How silent prayer works

When we pray or meditate in silence, we will find that we establish a link with positive, healing forces, and feel a wonderful sense of relaxation. You establish a link with the intrinsic intelligence that flows through all life, which we call God and you even secrete hormones that make you live longer.

During silent prayer, the mind is filled with positive, beautiful thoughts which trigger beneficial hormones in the body. In silence, you find the treasures of hope, faith and optimism. Without these, no illness can be cured. If you could visualise your own wellbeing during your moments of silence, you will be well on your way towards becoming healthy and energetic. Experts call this “creative imaging” and it is one of the most underrated techniques in modern healthcare.

Silent prayer in practice

Author and retired surgeon Dr. Bernie Siegel encourages his patients to mull over the question: why do I need this disease? Once the patient recognises the dynamics of his own life situation, he can enter readily into the healing process, making it quicker and more effective.

Dr. Gerald Epstein, who passed away last year, was another physician who used “mental imaging” in the healing process rather effectively. Dr Epstein would prescribe exercises in imagery for his patients. For example, a patient with immunity disorder was asked to focus on white knights—which could symbolise our white blood cells—guarding a fortress and pushing out intruders and hostile warriors.

Are you throwing away the pebbles?

The practice of silence can enrich your life with a sense of the divine presence. I often narrate the story of the man who stood alone on the sea-shore, gazing absentmindedly at the pebbles strewn all around. In a listless and dull frame of mind, he began to pick up the pebbles one by one and threw them into the water. When all the pebbles had been tossed away and the last one was in his hand, he took a good look at it and realised with horror that it was a priceless pearl!

He had thrown away scores of pearls without even realising their value.

Each hour, each minute of the day is a pearl of priceless value. The time that you spend in silence is especially valuable for it can lead you to physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

Enter the haven of silence

The constant stress and agitation of modern life creates an emotionally polluted environment. People often tell me that they are so stressed and tense that they long to run away from it all, fly to a quiet and beautiful place far away. Just as people who live in the cities turn to parks, woods, and green zones to refresh themselves, you too must make it a habit to enter the haven of silence regularly.

Communing with God—cultivating the presence of the divine intelligence in the still depths of silence—will not only refresh and rejuvenate you but also unleash the intrinsic healing powers of your body. The practice of silence can be like your personal jet which will enable you to reach those sublime spaces of your own soul!

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Health and happiness are twin goals that mankind has always pursued. Many of us know that we must be healthy in order to be happy; but very few of us realise that we must strive to be happy in order to be healthy. Since the beginning of the 20^th century we have accepted what is known as psychosomatic unity of the human being. ‘Psyche’ means mind or soul; ‘soma’ means body. Thus, the psychosomatic concept tells us that we are not just bodies – but an entirety that includes body, mind and spirit, functioning in a symbiotic relationship in which a separation is impossible to make.

Don’t take good health for granted

The World Health Organisation [WHO] defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing—and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.” To this we must add, spiritual wellbeing—without which a feeling of ‘wellness’ is incomplete. The sad fact of the matter is that people take good health for granted. They don’t even think about their health until they are in danger of losing it—when illness and disease begin to threaten. Even then, they go to a doctor or a hospital, and think that this is all they have to do about it—in other words, they take no responsibility of their health. This reminds me of the words of the great comedian, Charlie Chaplin. He said: “When I fall sick, I go to the doctor. After all, the doctor has to live! The doctor writes out a prescription for me and I take it to the chemist–for the chemist too must live! The chemist gives me medicines–but I don’t take them, for I too must live!”

The time has come when doctors too realise that they must work on the principle of healing that is within each one of us

I must offer due apologies to doctors and chemists who are reading this. But I am sure they too will see the point of the joke–you are your own healer. The power of healing is within you. And the time has come when doctors too realise that they must work not on the disease and its symptoms–but on this principle of healing that is within each one of us. It was Dr. Johnson who said: “To preserve health is the moral and religious duty of us all—for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when we are not well.”

