Who's holistic?
"The best way to know God is to love many things."
Vincent van Gogh
At this point in the game, it hardly needs to be pointed out that something is desperately wrong with the human body. Unless you've been living on a magazine cover for the last few years, you know that an enormous percentage of people on this planet have become, well, enormous. And that's just the tip of our public health nightmare; heart disease, diabetes, depression–the human organism is breaking down, right before our very eyes.
The primate has a problem that's for certain, and it's far more than an excess of adipose tissue. It's more than atrophy, diabetes and heart disease. There's something fundamentally wrong with the primate's very experience of living in this modern world. His body hurts, no question, but his problem is bigger than his atrophied tissue, his multi-tasked brain and his depressed spirit. His problem is wide-ranging, experiential and fundamentally holistic.
aboriginal holism
Intuitively, many of us suspect that the cure to our predicament demands some sort of holistic thinking. So, craving completeness, we go in search for holistic living, holistic medicine and holistic fitness. But what exactly makes something "holistic?"
If we turn to the popular press, we find a standard formula: body-mind-spirit. This combination is a good place to begin, but it's only a start. To get a truly comprehensive view, we need to go back into history and check in with the First People, the native and indigenous cultures. As it turns out, they have holistic understanding that is far more comprehensive than our own.
In my reading, I've discovered a remarkable consistency across native cultures, from the bushmen of Africa to the aboriginals of Australia. Without exception, each takes a broad perspective that emphasizes, not just our popular construct of mind-body-spirit, but also includes land, ancestors and tribe. In almost every case, these people found intricate interconnections across all of these elements: the health of the body was influenced by many forces.
Thus, if we really want to be complete on this score, we'll frame our holistic philosophy as “mind-body-spirit-land-ancestors-tribe.” It's a long handle and it probably won't fit on a magazine cover, but it's really a more integrative approach. So to keep things simple, let's call it aboriginal holism, the original holistic orientation.
Plenty's been written about the mind-body-spirit side of things, so let's leave those elements for the time being and have a closer look at the other side of the circle: land, ancestors and tribe.
land
“We are one thing, this place and these people.”from The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
For native peoples, land is synonymous with life and therefore health; there can be no life apart from the land. When you're a hunter-gatherer in a wild environment, the land is your sustenance. It's also where danger comes from, often in the form of predators, exposure and bad weather. So, you pay intense attention–all day, every day. You notice fine-grained detail of terrain, plants, animals, weather and seasons. The life and health of your body is inextricably tied to this attention. Your health vibrates and resonates with the waxing and waning of plants, animals and weather. The relationship is profoundly intimate.The body-land connection for indigenous peoples was so profound that, in almost every case, these people suffered horrible physical calamity when forced off their native lands into unfamiliar regions and reservations. Without a sense of place, their bodies and culture became literally dislocated, cut off from familiar reference points and life-giving relationship. At this point, stress increases radically and disease becomes almost inevitable.
The same holds true for us moderns, although few of us realize what is happening. Cultural and technological innovation has severed our bonds with the land and now our bodies are adrift. When everything is televised, virtual and abstract, the senses becomes distorted. Natural rhythms are lost and physiology runs amok.
Our predicament is doubly problematic. We desperately need connection to the land, but the majority of our sustenance now comes from a technological infrastructure that demands near-constant attention. We now work longer and harder than any hunter-gatherers ever did. And fewer of us are taking the land-based vacations that might bring some sense of place back to our bodies.
What we need is engagement, immersion and exposure. Our bodies need to feel the land, the weather and the seasons. Our flesh needs to touch the dirt. Without a sense of place, our training can never be truly holistic.
ancestors
The second part of aboriginal holism is ancestry. Without exception, every indigenous culture has placed enormous emphasis on honoring those who came before.
As Westerners, it is difficult, maybe impossible for us to imagine this dimension of aboriginal holism. For native peoples, ancestral contact is something that takes place in dreamtime, a realm that is both separate from and connected to ordinary reality. For native cultures, the ancestors are present in a parallel, non-material realm. They are invisible, but completely real.
Call it religion or a cultural practice, it doesn't matter. Attention to the ancestors is a universal feature of primal human experience and we can safely assume that it had some beneficial effect on health. Attention to ancestry provides an expanded sense of community and continuity that is calming, grounding and stress-reducing. It places us in a larger family. If you're standing naked on a vast, wild landscape, it helps to imagine that your departed tribe mates are still with you. We feel strength in numbers, even if some of those numbers are non-material.
