Reconsidering our Mission
Part 2
In our earlier years, we considered it most important to introduce to the community many modes of natural healing that were still little known in Maine. Now many of these practices have become mainstream and many practitioners are showing up to serve the growing interest. While we are still a resource for many of these therapies – nutrition, herbs, breath work, massage, etc. – the underlying mission and primary focus of the WHC is, increasingly, to address in an integrative way the spiritual and emotional need of our times.
It is very deliberate that we conjoin the spiritual and the emotional. By spiritual we refer to the deepest awareness of what we are as human beings in relation to the Whole; the emotional is an energetic expression of what we are as human beings that is essential to our natural development. The deep, positive and mature emotional life that is our natural capacity is, in our woundedness, largely admixed with a dramatized, negative emotionality, or reactivity. The adapted, or defended, ego-self that derives inevitably from the repressed emotional wounds of childhood serves also to distort or limit our natural spiritual maturation of awareness, joy, and surrender.
Thus the work of emotional ‘recovery’ or reintegration goes hand in hand with the work of spiritual awakening or maturation. And both are at the root of the cultural transformation we all fervently desire: from self-destructive ignorance, materialism and violence to a sustainable, reflective, humane and compassionate world.
Much of what manifests in our lives as physical illness corresponds to energetic suppressions and distortions that occurred in response to our early emotional and spiritual wounds. Emotions are energy, and we are energetic beings. Energy underlies our physical functioning. This is consistent with the traditional outlook of Chinese medicine, which teaches that the qi, or vital energy, governs the physical processes; the mind, in turn, directs the vital energy; and emotional health is a key factor in energetic health. Thus our emotional fragmentation underlies our tendencies to both physical and spiritual imbalance.
As we look to the future, the mission of the WHC reflects our evolving outlook and priorities over the last ten years. Our programs focus on the following areas, which are broadly and deeply holistic, and which should themselves be seen as overlapping and integrated:
1. Authentic Communication
2. Emotional Integration
3. Spiritual Integration
4. Energetic Integration
Communication, as individuals, couples and groups, has been a vital focus of our activity since our founding. Communication is the transmission of truth or reality between human beings. As such, it is a basis for relationship, intimacy, problem-solving, and even self-knowledge. Our capacity for communication is also vital to our physical health. Authentic communication, as opposed to merely mechanical or inauthentic communication, grows out of our capacity to genuinely access our own evolving experience of reality, to feel confident to express it, and to honor others as they learn to access and express their own truth.
This capacity to access truth is directly related to our growing spiritual and emotional integration, our openness to the wholeness of our experience, and the development of healthy boundaries for sharing and listening. The whole cycle of authentic communication – accessing experience, speaking without attack or projections, listening without reactivity or defenses, acknowledgement – and the healthy boundaries this entails – are skills that can be taught. They are fundamental to our work at the WHC, and we are committed to teaching these skills widely in the community, as they are needed everywhere.
See also Services: Couple Counseling and Communication Skills
Our emotions arise out of the most raw, responsive energies of the living organism. Feelings of need, anger, desire, disappointment, satisfaction and fear are with us preverbally, from the earliest moments of our conscious being. And we also begin to learn to manage them at the earliest age.
If we are emotionally mature adults we are able to feel our emotions, acknowledge them, and take responsibility for their appropriate expression in a way that still leaves us feeling whole. But as vulnerable children or newborns, with the tenderest ego boundaries, or none at all, the tide of emotions as it comes up against the world can be overwhelming or self-threatening. We learn to manage our emotions based on all the messages from our human environment about what is acceptable and non-acceptable, what will invoke the love necessary to our survival, and what will lose it. We may even frighten ourselves with the overwhelmingness of our feelings and consider them a threat to our survival. In either case, our emotional management consists only of repressing, or distancing ourselves from these feelings. In so doing, we are abandoning a part of ourselves as well. This emotional dilemma is magnified in cases of physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
Hence, as adults, we may find ourselves fragmented and in conflict, having disowned parts of ourselves and built unconscious defenses around that self-abandonment. Yet these disowned parts and unresolved feelings continue to run our lives from the unconscious level. Our instinctive self somehow wants the rest of us back, and yet fears it.