Health is not just about adding years to your life

Longevity is not the primary goal of human life. We are told that life expectancy has increased in our times; and this is attributed to better health care and the advances made in medicine and allied sciences. But a longer life is not what all of us seek. A life of pain and disease and affliction can only be a miserable burden when it is prolonged. Thus we have the cases of incurable diseases, and people who are ‘clinically dead’ being put on life-support systems in the ICUs of hospitals. This is hardly the kind of treatment or ‘life’ that we aspire to. Take the case of a man who is not really ill. He may not suffer from any disease–but he may feel dull, lethargic and listless. He may be unhappy, and beset by negative emotions. Such a man is not really healthy.

True health and wellbeing encompasses man’s physical, mental, intellectual, and spiritual state. When there is harmony and integrity between all these states, one is in good health. This is the concept of holistic health that we need now.

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I cannot say about others but reading inspirational wisdom featured within Complete Wellbeing and elsewhere has helped me expand my awareness of myself as well as of the world. And isn’t awareness the only way one can bring about any transformation within oneself? Reading stimulates my mind and leads me to question the status quo and reflect on my thoughts, feelings and behaviour. I have become much more open-minded and a lot less rigid about my worldview. Yet, I must say that cobwebs accumulated over years cannot be cleaned in one sweep—it requires persistence. De-conditioning deep-rooted beliefs requires deep-rooted conviction and persistence.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of good reading to my life has been the sheer volume of unlearning I have gone through. Owing to the wisdom I have gained from reading inspirational stuff, I have managed to free myself—and continue to do so even now—from  hundreds of old, useless and outdated beliefs that didn’t serve my highest good.

I owe a lot to those who have shared deep insights about the various aspects of life—they have helped bring out my latent strengths, while simultaneously pointing out the weaknesses that hold me back. Reading has taught me that the heights of love, peace, joy and fulfilment are not reserved for a chosen few—they are available to anyone. Whether or not I end up reaching those heights depends only on one thing—my choice.

“An ideal life” doesn’t exist

Coming back to the question at the start, not only am I far from living the ideal life, I don’t think I’ll ever get there—for that’s not the goal. To repeat an old cliché, happiness is not a destination, it’s a journey. But I do believe it is possible to live a richer life than I am living now. I also know that there’s only one corner of the universe I have the power to change, and that corner lies in me. Through Complete Wellbeing, we try to bring this awareness to our readers.

And no, I don’t follow every advice given in Complete Wellbeing—it’s not even designed that way. It is structured in a way that allows us to choose the thoughts and ideas that resonate within and then experiment with them to find our individual truths. Knowledge can be transferred, but experience has to be gained firsthand. No matter how sound the advice, no one else can live my life for me. And what’s more, there’s no “ideal life”… there’s only a quest to learn, to grow and to evolve into a greater version of oneself.  It’s this quest that I am learning to cherish. What about you?

The post A quest to cherish appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

One day, a young friend paid a visit to the prominent British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and found him in a contemplative mood. “Why so meditative?” he enquired. “Because I’ve made an odd discovery,” replied Russell. “Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

That’s a profound observation by the Nobel Prize recipient. When it comes to pursuit of happiness, the more learned we are, the more illusive it seems. If only we could sit back and relax, and resist the charm of the storylines in our heads, we would realise that life is quite simple. This is what the great Chinese philosopher pointed to when he said, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” Yes, we make it complicated by thinking and analysing too much. We mix up our priorities, then wonder why life is not working out for us; we live a life fabricated out of mistaken ideals, then complain about the lack of fulfilment; we chase worthless objects in the hope that they will bring happiness, then the illusion breaks apart.

But life need not be so full of complications. That’s why, on the occasion of our 9th anniversary, we decided to turn our attention to the basics—the stuff that true happiness is made of. Susan Biali, an internationally recognised medical doctor who is also a life coach, gently reminds us of the nine elementary factors of happiness and wellbeing that we tend to overlook in our busy everyday living. These “building blocks” as we like to call them, don’t come as a revelation. In fact, we miss them only because they are so obvious. And yet, mull over them calmly and you will discover that maybe you need to revisit the priorities in your life and make some much needed changes.

