Health – Regain Body Wisdom

The challenge of a renaissance soul

So, was there really something amiss with me? Even with this notion gnawing at me, I wouldn’t have rewritten a single word of my life’s narrative. It had been perfect just as it was, trials, tribulations, and all. I had learned abundantly, shared generously, and my life had always revolved around educating, healing, and writing. The uncertainty about anything else felt perfectly acceptable.

Having been away from my hometown for years, I missed the opportunity to attend alumni reunions or homecoming events in two decades. Then the Alma Mater invited us to celebrate our 25th medical school graduation anniversary. Out of the original 30 medical students, the 18 of us that graduated together were a spirited group of dreamers, eager to make a difference in the world.

Upon arriving at the gathering, I faced a stark realization that time had indeed marched on. My peers resembled our former professors, not just because they had shed their student attire, but also because each were showing gray hair and a touch of middle-age paunch (not me, I thought). As they shared updates on the years gone by, a second intriguing revelation struck me. Each of them had realized their dreams while I was still navigating the world. Or, as a dear friend in their sixties put it, I was still figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. However, no matter how young I felt, I was undeniably an adult. I had been married (and subsequently divorced), raised a remarkable daughter, fulfilled my earlier promise to serve the less fortunate, crisscrossed my country, ventured into the publishing industry, contributed articles to various publications, was on the verge of publishing my first book, had traveled to Canada to become an art therapist, and established a non-profit focused on youth alongside an innovative school.

Choosing Art Therapy as a second career was driven by the desire to add a new approach to my work with young individuals. It also felt like the perfect moment to amalgamate all my passions: to converge the roles of healer, educator, and artist.

Until then, I had never echoed my parents’ concerns about the need to find a “stable and secure life.” Even though I hadn’t amassed much wealth, I was quite content with my learning process and achievements and felt my life had been exceedingly engaging, meaningful.

However, looking at my friends, it struck me how early, at 20 or 22, they had known exactly what they wanted for their lives. Now, in midlife, they appeared accomplished and prosperous.

I had reasons then to suspect that I was an adult grappling with attention deficit disorder. I even consulted my Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), and some of the criteria did seem to apply. So, was there really something amiss with me? Even with this notion gnawing at me, I wouldn’t have rewritten a single word of my life’s narrative. It had been perfect just as it was, trials, tribulations, and all. I had learned abundantly, shared generously, and my life had always revolved around educating, healing, and writing. The uncertainty about anything else felt perfectly acceptable.

A few years prior to the gathering, fresh from Canada with a wealth of knowledge about mental health stereotypes (apologies: “diagnoses”), I vowed that, in order to become a “fully functional, stable adult,” the time had come for me to settle down. I would reside in the same place for more than the customary average of three to five years in one place, which had been my norm, and devote myself to a single specialty.

Was it truly feasible? Life, it seemed, had other plans for me. Although I did stay put for 13 years, I held three part-time jobs, ran a non-profit, and maintained a private clientele. And then, I relocated to the United States when circumstances grew challenging in my homeland. I started from scratch in Florida, and had to be really creative to make a living. I went to massage school so that I could continue to offer Reiki treatments (had recently become a Reiki Master), I became a Trager practitioner, I got my mental health license after a few years, I became a consultant for a massage school’s continuing education department, created a business to promote holistic healing, wrote for several publications, published a few books, and I opened a Holistic Center in Bonita Springs.

Over time, I came to truly value what I had gleaned from my myriad passions and occupations. I even discovered that there was a label for my type of personality, and that it had gained acceptance, even becoming trendy. They call us Renaissance souls. According to the person credited with coining the term, author Margaret Lobenstine (Secrets of the Renaissance Soul), adaptable souls like us stand a better chance of thriving in a world that’s very fluid. Our diverse passions and experiences have made us adaptable, resilient, and capable of offering more than just a narrow set of skills in the job market.

