Integrative Medicine
What is Integrative Medicine?
The Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine defines integrative medicine as “the practice of medicine that reaffirms the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient, focuses on the whole person, is informed by evidence, and makes use of all appropriate therapeutic approaches, healthcare professionals and disciplines to achieve optimal health and healing”. According to articles by proponents, integrative medicine is not the same as complementary and alternative medicine nor is it simply the combination of conventional medicine with complementary and alternative medicine. Rather, it “emphasizes wellness and healing of the entire person (bio-psycho-socio-spiritual dimensions) as primary goals, drawing on both conventional and alternative approaches in the context of a supportive and effective physician-patient relationship”.
It provides people with the ability to exert power over well-being. There’s a constant interplay between emotions, thoughts, and actions and our body systems. The food we eat, the air we breathe, how much and what type of exercise we get, how much we laugh or cry, or experience a general sense of joy, how we feel about our family, the nature of our intimate relationships, our friends and colleagues, all have a direct bearing on our health and sense of well-being. This holistic interaction is being played out on every level of our being, and effects all biological, structural, and psychosocial systems. In order to heal the physical manifestation, you have to find it’s cause in terms of how it’s being produced through lifestyle. All illness and disease ultimately has a mental, emotional, or spiritual correspondence as the actual cause. In order to heal the body and create good health, we have to work on all levels simultaneously.
Integrative Medicine and Modern Day Shamanism
Integrative medicine as we currently think of it today is extremely similar to the ancient practices of the Shamanic Arts. This is all natural medicine that works with the whole person and addresses not only the physical aspects of health, but also explores the emotional, psychological, biographical (lifestyle) and spiritual aspects, formerly referred to as the “four elements” which give us a practical formula for “how things manifest in the body as an analogous correspondence to the mind”. It views the person in a holistic sense from the perspective of being first and primarily a soul – a multidimensional being comprised of mind, body, and spirit. It works by producing change as a lifestyle modification by incorporating knowledge through actual practice to transform your paradigm, resulting in a new manifestation as a direct result of consequence. It works through a paradigm shift that alters your lifestyle and habitual routines – ways of doing things – to produce new affects that are life-promoting in all areas of your life. All current manifestations are the result of habits of some sort, whether they be mental mind-sets as habitual perceptions and thought-processes (beliefs), emotional moods, conditioned behaviors, or relationships as consistent interactions of various sorts. It takes repetition over a period of time to manifest as a physical symptom, illness, or disease.
The Origin of Illness and Disease
All levels of physical manifestation have their cause – originate – in the biographical (lifestyle as a story) and psychological (perceptions as beliefs) realms, that further act to stimulate emotions as a state-of-mind or overall “mood”, which produce behaviors that express them by acting them out and producing a personal reality out of them. Our biography as our life’s story; how we live our day-to-day life as a consistent routine or ritual, is the result of our paradigm or model of the world, which is a dynamic network comprised of feelings, values, beliefs, preferences, conditioned emotional states, and trained (unconscious) behaviors that all work together to make up how we perceive ourselves, others, and the world at large.
We form habitual interpretations of situations and events that give them a consistent meaning that produces a consistent response to them as behaviors that we repeat methodically that create a congruent reality across all areas of our lives as a form of continuity as a consistent theme. Our paradigm as the fundamental patterning of our mind or soul, is a holistic living organism that is only capable of producing more of itself as fractal patterns that are dynamic modifications of the same general parental pattern, adapted to various situations creating numerous variations that still hold true to the central theme. They all express the reality of the core beliefs that produce them. No matter what we look at, or what perspective we use to look at it, we are always working “through” or by way of our own mind which acts as a perceptual (mental and emotional) filter or lens, that can only perceive what is of a similar nature (vibratory frequency) to itself. What is of a different nature, it fails to identify or recognize, or it simply acts to transform it through how it interprets it to fit within it’s existing model in a way that makes sense.
What this tells us, is that all physical manifestations originate as a mental perception that forms the basis for our lifestyle. In order to heal the physical malady, we have to find it’s cause as a lifestyle or habitual tendencies, and then introduce knowledge as the basis for change at this level which will act to modify the entire lifestyle and the physical manifestation that resulted from it. You see, all physical maladies are usually the result of a dynamic series of causes rather than a singular behavior.
Our body-mind system exists fundamentally in a natural state of homeostasis, in terms of what’s normal for that person within the natural genetic expression, as a form of balance or equilibrium. When something is introduced that creates a new emphasis that alters the natural balance of the entire system, it “creates” through the system by altering how the system expresses. If the new practice or substance is toxic or non-organic, it no longer supports homeostasis, but instead undermines it by changing the chemistry of the body at the cellular and molecular level, and manifests as an illness, disease, or cancer of some form. The only way to “heal” the physical result, is to identify and remove the cause.