While explaining the need to cultivate emotional resilience, Susan highlights the importance of conscious commitment to live in a balanced, mentally healthy place. “As soon as life gets crowded, most people push sleep, good nutrition and exercise out of the way, to make room for what we think is ‘more important’. We’ve got it backwards! We should see these good health basics as the foundation of our day, the non-negotiable framework of balance in our lives, rather than considering them as disposable options,” she says.

Of the nine building blocks, you may discover that you have a few of them already in place—these are the aspects of your life that are going well. You now need to make a conscious effort to get the remaining blocks to interlock and fit with the existing ones. The changes may not happen overnight but once you are committed to the new blueprint of your life, it’s only a matter of time when the structure of your life will become sturdy and durable—with the wherewithal to resist small and big tremors that will strike from time to time.

Happy Diwali!

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I have to admit—I was expecting a compliment from the doctor! [vanity, such vanity] I’d have settled for a modest tribute, something like, “You’re in pretty good shape, for an old guy.” It was not to be. When the tests were done and results compiled and assessed, the doctor came over, confirmed my identity, looked at the test results, then at me, and said: “Well, I couldn’t find anything wrong. You seem medically uninteresting.”

I thanked him, paid the bill and departed. I wondered about his conclusion all the way home—“medically uninteresting…hmm”.

Does medically uninteresting mean I’m healthy? Are these the signs of health?

• No pain
• No symptoms
• Not sick
• Not always sore/tired
• No life-threatening disease
• Not unconscious
• Still alive

Of course not—there IS more. There truly is a great deal more to health than the absence of illness or the presence of medical non-interest. For today, simply acknowledge that the term ‘health’ is not often used in the best and fullest sense of the word. You can truly do much better than “medically uninteresting”—aim for wellness.

Wellness vs Health

Well over half a century ago, a physician named Halbert L. Dunn began talking and writing about “high level” wellness. Though I used the “high level” phrase for a while, I gave it up after a few years, thinking it a bit redundant. After all, wellness is by nature and definition “high level” compared with just an ordinary lifestyle.

I was attracted to the word “wellness” because it is an alternative to the common word so poorly understood, namely, “health.” People usually think of health as a state of non-sickness or absence of pain or injury. Health, in short, was then, and still is, viewed as the absence of something.

This perspective is not only inaccurate—it’s also hazardous to health! If you think you’re well just because you’re not experiencing sickness, you might be less motivated to take steps to advance beyond that state. There is, in such case, too little incentive or vision for something more. You might settle on taking the minimal steps for maintaining the sub-level normalcy of a low-standard normal health.

The alternative, which wellness invites, is to view health in a variety of positive dimensions. This includes recognizing levels and degrees of wellbeing, stages and positions along a continuum of functioning. In this way, quite specific images of optimal existence come into sight.

So What Is Wellness?

Wellness embodies new parameters and expectations of wellbeing. Here are a few of them.

Wellness is multi-dimensional

A wellness lifestyle has multiple dimensions. Let me outline to you my first model that has five dimensions. Each dimension was used as a chapter in my 1977 Rodale book entitled, High Level Wellness: An Alternative to Doctors, Drugs and Disease. Maybe it will appeal to you, and be helpful as a starter way of organizing things

1. Self-responsibility
2. Nutritional awareness
3. Stress management
4. Environmental sensitivity
5. Physical fitness

Self-responsibility entails a conscious recognition that you are in charge of your health and the quality of your life. Without an awareness and full commitment to the idea that you are the prime cause for what goes well or poorly, you are not likely to invest the time and energy to pursue excellence in the other dimensions.

Wellness Is Positive

The reasons for pursuing wellness are always related to satisfaction, payoffs and pleasures, not sickness avoidance or life extension. It’s likely, of course, that wellness will lead to less illness and probably a longer life, but these are welcome side effects!