Spiritual seeking or fashionable Secret

By Silvia Casabianca

You complain: “Life is difficult, unfair and lonely. My efforts are seldom acknowledged or rewarded. I don’t have the family, job, house, car or friends that I deserve. Not only life is not as it should be, but I cannot change the world to my convenience. Or, can I?” But then came The Secret (the movie, the CD, the book).

“Oh, you certainly can, because you create the world you live in with your thoughts, your words and your actions,” the masters say. “Just learn the principles of the ‘Law of Attraction’ and all you desire will be manifested. If it doesn’t work, just review if you are using the principles properly: find out what you’re doing wrong.”

“This is The Secret to everything – the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted,” read the promise delivered on The Secret’s first official web page. A misnomer by now, The Secret carries a message that caught the attention of the world in a way that perhaps none of the former publications on spirituality, religion or how to become rich in three seconds have.

So, if you crave an abundant, a worry-free life, and you haven’t seen the movie or bought the book, what are you waiting for? Besides, it’s not the only book on the topic. You can get Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires, by Esther Hicks or The Master Key System, by Charles F. Haanel, to name a few.

In the past 50 years or so, the Americas, from Alaska to La Patagonia, have been flooded with information on spiritual, religious and metaphysical matters. Most of the material presumably comes from the East or from esoteric knowledge that was previously withheld from the public. This knowledge has been marketed through books, CDs, DVDs, movies, social media and charismatic speakers. Shall we hypothesize that spirituality provides more answers than science? Even though science has dug deeper and deeper and to the level of the most minuscule particles life is made of, it would seem that the answers it provides do not suffice. In our quest for meaning, it’s not the amazing biomarkers helping doctors in early detection of cancer, the trip to Mars, or the development of fiber optics, and artificial intelligence, but the feeling that God is reachable what brings hope to people whose lives have been stricken by disease or scarcity.

Back in 2001, the economist Paul Zane Pilzer reported that Americans were spending $200 billion annually on wellness, from fitness clubs to vitamins. Well, in 2022, the industry surpassed the $450 billion mark.

Although wellness and nutritional products have reached a plateau and have faced the threat of limitations brought about by regulation of supplements and vitamins by the FDA, the industry continues to hold the promise of getting to the trillion-dollar mark soon. However, a glance at the incredible success of such movies as What the Bleep do We Know, Conversations with God, How to Know God, and The Secret, is enough to see that spirituality as merchandise nipped at the wellness industry’s heels.

What are these products really selling? Hope? Magic? A power drawn from realizing that one’s life is totally on one’s own hands? The common ingredient is faith. Recently, a Reiki patient reminded me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s definition of faith: “Not wanting to know what is true.”

Indeed, and beware! You can use superficial knowledge of the laws of the universe, or a poorly-understood spiritual principle as a tool to deny your reality. Therein lies the danger of the trivialization of metaphysics, the commercialization of the sacred and the cheapening of spirituality.

How could anyone learn the principles that gurus have mastered in a lifetime of dedication and meditation by watching a movie, listening to a tape or attending a weekend seminar? No Buddhas or Einsteins are born in a snap. Why is the marketing of promises to make over our lives so successful? Is people’s wishful thinking replacing effort and creativity in resolving financial needs, or are we all truly looking for a spiritual life and a re-encounter with a re-defined God that exists within? Is this perhaps a unique rebellion, turning off the current paradigm, whereby only a few deserve abundance and good health?

In Where Are We Going? (ReVision magazine, spring, 2001), Mariana Caplan discussed contemporary spirituality trends: “When mystical experiences become our obsession, and we run from workshop to teacher to fancy esoteric tradition looking for the next high, we have taken a great detour from the needs of our culture – a culture that is obsessed with boldness but devalues subtlety; that is infatuated with excess but scorns simplicity; that honors selfishness while mumbling about service.”

Conscious evolution from fear to solidarity

How do we responde to stress or fear? We have choices but we need to learn how to regulate emotions and become more compassionate.

