If there is a day that deserves to be a ‘World day’, it is the World Health Day.
Health and Holy share a common lineage, both come from the concept of ‘whole’; and that makes for the most beautiful understanding of health. To be healthy is to be whole, to be in awareness of the whole and that is what it is to be holy too. Of not being fragmented as only a physical entity or a mental attitude or an emotional expression. But be a complete holistic being manifested through consciousness of itself!
From the spiritual point of view, ‘We are the world’. It is only fair that we look at the world as a whole for this understanding of Health too.
The resurgence of looking at health holistically has been happening throughout the world. The aboriginal healing systems are finding their place in hospitals in Australia. Yoga as a therapy to cure disease is gaining so much traction that young people from across the world are descending on a Hospital in Pondicherry to learn the nuances. People are accessing and using Pranic healing and Reiki to heal people, sometimes from a distance. The clinics of Men-Tsee-Khang under the Tibet system combine its system of healing with Astrological understanding of the patient.
Modern allopathic medicine has accepted the role of mental and emotional well-being to treat physical ailments. Not only do they recognize it but some are also beginning to include spiritual understanding in getting to the cause of disease. A few Cardiologists that I shared ‘Healthy Heart meditation’ (that I have formulated along with a Jain Muni and included in my book Aavirbhaav) with were extremely happy to see the meditation and even discussed some facets of the same with me; they are still unwilling to publicly put their stamp of approval on it though! Understandable. Not for a minute am I taking away from the immense developments of modern medicine. Thanks to these, life spans have been enhanced, infant mortality rates have been reduced and a lot more has been achieved. All I am saying is that at an individual level we need to begin understanding how our health is impacted by the various aspects of our being. When there is balance in the various layers of our being, we have health, we have calmness, we have peace. When there is imbalance, a lack of understanding of ourselves as a whole, lack of awareness of ourselves as a spiritual being, then there is disease(being dis-at-ease).
The symptoms of anxiety that have become very common now-a-days are the first warning signs that some course correction in our conduct and demeanour is needed. Can we evaluate these in isolation? We need to look at them from the very core of our being. We need to look at ourselves as part of a whole that is interconnected in various ways: to our emotions, our ambitions, our expectations – from others and ourselves. This looking at ourselves and attempting to understand could be called meditation. In the awareness that comes from looking and understanding, a lot of baggage drops off, we become less diseased, move towards greater well-being and start becoming whole and healthy.
On this World Health Day let us rededicate ourselves to being whole. To enquire into what the concept “We are the World” means. To asking difficult questions of ourselves. To questioning every restrictive identity we have accepted. To reject any partial & limiting definition and begin to live from our understanding of the core of our being & the whole of our being!
This article appeared in Business World on World Health Day 2018
