Recently I explained to my primary healthcare physician how I saw our relationship:
I trust you when it comes to my personal health, but I also "tune in" to my own body and what I intuit is best for me. I see our doctor-patient relationship as a collaboration, a team effort, for it is not really up to you to solve my health problems, but up to me. You are there to assist me, and I value your experience, your knowledge, and your compassion. I know that you have my well-being in mind when you act as my physician, though I may not always agree with your opinions or suggestions. However, I will always carefully consider them.
You have been an integral part of my ongoing improving overall health and well-being. Thank you, my doctor friend, for your dedicated service, flexibility, openness, and collaboration in this continuing process of remaining healthy. I feel blessed to have you by my side in a physician's role, and I hope that all of your other patients have similar sentiments.
I realize that most patients do not feel that way about their doctors, at least in this country. But there have always been some exceptional doctors in every generation, doctors who are in the ministry of caring for the well-being of others rather than in the business of healthcare. My primary-care doctor is one of those exceptional people, and so are others from the past as well as in the present. These exceptional ones are of various races, religions, and nationalities and include both men and women.
In spite of my physical aging process and increased limitations, I think I am healthier than I have ever been in my entire life. My overall health is better because my psychospiritual health continues to improve. I feel strong and more balanced physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually than ever before. Though I no longer can do certain things physically that I could do fifteen or twenty years ago, I can do many other things that I couldn't do two decades ago, mostly on the intellectual and psychospiritual levels.
Healthcare should involve an integration of considering the whole person, which includes the entire physical body-system, as well as the emotional-, mental-, and spirit-systems of the individual. Interestingly, as an avid student and teacher of the concepts found in The URANTIA Book, I have noted that when referring to the health of a person, this wonderful spiritually-based text associates “health” with the body, mind, and soul. Health is linked with sensible living habits, happiness, mental clarity, emotional stability, and an awareness of spiritual reality.
Health, sanity/mental efficiency, and happiness are integrations of truth, beauty, and goodness as they are blended in human experiences. Such levels of efficient/balanced living come about through the unification of the energy/physical systems, idea/mind systems, and spirit systems.[1]
Rather than compartmentalizing human beings into separate parts to be “treated” by specialists, exceptional healthcare givers/ministers have more of a “wholistic” perspective when interacting with those they are attempting to aid in becoming healthier by integrating and unifying and blending parts rather than separating them out.
The more progressive healthcare providers, scientists, sociologists, educators, theologians, and statespersons (rather than mere politicians) realize that in treating “sick” environments, societies, and persons you have to look at the entire eco-systems, social-systems, and person-systems. The declining health of Mother Earth matches and is interlinked with the declining health of our modern societies and individual citizens.
In my own struggles to maintain good health and well-being, I have discovered that my own life-support systems seem to match the Earth’s and its peoples. As the lungs of the Earth are being debilitated by the massive destruction of rain forests, my lungs feel compromised too. As the Earth’s waterways are being poisoned and depleted, so does my circulatory system feel sluggish and inefficient. As people’s hearts are broken and their spirits diminished by a consumer-driven, mechanistic social system, so my heart feels fragile with my grieving over the cold-hearted state of the dominant culture.
I think that poor health—whether in a person or in our natural world or in a society—is a result of being out of divine pattern. Divine pattern involves integrative systems that all coordinate to reflect the truth, beauty, and goodness of the Divine Creator. Frankly, a vast majority of religious endeavors and institutions on this world are not healthy at all, regardless of their religious rhetoric. They are very sick and have been out of divine pattern for many thousands of years.
Tens of thousands of years ago the ancient Sethite priesthood was comprised of “high-minded and noble teachers of health and religion” who were “true educators” and not at all like most of the “debased” and “commercialized” religious teachers and healthcare providers of today.[2] Socrates and his successors, Plato and Aristotle, taught that goodness was the health of the soul.[3] Today, only a few healthcare professionals—who are caught in the ocean of a grasping, greedy medical industrial complex—realize the truth that people’s health is tied up with the state of their souls.