Dr. Silvia Casabianca argues that humans are hardwired for empathy, love and compassion. These gifts reside in our genes, our physiology, our chemistry, and they can be nurtured and developed. They can be harnessed and used to solve many of the problems we struggle with-from the interpersonal to the geopolitical. Millennia of human experience have led us to this moment when we are perhaps finally ready to embrace, and enact our true, loving nature. The coronavirus pandemic provides us with an opportunity to rethink the way we live, to appreciate what we have instead of craving for what we don’t have. This might be an opportunity to become more aware of how crucial relationships are and that we’re so interconnected that what I do, can affect everybody else. Go to www.SilviaCasabianca.com or buy her book in Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/ydy6eljm

We’re wired for love but humans have created stratified societies that enhance competition over cooperation and having over just being. The coronavirus pandemic provides us with an opportunity to rethink the way we live, to appreciate what we have instead of craving for what we don’t have. This might be an opportunity to become more aware of how crucial relationships are and that we’re so interconnected that what I do, can affect everybody else.
We often fail to embrace our common humanity or commit to our common destiny with full responsibility. It often takes a crisis, an epidemic, a recession, an earthquake, a hurricane, to activate what Shelly Taylor called our tend-and-befriend response. But if we learn new parenting and education modalities that take into account our human potential for empathy, compassion and solidarity, we will become equipped to solve the most pressing problems humanity and our planet face.

Our foremost asset is that we’re born hardwired for empathy, compassion, and love even if the current state of affairs in the world often seems to contradict this assertion.

Many of our problems come from the way we learn to respond to fear or perceived threats in the environment without consciously assessing them first. In other words, we have not learned to regulate emotions, we respond automatically. This is mostly because our educational and parenting models are centered on modifying children’s behavior instead of promoting autonomy, self-compassion, and empathy.

In the times of Coronavirus: What we need to learn

What do we need to learn from this coronavirus pandemic?

Mom and daughter visiting through the window in the times of Covid-19 — Lori Spencer visits her mom Judie Shape, 81, who Spencer says has tested positive for coronavirus, at Life Care Center of Kirkland, the Seattle-area nursing home at the epicenter of one of the biggest coronavirus outbreaks in the United States, in Kirkland, Washington, U.S. March 11, 2020. REUTERS/Jason Redmond – RC2HKF9TE1XS

In my former post about the Coronavirus pandemic, I opened up about the different reactions I had when it became evident we could not escape the impact of the Covid-19. When pandemics happen, we experience the exact same reactions we have when experiencing losses or when we have been victims of a catastrophe. We go through the stages of grief:

Denial versions:

It’s a hoax or a false alarm.
I’m safe, this is happening far away. I won’t be affected
I’m healthy, no virus will make me sick
This is only affecting “Other” people.

Anger versions:

I found who’s guilty – I assign blame on others
I spread conspiracy theories
I just feel irritable at the whole situation and the limitations it brought to me

Negotiation versions

If I pray (meditate, practice yoga or Qigong) I’ll be okay
I’ll eat better to improve my immune system
I’ll change my lifestyle to be healthier and protected from the virus
I understand we’re part of the problem, we need to do something, we need to change the world

Depression

I should not have…
I regret…
Isolation hits hard, I see how much I need my…
I sleep all the time, have no drive for anything, what’s the point anyhow.

Acceptance

This is what it is
I take responsibility for my part
I learn from this experience and make some changes
I prepare myself for what’s coming

It’s really sad that what is required of us is to “keep social distance” precisely in times in which we have disconnected so much from each other. I see a slight change in the quality of the messages I receive from friends and acquaintances. An increased, personal, concern for one another. But if individualism is one of the main features of these times, the pandemic can make it worse. We might become more suspicious of others than ever.