Often, because all manifestation originates at the idea, mental and emotional level, and taking into full consideration the power of the mind to control natural biological processes and behaviors of the body, many illnesses and diseases are purely psychosomatic in nature and can be remedied through psychological healing of various sorts. Our emotional states, the ones we live “in” and “out of” most often (habitually) not only produce equivalent chemistry in the body, but is also attached to memory as mental patterns that run our thoughts and produce behavior that acts them out to create a reality out of them as a story that becomes the basis for our personal experiences. Our emotional states and the patterns they lock us into produce equivalent physical expressions in the same area of the body that we experience the emotion as an internal sensation. The emotions and the mental patterns they run, which become projected and acted out within our lives, forming our life’s story (biography), result in a physical expression within the body itself.
The Power of Emotional Beliefs
We create and acquire beliefs as interpretations of situations and events in an attempt to make sense out of them, that become a story we tell ourselves that gives it meaning and significance. What it means also means something about us, about others, and about the way things are in general. These story-lines as self-belief that we simultaneously use as a mental filter to perceive a neutral and objective reality as a means of personalizing it, manifest spontaneously the physical conditions necessary to create a tangible reality out of the belief that’s perceived as “real” and quite concrete to the person creating it. Whatever we believe (perceive as true and real) we produce the physical correspondence for it immediately as a natural biological process. This is clearly demonstrated in the placebo affect, as well as multiple-personality disorders where each personality (soul-mind) takes on entirely different characteristics and diseases within the same body, and can produce the physical change instantly with the shift in personalities. The mind’s ability to create within the body through mental perceptions that it believes are real gives us clues as to how to use this same process or ability to also induce natural and spontaneous healing of the body by way of the mind’s ability to express through the body by becoming “one with it”.
Understanding the 4 Elements
The process of manifestation is represented by the four elements as the four states of matter: the first being electrified (programmed) plasma that forms a wave (Fire); gas as thought-forms (Air); liquid as emotion that motivates the thought determining how it’s formed into a concept (water); and solid as the external physical manifestation of the emotional thought form as a conceptualized reality (Earth). We start with an idea as a form of archetypal thematic patterning that draws to it and organizes like thoughts into a distinct pattern as a theme that has a story (process of expression) inherent in it. This archetypal pattern, undergoes a constant transformation as a dynamic series of modifications based on how it’s adapted first to the mind of the individual, which prompts a series of corresponding thoughts as a thought-process. The thought process stimulates a physical response as an emotional reaction to our own thoughts, that are associated to specific types of memory which serve as templates for preformed realities that merge with the current thought-process and determine how it’s developed as a personalized version of the originating pattern or thematic idea.
It’s continuously adapted and modified based on the individual paradigm, mood at the time, conditions and circumstances, or specific situations in which it’s taking place. The exact conditions of the present determines how it’s formed as a dynamic variation that remains true to the core theme (structuring mechanism as composition). The four elements as the creative process for how an idea as a pattern of reality manifests through a series of step-down processes as a chain-of-association that restructures the energetic field of the mind, causing it to express as a different formula or configuration. To alter the expression, you have to work at the level of cause, meaning, what’s responsible for initiating the whole process that results in a physical condition.
This is commonly called many things – your ‘primary vibratory frequency’ which only has the ability to access and draw into it, or conceive of ideas that are analogous correspondences to it, or our ‘soul’s essence’ as a morphogenic field programmed to constantly produce experiences of a specific nature, or the actual process of ‘karma’ forming a predetermined destiny as the expression of our current level and quality of consciousness. No matter what we call it, or what model we choose to look at it through in an attempt to gain a working understanding of it, it all reveals the same basic process of mind and matter actually being different aspects of the same thing, separated only by what part of the process we’re examining or experiencing the results of.
Because of these fundamental laws as the creative process of all of life – living forms – we know that all physical manifestations originate or are the end product of consciousness becoming a physical reality as self-creation that provides us with the experiences equivalent to our soul’s vibratory essence. The only real purpose of physical illness and disease is to show us, allow us to gain realization around how we are using our mind to create behaviors that provides the stage necessary for us to work with and develop our own powers to self-create in a conscious manner and determine the type of experiences we render and the story we tell with our life as a result. All physical manifestations can ultimately be healed (transformed) at the level of the mind where what is unconscious and operating within our life without our direct awareness is brought into full awareness, and we realize what we’re doing and why. We can only work with and act on what we are aware of. We can only use our mind in powerful ways when we understand how our mind works and the process it undergoes to produce physical reality as the direct and intimate experience of itself.
NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming
Alchemy – The Art of Personal Transformation
