. It encompasses all aspects of human nature — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. It has full scope to solve problems in all aspects of our existence. It is not burdened by an encrusted mythology or limited by artificial restrictions and limitations that would keep it from being generally useful and available. It is well positioned to cooperate with any other science, technology, or discipline, but does not look to any other profession for direction or authority to define its scope or carry out its work. Holistic psychology is a new awakening that sweeps aside the one-dimensional picture of standard psychology, and reveals our true nature — multidimensional, yet unitary. It brings about a theoretical and practical integration that includes all aspects of the person: physical, mental, and spiritual, within a physical and social context. Thus it reorients us to the essence of our human nature, and of our personal identity. It paints the picture of ourselves in proper perspective — a picture of the whole person, the unique person, the person with will and consciousness, with potential for transformation and transcendence.

A Road to Personal Change and Transformation

What is your destination? For some — in some sense perhaps, for us all — the ultimate goal is personal transformation and self-mastery. From this flow personal fulfillment, career success and other accomplishments, satisfying relationships, and physical health and healing. But not everyone gets a ticket to the end of the line. Perhaps for now you wish to go just to the next station, then perhaps take another leg of the journey later on. Still, it helps to have the map. At least you can avoid catching the train in the wrong direction!

A Model for Health and Healing

Holistic psychology illumines our search for health and healing. Its concepts, principles, processes, and techniques help us to reach our goal. It also provides a conceptual framework suitable for the health care of the future. The search for health and healing is but one aspect of the search for personal transformation and self-mastery — the search for our real Self. Spirit is the source of health and healing. Attunement to Spirit allows energy to flow freely through all aspects of our being: spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical. The real Self is Spirit. Thus, to attain transformation and healing, our task is nothing more and nothing less than to connect to our real Self. Holistic psychology is a new awakening that sweeps aside the one-dimensional picture of standard psychology, and reveals our true nature — multidimensional, yet unitary. It brings about a theoretical and practical integration that includes all aspects of the person: physical, mental, and spiritual, within a physical and social context. Thus it reorients us to the essence of our human nature, and of our personal identity. It paints the picture of ourselves in proper perspective — a picture of the whole person, the unique person, the person with will and consciousness, with potential for transformation and transcendence.

The following is excerpted from the book, Sing Your Own Song, Dance Your Own Dance

Like a gentle zephyr, the stirring of a new consciousness wafts over the land — the dawning realization that health and illness have to do with more than just organs and tissues and biochemistry. There is a new awareness of health as wholeness, and of healing the whole person — body, mind, and spirit. — From the book, “Sing Your Own Song, Dance Your Own Dance”.

Beyond Medical Technology

Medical technology can be marvelously effective. For example, in the urgent care of traumas and infections it has no rival. But its narrow focus on physical means and methods often makes it ineffectual and even counter-productive. Methods imposed from outside, whether biochemical, mechanical, or surgical, disrupt the body’s own self-regulatory functions and have serious potential for toxicity and debilitation. In the long run, these untoward “side effects” can outweigh the short-term benefits of symptom reduction. The most sophisticated medical technology the world has ever known becomes a blunt instrument when it fails to reckon with the human condition. Modern medicine is all about physical means and methods. It gives short shrift to balancing the energies and enhancing the life force. It routinely ignores, pooh-poohs, or even actively opposes natural remedies, self-care, folk medicine, and divergent lifestyles — generally any method or system that dares to take a different slant or a broader perspective. Yet many of these remedies, systems, and traditions that are scorned by modern medicine have amply proven their worth, often in areas where medical technology comes up short. Wellness concepts have made their mark in helping the “worried well.” Various traditions of energy medicine excel in the treatment of “chronic” or degenerative diseases. The effectiveness of psychological and psychophysiological approaches in the treatment of illness has been demonstrated in a wide range of contexts. Those who connect with Spirit reap the benefits of causal healing. It need not be either-or. Why not draw on the best that all the varied traditions of health care have to offer? That is not to say, “some of this and some of that.” An indiscriminate hodgepodge leads to hit-or-miss, more often miss. To do the job right requires a carefully orchestrated synthesis within a coherent framework. That framework is provided by the holistic model. The orchestrated synthesis is provided by the Holistic Village.