Ideally, we can use this pandemic to reflect on the quality of our lives and the relationships we have. Maybe we can stop competing, trying to be the one with the most brilliant idea to see how to build new ideas and solutions conjointly. Maybe now we will see how everything is so interconnected that it’s difficult to function as a society without the contribution of each individual. Maybe we’ll start valuing each individual’s contribution. Maybe…

May you be well

EVOLVING in times of the Coronavirus pandemic

Coronavirus pandemic tests the capacity of the world leaders to manage a crisis.

“We have to change our everyday lives — not gradually, but right now,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. Germany has shown an exemplary management of the Coronavirus pandemic.

I honestly feel unqualified to talk about compassion during this Coronavirus pandemic. My perspective about the illness, the role leaders play in a world emergency, has changed since we first learned about the Coronavirus.

I have been upset, worried, uncomfortable, a loud critic during the month or so since we started to realize that we were not safe from the spread of this virus. Many things have crossed my mind. For example, I have thoughts of nature taking revenge on us for the little care with which we treat it. It’s decimating the population of the most destructive creature that has ever inhabited Earth, I thought.

Then I found myself inclined to believe some of the conspiracy theories. We’ve gotten so mistrustful of “leaders” driven by greed, that it was difficult not to start looking around to see who is benefiting from the epidemic so that we can place blame on someone, or something.

I was troubled by some people’s carelessness also. But I was myself being careless. I thought I was healthy, had no symptoms, and could wander around with little risk. Then I read about the healthcare practitioners begging us to help them “flatten the curve.” I realized our carelessness could contribute to unconsciously made the epidemic worst.

And, of course, I blamed the ineptitude of the president of this proud country. It hit me that there are so many people who do not believe in science, who render the US weak in front of the epidemic and who would say anything, no matter how inaccurate or false, to blame an opponent, to capitalize the moment politically.

However, the most striking realization was to remember that I used to believe in the mighty power of the US. This country is no longer the vanguard, it does not make alliances with other countries, and pride has consumed the nation and its leaders into odious selfishness that, in the case or coronavirus, can prove deadly. The US administration no longer works side to side with world organizations like the World Health Organization to coordinate efforts to alleviate the burden of this health event. Nationalism in the times of globalization proves its weakness and its wickedness. People and countries cannot be global to profit, and then not global when compassion and solidarity are needed.

Child abuse has lasting consequences

Disciplining children by physical means is still commonly accepted around the world. What many people still don’t understand is that this practice can serve as a prelude to an escalating pattern of child abuse.

According to the United Nations, eleven percent of the world population lives in extreme poverty –– make less than $1.90 a day––and therefore struggles to fulfill basic needs. Even though fewer people live in extreme poverty these days, almost half of the world’s population —3.4 billion people— still strives to meet their basic needs, the World Bank said in 2018.

Child abuse and neglect can result from the convergence of poverty, high levels of stress, low levels of education, and lack of parenting skills. In households where people are struggling to make ends meet, children’s basic physical, emotional, and spiritual needs are more often neglected.

Researchers have found that exposure to repeated stressors cause hormonal imbalances and activates an area in the brain called the limbic system. The mental status of the parents, the way they regulate emotions, end up affecting children. We need to be aware that brain development and mental health are the result of our interactions. When caregivers or teachers interact with children, they are impacting their brains. This, in essence, is how love becomes flesh, says author Louis Cozolino in his book “Neuroscience of Human Relations,” (W. W. Norton & Company; Second edition, 2014)

Childhood adversities, including neglect, and physical, verbal or emotional abuse, affect the child’s acquisition of skills, their social competence, and their capacity to respond empathically. And, what is worse is that studies have consistently found that any form of physical punishment is associated with future violence against caregivers, siblings, peers, and partners. However, researchers also found that children’s aggression was reduced by stopping harsh discipline.

When a child is born, he or she is equipped to naturally experience concern for another. But, as researchers have shown, deprived children or children exposed to any form of child abuse or trauma, have problems experiencing empathy or even recognizing emotions different from anger, which is a response typical of the fight-or-flight response to stress (resulting from the activation of the amygdala in the brain).