As moderns, we may not be able to sense our ancestors in dreamtime or conjure their presence in our daily lives, but we can study evolution and imagine the lives of ancient hominids. We can trace their origins in East Africa and read about their lives as hunters and gatherers. The great thing about this study is that it helps us appreciate the continuity, not just between ourselves and ancient humans, but between ourselves and other primates, mammals, vertebrates and the rest of the animal world. Our biological ancestry gives us a sense of community and continuity that is profoundly comforting.
tribe
“The Ju/wasi are extremely dependent emotionally on the sense of belonging and companionship. Separation and loneliness are unendurable to them.”from The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
The third element in aboriginal holism is tribe. When we think about it, this really comes as no surprise. When you're living in a truly wild environment, your survival is intimately linked to the functioning of your tribe. A quick thought experiment proves it: Just imagine yourself on some primeval, semi-wooded grassland, thousands of years from civilization. In all probability, you won't be able to make it on your own. Individualism would be absurd. On the grassland, a stand-alone human is a dead human.
Thus, you learn to pay close attention your mates. You observe their behavior and spend large amounts of time adjusting and maintaining social order and relationship. Gossip, conversation, rank, story-telling, politics and posturing are all vital parts of daily experience. When the tribe is your life boat, you pay close attention to how it works.
This emphasis on tribe dovetails perfectly with modern discoveries in neuroscience and the emerging field of "social neuroscience." In particular, we see Daniel Goleman's book, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. As Goleman reminds us, we are hyper-social animals; our brains are wired for sociality. In effect, we have broadband, brain-to-brain connections between people in community. Our bodies are actually molded by others around us. This is physical reality, not just metaphor. Conversation shapes our brains, mirror neurons reflect emotion, memes flow constantly as they create culture.
Naturally, this social dimension of the human experience has a profound effect on human health. Research has shown unequivocally that socially integrated people recover more quickly from disease and live longer.
Unfortunately, our culture is obsessed with individual experience, performance and appearance. This misplaced focus is particularly obvious in the world of popular health and fitness publications. Many of these publications claim to be “holistic” and yet place almost their entire attention on the welfare of individuals. Individual bodies grace their covers; never a group.
Obviously, we need to wake up to the social reality of the human experience. People are healthier when they learn, play and train in groups. Isolation is not only an illusion, it is a form of pathology.
All together now
As our picture of human health begins to come into sharper focus, it's now becoming absolutely clear that the human body is not an isolated, stand-alone organism. The idea that the body stops at the outermost layer of skin is simply false. In actual fact, your body is bigger than your body.
The interconnections are densely interwoven: mind speaks to body, body speaks to spirit, land speaks to mind, tribe speaks to spirit, ancestors speak to body...and so on. Holistic health is a rich, multi-directional conversation. We can isolate individual voices and snippets of conversation, but such efforts are always incomplete. The only truly holistic perspective is to view the whole animal in its environmental and tribal context.
Clearly, it is time for the health, fitness and medical industries to wake up to the reality and powers of holistic thinking. Unfortunately, almost everyone is missing big pieces of the whole. Western medical providers are obsessed with tissue and little else; their narrow perspective will only succeed in a limited range of cases. Schools go after minds (standardized minds!). Commercial gyms go after muscle. Spas go after skin. Yoga studios do better with body, mind and spirit, but still fall short.
So, we are forced to ask the question – Is there anyone out there doing a truly comprehensive holistic practice? Who among us is connecting clients with land, tribe and ancestors? Lots of programs lay claim to the holistic label, but as far as I can see, no one is really delivering. Obviously, we have a lot of work to do.
What we need is an integrated, multi-disciplinary curriculum that touches the entire human experience. It might look something like this:
- mind: scholarship, literacy, academics, cognitive therapies
- body: functional fitness, strength, agility, balance, endurance, nutrition
- spirit: meditation, stress-reduction, compassion, art/beauty, play, joy
- land: dirt time, natural history, hiking, flora and fauna, place, local farming
- tribe: community experience, social contact, parties, singing, drum and dance
- ancestors: human origins, evolution, biological continuity
It doesn't matter whether you're working at a school, a gym or a studio. The age of specialization is waning; it no longer works to dig one hole, deeper and deeper while ignoring the rest of the world. The time for panoramic vision is upon us. It's time to train the whole animal.
