Thanks to the brilliant mind of mathematician, scientist, philosopher Rene Descartes and his agreement with the Catholic church in the early 17th century, a distorted story about who and what we are has been retold to this present day.
Convinced the body is a mechanism and runs like the workings of a clock, he persisted through anatomical dissections of cadavers to prove the body could be separated from the mind. At the time, there was a great upsurge in Europe in the study of anatomy by dissection…and they were running out of bodies.
A devout Catholic who also spent his life trying to prove the existence of a God, he approached the Pope to ask permission to use the bodies of deceased prisoners for his scientific research. At length, the Pope agreed…on one condition…that the church was to remain the guardian of the soul (and the mind) and Descartes and his followers could only study and deal with the body. The contract was struck.
Up to this time, from the middle ages, healing and medicine had been performed by monks and nuns. The ‘hospitals’ were in the monasteries where they treated and healed the whole person, body, and soul. They grew healing herbs, made decoctions, and used the harmony of nature and prayer to re-harmonize the health of the human being.
This pivot by Descartes, was the point at which an entire culture went rapidly down a trail of dualism and separation, compartmentalizing and separating the body into smaller and smaller parts. We commonly use the analogy of the body as a machine because of this way of approaching medicine.
I believe modern medicine is miraculous in many ways and we are all grateful for the ability of surgeons to actually replace diseased organs and tissues in our bodies.
But there’s a danger in taking this to the extreme and fully believing we can abuse our bodies and not take care of them because there’s a surgery to replace any part that wears out.
You are NOT a machine. You are a vastly complex, dynamic organism.
New, leading sciences like neuro-immunology, epigenetics, quantum physics are now proving to those who need scientific proof, that although Descartes and many others have been close to the truth, their interpretations have been wrong.
There is no dualism. The body IS the mind IS the soul.
We are one organism expressing itself in what we have arbitrarily divided into these three ways, in order to understand them.
The body is not a machine and wellness is not a destination that, once reached, remains fixed. Our state of health can be affected through any of these three facets: since all three are affected simultaneously, it doesn’t matter where we start. Any change we make in body or mind or soul benefits us at all levels.
If the mind is full of chatter and worry and the spirit has lost its strength, the easiest place to begin is with the body.
Reducing stress, pain and strain lowers the pressure throughout our whole system and opens some space for clear thinking and inspired connection.
If you can’t seem to get physically moving to walk, play a game, dance, go to the gym, then do something to prime your body into movement by getting some massage or other bodywork. Make a small change in what you eat, when you go to bed, who you spend time with.
The small daily choices we repeatedly make profoundly affect our well-being, helping or hindering the larger choices we face.
Be well or be ill. Choice is the one thing we can control. Choose not to be misguided.
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