It’s therefore essential to set up policies in place to address the need for parenting education for all caregivers, as an effective child abuse preventative strategy.

The third person is essential for emotional health

A dad is trying to playfully connect with his 9-year-old at a restaurant. The boy is standing to the left and the father has his arm around him. Both seem a little uncomfortable. The dad starts throwing what seems like a math quiz at the child.

What’s 40% of 50? the dad asks and the boy has trouble finding the answer.

The dad gives him clues, takes him to “what’s 40% of a hundred?” to which the boy easily replies 40 and then the dad insists with the former question.

Even though this time the boy easily says 20, he is frustrated and concludes, “I’m not smart, dad.”

This simple anecdote of interaction between father and son makes me think of a hundred things.

For one, how difficult it is to respond sometimes to the emotional needs of another person!

The father’s intention seems to be to communicate with his son, to play with him, to stimulate the child’s brain. However, he doesn’t seem to realize he’s making the child feel incompetent and stupid. Not a good foundation for a parent-child relationship, but unfortunately this interaction is not uncommon between adult and young males.

There was an implicit “leave me alone” plead from the boy that the father disregarded. I wonder if the child will remember this one as a humiliating moment where he perceived his father was more intelligent. Will he also feel that his father sees him as a failure and therefore won’t feel proud of him? Not unlikely, the father-son memory will be recorded with some resentment that will mark even the son’s choice of career (I’m not good for math, I will choose art).

The saddest thing though is not only that the father didn’t see the child’s discomfort (the father kept insisting) but that the dad’s good intention was not recognized either.

I believe in these cases a third person is essential. Was this a divorced father sharing weekend time with his child? The mother was not there. Would she have stopped the father from going on with the quiz to protect the child? Would she have interpreted and explained to the child what his father’s intention was?

I’ve seen how important it is for single parents to have a third person reinforce their authority, share responsibilities, explain their intentions to the child.

I’ve also seen how important it is for a child who is verbally mistreated in public to have a third person intervene and stop the abuse. It takes the blame out of him/her (“It is not something I did what explains my parent’s abusive behavior”).

I am certain that in many occasions our perception of the world is tinted and biased because we lack that third person in our lives who can explain and interpret the facts for us. For example, a grandfather who provides a different perspective; the stranger who intervenes to either defend the child or take the steam out of the situation; the wife who explains dad’s intention; the therapist who allows for a space where emotions are acknowledged, words listened, and new perspectives are possible.

Let’s look for opportunities where our children can see the two sides of a coin. That will help them integrate lightness and darkness and grow emotionally healthy.

Is selflessness possible

We’re ego and soul, and yin and yang, opposite forces, characteristic of duality, struggle inside us.

One of the most compelling challenges in my spiritual life has been to really understand the motives underlying my own feelings and actions. One of my teachers said a long time ago that a healer’s actions need to be motivated by what he called “pure intentions.” However, since subconscious forces drive us, how do we know what our real intentions are at any given moment?

For example, the most generous gestures could be driven by the need to please others or to be loved. An action could give us stature to the eyes of others but only our inner core would know how many pints of selfishness our generosity hid.

But this is not a new dilemma for me.

At 15, I was already a snob philosopher who could swear with no shame that she understood Socrates pretty well. Plato’s writings got me thinking about the essence of life, about beauty and goodness and I pondered what would be the best way for me to achieve some kind of utter kindness, selflessness, integrity… only to come to the conclusion that achieving this utopic perfection would on itself be tremendously self serving because I’d be striving for it basically to feel good about myself.

So, is selflessness really possible?

I follow the great egalitarian philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in that man is born good but the pernicious influence of human society and institutions corrupts them. I also believe with Daoists that we are born with wisdom, trust, faith, love, peace and joy and life experiences makes us learn anger, grief, fear, mistrust, resentment.

But be what it may be, we’re still made of ego and soul, and yin and yang, opposite forces, characteristic of duality, struggle inside us.