The path of healing leads through re-experiencing and re-grieving our early hurts and separations at the feeling level – but now with the help of our new adult strengths and support systems. This process can be very gentle and also very challenging. It can only happen at the right time for each person.
In the absence of this work, the drama of repression, conflict and self-rejection will not only continue to feed many of our personal dynamics, but it also will continue to be at the root of humanity’s collective social and political history of violence, oppression and self-destruction. Yet emotional healing is given minimal focus or support in today’s medical or insurance-driven models of therapy. That is why at The Whole Health Center we consider it profoundly important to provide education and specific therapeutic support for this process.
See also Services: Emotional Recovery and Integration Work
Emotional integration is an important part of true spiritual integration. To pursue a spiritual life without including work on our emotional recovery can lead ultimately to forms of spiritual distortion and self abuse or spiritual abuse of others that we witness today and throughout history. Spiritual integration is a path of openness to the unfolding truth of being that is always greater than our minds’ or egos’ narrow labels and categories. It is an openness to the infinite dimensions of being that may express themselves practically in a life that is full, open, loving and generous. It is not about attachment to dogmas, but about an openness to mystery that may continually redefine our experience of what it means to be alive and to be a human being. It allows for an evolving sense of union with life and with each other that is an antidote to the rigidities, greed, hatreds, and prejudices that destroy our world.
Such spiritual integration is at the non-dogmatic heart of all the great spiritual traditions. It combines a deliberate cultivation of positive and life-nourishing impulses of thought and behavior with a contemplative awareness or devotional openness that transcends and imbues all our habits of thought and action with higher understanding and love.
Spiritual and emotional healing complement each other and have proven to have a profound impact on our energetic health and on the health of the body as well. Hence, our teaching and therapeutic work at The Whole Health Center, both one-on-one and in groups, reflects this spiritual context. It offers a strong foundation in the psychology of spiritual transformation – processes of meditation, visualization, and contemplative awareness; of self-observation, self-responsibility, and self-surrender – that are not divorced from the practical and emotional truths of everyday life.
We are also committed to promoting and supporting True Heart/True Mind, the residential spiritual retreat offered by Paul several times a year for the last eighteen years.
This intensive retreat process schools people deeply in the practices of contemplative awareness and authentic communication. It has long proved its capacity to promote self-realization and personal and spiritual growth, and is wholly consistent with the mission of The Whole Health Center.
See also True Heart/True Mind and Spiritual and Mental Health Counseling
Energetic Integration
Finally, as has been said, there is no separation between mind, body, emotions, and vital energy. There are natural energetic pathways and a natural energetic integration in the healthy mind/body system. Spiritual, emotional, and physical health all release a flow of vital energy in the body. Further, the deliberate cultivation of the flow of vital energy seems to resolve toxic congestions on all levels and clears the path for spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health. Qi gong has therapeutic benefit for those struggling with specific disease symptoms, as well as general self-care benefits for all who practice it. Hence, drawing on the ancient planetary traditions embodied in the classical Chinese science of qi gong (‘energy work’), and with various creative interpolations and extrapolations, The Whole Health Center has devoted much of its energy to promoting and teaching this simple and joyful energy work within the community, drawing on all its capacities to integrate spirit and energy, mind and body.
See also Services: Energetic Integration
Conclusion
In conclusion, our work at The Whole Health Center recognizes that the evolution of our health and wholeness as human beings requires the work of both ‘recovery’ and ‘transformation.’ Recovery is the work that restores to the person the emotional integrity and healthy ego processes that are compromised in our developmental years. For those of us concerned with spiritual transformation in our lives, we must understand that the integrity of that work rests on the foundation of healing that the recovery work provides. On the other hand, those of us who have been focused on our recovery work should recognize that the work of spiritual transformation, with its unfolding of our capacities and our consciousness, is the ongoing completion of that recovery and the living fulfillment of our human potential.