Negative appeals to behave sensibly, such as “don’t do X [often something appealing, like drinking, dancing and carousing] or else Y [something unpleasant, like inebriation, fatigue or accusations of moral turpitude] will happen, are not effective and they certainly are not much fun. People often look for ways to outwit negative admonitions. In wellness, the emphasis is on short-term pleasures gained from choosing positive path, not on long-term penalties or negative-reinforcement. This is why wellness is so much more pleasant than traditional health education.

Wellness Is About You

Wellness lifestyles must be shaped in a manner unique to each person. No guru or other expert can tell you what to do or how to do it. Your style, opportunities, situation and resources are unlike those of anyone else so you must adapt all advice to your situation and circumstances. That’s another reason why self-responsibility is a foundation for this concept.

Wellness Is Beyond Body

Wellness includes physical health and emotional/mental wellbeing. The physical element is equally important as the mental, but the two are actually inseparable. One always affects the other. Physical fitness is a pathway to psychological and emotional equanimity and if the latter is going for you, you will realize the necessity of daily physical exercise “devotionals”.

Wellness Is An Attitude

You can practice wellness at any point in the life-cycle. A great lifestyle is as important to the old as the young, the poor as the affluent, the sick as the well. This is about an attitude and a mindset, a context by which to perceive what matters and what to do about matters large and small affecting your life and purpose. It is not a stagnant position to take on one thing or another.

What Wellness Isn’t

Wellness is not the same as holistic health, complementary medicine, prevention or medical self-care. There are sometimes common themes, but more often there are not. Most important of all, wellness is almost certainly not about wellness! That is, not about the misrepresented nature of so-called wellness by pushers of products and services who have borrowed or rather hijacked the word. Many shysters and mountebanks and just plain hustlers have taken the word and shaped it into forms unrecognizable to those of us who view wellness along the lines described here.

Complementary medicine and holistic health are often oriented toward treatment; the terms are most often employed by healers, usually by persons who are not licensed medical doctors and others who practice standard, evidence-based care. Prevention and health education are terms used by healthcare professionals who dispense illness and disease avoidance advice. Medical self-care is primarily focused on teaching you how to accurately, economically and efficaciously identify and attend to emergencies, injuries or relatively minor medical problems. This kind of care-giving and teaching is fine and desirable, if done properly. However, they are different from what is herein described as wellness. Such distinctions enable an appreciation that lifestyle choices affecting quality of life are not matters administered by others and directed at problem areas.

Wellness is that which is up to you, with the focus upon becoming “weller” and happier, not less troubled or to suffer less. The latter happens as a pleasant side-effect as you advance toward or succeed in remaining at or near a dynamic high level wellness state of being.

The everyday experience of a lifelong quest for attainable but challenging peaks of optimal life quality is its own reward.

Make Your Journey Joyful

It might be fun to think of wellness as a game, especially if you want to have fun while getting serious about a more ambitious lifestyle. Wellness is not complicated. Imagine a game about boosting your quality of life. Why not? Games are enjoyable and often effective as a learning tool. A wellness lifestyle game might be an attractive way to approach a higher quality of life. To play what could be called “The Wellness Game” [TWG], you first decide to participate. A wellness lifestyle usually does not come about accidentally. Instead, it is a choice. Like any game, you play TWG best if you know and abide by the “rules.” Here are a few basics.

• Decide to play
• Make a commitment to try to win
• Recognize The Wellness Game is something you want to do—nobody is pressuring you to play
• Don’t put it off till tomorrow or next week—get started now.

You are already abiding by these basic rules: you are reading this article. The next step is to follow a rule not included in most games, but helpful for TWG—express your commitment to play. Do it in writing.

Use a sheet of paper to write these words or words of your own choosing along the same lines: I am committed to playing the Wellness Game. Sign your name to this agreement.

“I, _______________, agree to learn the rules and play The Wellness Game.”

To make The Wellness Game fun, feel free to add your own rules. After all, it’s YOUR lifestyle that is to be won or lost.

OK, if you put your name in the blank or wrote a note to this effect as suggested, you are on your way. You are committed to learn about and shape a wellness lifestyle. Games, though associated with frivolity and play, are hardly frivolous when they have a long-lasting positive impact on your life.