Maybe our life is about bringing light into our darkest places inside. Maybe it’s about increasing our awareness of our true essence. Maybe enlightenment is this consciousness of our wholeness, which is made of contradictions, about keeping a constant awareness of our oneness in the midst of our perception of division and differences.

The question then is not if selflessness is possible but if we could increase awareness of our interconnectedness.

Disconnected from the other

The main point about civility is…the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.

—Zygmunt Bauman

The media constantly inform us about acts of terrorism, wars, people displaced by violence, refugees, famines, natural calamities, human and drug trafficking, mass lay-offs, corporations that sink overnight or merge to form larger and frighteningly powerful entities. All of these are symptoms and consequences of our disconnection as humanity.

In January 2018, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Teresa May, created a new position, a Ministry of Loneliness. More than nine million people in the UK suffer, either occasionally or permanently, from loneliness, according to a report published by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness. And loneliness seems, more than anything, the product of our inability to connect with others.

We’re not only isolating ourselves, we’re regrouping.

Armed with recent demographics, journalist Bill Bishop published The Big Sort:Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. (First Mariner Books, 2009). When he looked at the electoral results of the last thirty years, he observed that Americans have grouped by class, skin color, and beliefs in increasingly homogeneous communities. This has happened not only at the region or state level, but by city and even neighborhood. His data has been confirmed by other reporters, such as Corey Lang and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz of the UK,[1] who also predict that this tendency toward segregation will be generalized along party lines. People are choosing neighborhoods (and churches and news programs) that are compatible with their lifestyles and beliefs. This type of grouping prevents the new generations from being exposed to different opinions and views of the world. The phenomenon is happening throughout the nation. For example, in rural West Texas, a fifty-acre community development (Paulsville) was created in 2008 to provide homes exclusively for followers of then libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Bill Bishop suggests that the outcome of this trend has been a notoriously dangerous polarization of the population, a decline in tolerance, and an increase in extremism.

Facebook designs algorithms that select what’s displayed in my wall and shown to my friends and family. Other algorithms will get me to see more posts from people who think like me and fewer from those who have different opinions, or more personal comments and pictures, than any political news I’d like to share. My followers and the people who like or click on my posts back my opinions, but my posts rarely reach those who think differently. The balkanization of social media or splinternet––meant to block, filter, or redirect certain topics––causes us to live in separate microcosms, with narrower visions. It denies us the opportunity of enriching ourselves with differing ways of seeing the world. It has become a political instrument to perpetuate power in the hands of a few.

In a sociopolitical climate of constant change, corruption in the highest spheres, mutual distrust, and unrelenting competition, we feel easily judged, criticized, and excluded. This also constitutes an obstacle when trying to connect with others. I distrust others because I suspect they want what I have (my money, my partner, my position at work, my influence). Since others have abused me in the past, betrayed me, abandoned me, rejected me, I can’t expect otherwise. In the midst of this mistrust, I keep my guard up. I don’t show my vulnerability. I choose not to connect with those different from me but to group with like-minded people. The paradox is that vulnerability actually connects us, humanizes us. We need to change the paradigm that the intellect is what makes us strong. True strength doesn’t come from our physical bodies and brains, which inevitably deteriorate, but from experiences and feelings that eventually make us capable of empathy and prompt our indignation about social injustice or ignorance and ambition. We all have a soft side, and that’s just fine. We are yin; we are yang.

[1] The LSE US Centre’s daily blog on American Politics and Policy (online).

Disconnected from our bodies

Not only have we progressively disconnected from each other and the planet, we’ve also stopped listening to our bodies. We’ve forgotten how to lead a rhythmic life. We don’t eat when we’re hungry, but when the food is available or when it’s noon. We don’t sleep when tired; that’s what caffeine is for. We turn off symptoms with medication, instead of trying to understand their roots. In addition, we’ve lost body wisdom. Our gardens are more for adornment than for receiving our daily dose of sun or for planting trees that purify our air. Instead of exposing our skin to the sun, which would transform skin tocopherols into vitamin D, we take a supplement. Instead of drinking orange juice, we look for vitamin C capsules. If something upsets our stomach, we just take an antacid or digestive enzyme instead of eliminating from our diets the foods causing problems.