The work that I am involved in, which encompasses every aspect of my life, integrates all life experiences into a whole. My own healing process has been one of becoming uncompartmentalized and more unified within my whole being. The Soulistic Healing Center, which is a facet of my work, has another way of looking at “health.” It has redefined health in its outreach ministries of providing healthcare, just as I have had to continually redefine what good health is for me as I unfold into my God-given personality circuitry and grow psychospiritually.
In my own health-maintenance process I rarely use “health professionals” and medicines because I do not need to. Though very full with meaningful work and many responsibilities, my lifestyle is less strenuous and rushed than thirty years ago. I eat naturally-grown foods from our Avalon Gardens; drink clean, chemical-free water from our private wells; exercise by swimming and walking in beautiful natural places; and use eco-friendly common products for home, lawn, and personal care. In not using toxic “foods” and products, I do not poison myself or my natural environment. And I feel good mentally in taking responsibility for caring for my physical health and for my natural environment.
Even more importantly, in taking responsibility for my own health is the overseeing of my psychospiritual welfare. I spend time reading and expanding intellectually. I interact closely with fellow kindred spirits and good friends in an intentional-community setting. And I laugh—at myself and at the many silly situations in life on this world.
Dr. Patch Adams is renown for his use of humor in the treatment of diseases and health promotion, as are certain teachers of spiritual truths. The URANTIA Book states that humor serves “a valuable purpose both as a health insurance and as a liberator of emotional pressure, thus preventing injurious nervous tension and overserious contemplation.”[4]
In the maintenance of my own health, I rest, contemplate, meditate, reflect, pray, and worship. I have come to fully embrace the truth that an understanding at some level of spiritual reality can contribute to “the enjoyment of abundant health and to the cure of numerous mental, emotional, and nervous ailments.”
Even the physical problems of bodily health and efficiency are best solved when they are viewed from the religious standpoint of our Master’s [Jesus’] teaching: That the body and mind of mortals are the dwelling place of the gift of the Gods, the Spirit of God becoming the spirit of man and woman. The mind of men and women becomes the mediator between material things and spiritual realities.[5]
The joy of the outpoured spirit, when it is consciously experienced in human life, is a tonic for health, a stimulus for mind, and an unfailing energy for the soul.[6]
Cellular biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton emphasizes that our beliefs can change how our genes will respond. He states: “The new science has everything to do with your beliefs.” Though Dr. Lipton calls this awareness “new science,” the fact that energy follows thought has been known in the circles of genuine religious persons for thousands of years.
Now with the new science a small number of progressive scientists and healthcare professionals are beginning to understand the power of thought and how energy in body systems is affected by the state of mind in individuals. With thinking and attitudes that are founded on truth, beauty, and goodness, there is a greater probability for healing. Beliefs and perspectives that are negative, resentful, self-centered, and fear-based can cause poor health. In addition, the beliefs and energy fields of other people around an individual can affect how healthy or unhealthy that individual will be.
If our perceptions determine the status of our well-being, if our thoughts as well as the thoughts of those around us can create disease or healing, wouldn’t we want to be extremely aware of what healthcare providers we allow into our lives? Wouldn’t we want to be more selective of the places we go to when we are sick and who we hang out with when we are trying to get better? Wouldn’t we want to become more educated about what goes on behind the scenes in the medical industrial complex? Wouldn’t we want to know what the mindset really is within the American Medical Association, the huge pharmaceutical corporations, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), the medical insurance companies, and most hospitals?
[1]The URANTIA Book, Paper 2, Section 7, Paragraph 11
[2]The URANTIA Book, Paper 76
[3]The URANTIA Book, Paper 98, Section 2, Paragraph 6
[4]The URANTIA Book, Paper 48, Section 4, Paragraph 19
[5]The URANTIA Book, Paper 160, Section 4, Paragraph 9
[6]The URANTIA Book, Paper 194, Section 3, Paragraph 19