The Holistic Model

Modern psychology and modern medicine are elaborate edifices constructed to protect established interests. Their rules and procedures are designed to protect professional privileges and maintain the status quo — not to facilitate wellness, healing, empowerment, or transformation. Their technology is based on nineteenth-century materialism and reductionism — concepts abandoned long ago by physics, as simplistic and limiting. With their narrow purposes and flawed premises, these professions do not, cannot, reflect the truth about you, as you, me as me. As now constituted, they do not serve us well. When we seek healing or transformation, we must respect physical and biological laws. They represent an important piece of the process. But it is just one piece. We are, after all, beings of light, not just dust in the wind. We are possessed of body and mind, but the soul is imbued with consciousness and volition. Life has meaning — or should. We have social awareness. And we have the potential to transcend physical limitations and manifest Spirit. A comprehensive, coherent, and truly workable model of holistic health care must reflect our true nature. For this, it must be based on the concepts, principles, processes, and techniques of holistic psychology. Holistic psychology offers an ideal framework for personal transformation and healing. Based on a true and complete picture of human nature, it responds more appropriately and more fully to our needs. The Holistic Paradigm leads us to a deep understanding of ourselves. The holistic principles guide us on the path of transformation and healing. The transformational processes and techniques provide the tools to get the job done.

A Village for Healing

The Holistic Village represents a confluence of diverse health care traditions and options. Conventional medical technology, wellness concepts and practices, alternative or complementary methods, all have a role. So do the various traditions of energy medicine, thought medicine, and spiritual or causal healing. The Holistic Village is also a healing center and spa that serves as a showcase for the health care of the future. In a scenic physical setting, it brings together the great healing traditions of the world. Schools of holistic psychology, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, osteopathy, Ayurveda, and naturopathy are sited in or near the village, attracting the leading practitioners in their fields to teach and to practice. Lectures, demonstrations, conferences, classes, and private sessions provide health seekers and professionals alike with intellectual and experiential understanding of healing principles and methods, ranging from hatha yoga, tai chi, Breema, and Tragerwork, to special techniques of diet and fasting, to Autogenic Training and Holistic Renewal. The continuing ferment of teaching, learning, and healing enhances the expertise of practitioners, advances the state of the art, and further refines the model itself. The outer space reflects the inner space. At the center of the village, in the shape of a five-pointed star, is the Library of Light. The four points in the horizontal plane represent the four corners of the earth. These wings house the great writings and teachings from all ages and all traditions. The fifth point of the star is a spire that rises over the Temple of Spirit, a refuge from the world for all seekers, regardless of religious belief or affiliation. The physical setting, the facilities, and the ambiance of the village, all support activities that refresh, restore, and heal the whole person — body, mind, and spirit. The pharmacy is stocked with conventional prescription medications as well as homeopathic remedies, vitamins, food supplements, herbal preparations and assorted accessories for various healing traditions. Food stores, juice bars, and restaurants offer healthy and healing fare. Shops carry specialty items such as natural-fiber clothing, massage tables, yoga mats, and slant boards. You can buy, rent, or borrow books and videos that educate and heal. There are spas and saunas and the accoutrements of hydrotherapy. Sport and recreational facilities are designed and operated to promote a sustainable, healthy routine, adapted to the needs of each individual. There are day-care centers and schools; geriatric facilities and a hospice; an organic garden, and a farm with free-ranging animals. And there is the scenic natural setting itself.

Where Is the Holistic Village?

Like everything in this world, The Holistic Village must follow the laws of manifestation. First comes the conceptual village — an idea, a vision, a plan. The next stage is energy — a network and a community bound by a common purpose and a shared organizational framework. The physical village is the third stage. Though a physical cluster of facilities has great appeal, it can be a point of destination rather than a point of departure.