We’ve also stopped trusting the wisdom of the body, no longer listening to its inner healer. We believe that our doctor is the expert in our own body, and we allow specialists to manage our health. I often see patients unable to decide on a course of action because what reason prescribes goes against what their heart, their instinct, or their dream shout. Society (which strongly echoes the parental voices lodged in your mind) sometimes prevents you from seeing the red flags or advising you about what’s best for you. We end up not doing what our hearts and souls really need and want.

I believe three types of disconnection (from the body, from others, and the planet) are interrelated and lead to deficiencies in our ability to nurture ourselves, love our neighbors, and protect and preserve the environment.

Development (a misnomer) has given rise to the adoption of new values, which have a clear detrimental impact on the evolution of the individual and the culture, and are very different from the knowledge of our ancestors, who recognized the need to preserve, honor and care for the planet. But we still call ourselves civilized.

This divorce we have created is based on an illusion. In 1973, in his essay “The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective,” the astrophysicist and author of Cosmos, Carl Sagan said, “Our sun is a second- or third-generation star. All the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes, were produced billions of years ago in the interiors of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff.”

The still-predominant reductionist paradigm feeds the perception of separation from our surroundings, including other people, and convinces us that we’re merely individual beings, divided, segments. We’ve fooled ourselves into denying we’re all stardust and that what I do to you I’m doing to myself too, that what I do to the planet affects me.

Fortunately, we’re coming to understand that reductionist science, which until recently we thought irrefutable, is questionable and that we’re enrichened by the adoption of more holistic, systemic, and comprehensive perspectives. Holon means complete, total. A multidimensional and holistic perspective of health, disease, education, politics, and our relationships with others and with the world goes beyond what current science could even now explain (measure or corroborate).

Adopting a holistic approach can transform our relationship with our bodies and the environment. If we were more open to ancient cultures, we’d see that Buddhists, Taoists, and Hindus offer us invaluable pearls of wisdom, treasured for generations, and with a universalist perspective. They teach us, for example, that a frugal, moderate discipline and lifestyle, a conscious existence (monitoring our minds), can keep us physically, emotionally and mentally healthy and is good for the planet. The four Buddhism’s components of love are joy, compassion, equanimity, and benevolence, which allow us to connect with others and the environment from a kinder heart.

The Bible also preaches frugality, which some people may interpret as paying less for stuff. The real meaning is having less (only what’s necessary), avoiding waste, and not allowing our happiness to depend on what we own. This is also good for the planet.

In psychology and social sciences, we’re also approaching a more down-to-earth vision of love and relationships, an understanding that individuals can connect with others without exposing themselves to be hurt.

I will be able to take responsibility for my feelings and experience joy in relationships as long as I can fully express my essence and be myself in the presence of another. It makes all the difference in the world if I learn that it’s healthier to choose a companion, friend, neighbor, colleague, or family member who won’t judge me and in front of whom I don’t need to hide my feelings or thoughts or appearance in order to be loved. In other words, if I learn to be with people capable of accepting me as I am, who love me because of who I am. And if I make a mistake and choose a wrong pal, if someone mistreats me and becomes a toxic presence in my life, it’s also important to know that the fairest and healthiest thing to do is to get away.

It might not be necessary to know why or when our instinct and intuition got clouded, or when or why our human relationships became utilitarian, or how we came to have a minimal or neglectful relationship with nature. But it’s crucial to overcome this rift between us and our bodies, between us and our neighbors, between us and our planet. It’s critical to regaining the natural wisdom through which we keep our inner healer attuned.

How could love and solidarity prosper in a competitive and polarized world where it’s become so difficult to bridge the gap between us and those who don’t think, live, feel, or vote like me?