Follow the kind of rules [or guidelines, traditions or principles] that seem most likely to complement your circumstances and ambitions. Remember, this process is about enjoying and winning TWG. The bottom line is to identify, create and sustain a lifestyle that boosts your well-being, particularly your happiness and capabilities to live well.

A key rule in The Wellness Game is to take your lifestyle choices seriously without being grim or rigid about it. Find the balance that works for you—that’s what the best lifestyle players do. You can learn to play as well as anyone else.

What Counts As Lifestyle?

Lifestyle includes the entire range of actions that are or could be brought under your control, including but not limited to:

• How and what you eat. In the course of playing The Wellness Game, you will discover that it is less important to think in terms of specific foods being “good” or “bad” for you as it is to eat wisely most of the time. Nobody is, or needs to be, perfect. If a certain food is a big treat for you, enjoy it now and then, but not so often if it’s the kind of item that might give the average dietician a heart attack to look at, let alone consume.
• How often, how long and how intensively you exercise.
• Your ability to enjoy some aspects of everyday life, find rewarding work that is of interest and maintain friendships and community support. A game? Yes, we can think of it that way, but the stakes are higher than any game you might play in Las Vegas, Monaco, Mumbai or elsewhere.
• Your understanding of the medical system, particularly its limits and how little it can do, under the best of circumstances, beyond diagnosis and treatment of injuries, illness and disease. Becoming healthier is entirely up to you—based on the lifestyle you create.

A Key Variable

For TWG, the environment is important. You can’t exert as much influence on the environment as you can on your own lifestyle. Yet, you must pay attention to the nature and influence of your surroundings. To the extent possible, rearrange it to your favor, at least at home and in your work setting and friendship circles.

Because only your lifestyle is under your direct influence, the emphasis in The Wellness Game will be on elements that fit the lifestyle category. But, the culture is important. An environment or a culture that belittles certain qualities needed for happiness or hope, optimism or, in our case, a wellness lifestyle, will make success at TWG difficult, no matter how outstanding an individual plays TWG. An individual can only do so much.

The efforts you make to succeed at TWG and enjoy wellbeing and joy in life, happiness, a positive outlook and multiple levels of meaning and purpose are shaped by the quality of the physical, emotional and mental surroundings.

When you think of wellness as a game, the pursuit of advanced well-being becomes a lifelong no-lose contest in which you get to win every day, find continuing meaning and experience recurring satisfaction. Good luck.

Where Are You on the Wellness Scale?

All lifestyles patterns fall into one of four categories [called the Ardell’s Four Lifestyle Patterns]. They portray a range from the highest level of wellness to the minimal level of functioning. Occasionally, we all behave in ways that fit each category. However, for the most part we follow a certain pattern, one of the four described below:

Low level worseness

A few examples of egregious choices that diminish life quality and personal effectiveness:

• Insufficient exercise
• Poor food choices
• Alcohol and/or other substance abuse
• Use of nicotine
• Reliance on caffeine
• Severe weight issues and attendant poor body image
• Misuse of medications
• Unrealistic expectations for medical care
• Uncritical acceptance of information

Middle-level mediocrity

A few examples of choices that reflect mediocrity. This is “absence of illness” level of health. It does not so much diminish life quality as it fails to advance it. It’s a form of being stuck nowhere in particular, a boring and uneventful place of being.

• Non-sickness associated with good health
• Apathy
• Low energy levels
• Lack of commitment
• Poor self-image
• Unaware of negative norms and their influence.

Intermediate-level omnibus tinkering

This level entails sporadic efforts toward better health and advanced functioning. A beginning, but still missing is the conscious, determined commitment to sustain an all-out wellness lifestyle. A few examples:

• Non-systematic health initiatives
• Cyclical efforts to change
• Experiments with short-term fixes and programs [e.g. the rhythm method of girth control]
• Illness-avoidance motivation
• Excessive faith in experts with all the answers, not to mention products and services on offer

High-level wellness

A systematic and pleasure-based understanding of what to do and how to sustain a deliberate commitment to a high quality of life. Examples might be:

• Embracing personal responsibility
• Initiating efforts at shaping supportive environment
• Balancing positive initiatives in different dimensions of living
• Resolving to adopt and utilize healthy skepticism and initial doubt while looking for objective data to assess choices
• Conscious commitment to excellence
• Developing a personal wellness plan

Which one would you guess, at this stage describes your lifestyle pattern? Are you closer to one of these broad-brush stages than another? Most people are likely to have features of all the patterns in their lifestyles, but one usually stands out as most representative of an overall pattern. Not to be concerned—this is only of personal historic interest. What matters, is where you want to go next—unless, of course, your pattern is High Level Wellness. In that case, the goal is to keep doing what you’re doing. Things are going great if that’s the case.

Remember, maintaining a wellness lifestyle is rarely done accidentally—it is more likely if done deliberately. To function at the heights is a choice and while satisfying and rewarding, it’s not always easy. That might be the most important “rule” to emphasize in approach to wellness.

Kick-start Your Journey to a Fuller Life

You are ready to begin journey to wellness. Let me send you off with ten simple suggestions for improving prospects for advancing, day after day, until you are better informed, more motivated and well prepared to pursue, achieve, and enjoy a wellness lifestyle.

1. Advice can come from many sources but ultimately you must make the unique decisions for designing and maintaining quality for your health, work, and wellness.
2. It is very difficult to be well and focused on excellence in lifestyle if you can’t express your talents and passions at work, in some manner.
3. Coming to terms with the fact that change is inevitable and happening at a faster pace than ever before will enable you to deal more effectively with its manifestation at home, at work, and at play.
4. Your lifestyle choices, including your attitudes, beliefs, emotional responses, and actions, will have a greater impact on your health and wellness performance than any and all doctors. Such choices also matter more than the economy, the environment, your income level, your age, your employer, your horoscope or your luck.
5. Wellness is too important to be pursued grimly. Whatever your choices, make sure you are having fun.
6. Modern medicine’s a wonderful thing but there are two problems: people expect too much of it and too little of themselves.
7. Balance is a good thing and a worthy goal but there are times when you should forget about it in order to pursue a passion. Passions are not for the moderate or “balanced.” Passions are for lovers of life, paragons of artistry and champions among men and women.
8. It is far better to take up healthy practices than to give up unhealthy habits. This is especially true in the beginning of a change program when you are seeking to enhance the quality of your lifestyle. It is wiser, for instance, to take up a satisfying activity that gives early positive results, such as vigorous daily walking for an hour or more, than to struggle to refrain from smoking. Of course, doing both is best.
9. Lifestyle quality is seldom achieved by accident. You have to make a choice to live and work this way.
10. It’s never too late to start a wellness lifestyle though sooner is always better than later.

This feature is an excerpt from the latest edition of Donald B Ardell’s 14 Days to Wellness. If you enjoyed this excerpt, you might also enjoy Donald’s other book REAL Wellness: It’s What’s New in Wellness Today.

The post Wellness vs Health — You’ve Got It All Wrong! appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

In The Art of War, Chinese philosopher and strategist, Sun Tzu, said, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Sun Tzu’s thought spread west to Rome over 2,000 years ago, and has been applied in military contexts in every century until modern times as “peace through strength”.

However, in relation to the prevention of disease, this concept has been internalised only in the East as “health through strength”. We can protect ourselves from the siege of sickness only by taking responsibility for strengthening ourselves, our personal fortresses, before the battle.

Thus, the way to prevent chronic diseases, or at least to lower your risk of getting them, is to keep two general principles of health in mind: lower your risk factors and increase your functionality.

Lowering risk factors

Your risk factors are:

• tobacco use
• unhealthy diet
• stress [including environmental stressors]
• alcohol abuse
• lack of physical exercise.

While almost every healthcare professional will agree that no tobacco use is the best use of tobacco as a preventive practice, it is beyond the scope of this article to prescribe what is the best diet for you, how much alcohol you should or should not consume, or exactly how much physical exercise you should get [although you probably need a lot more exercise than you are getting now].

Meanwhile, what is considered to be a harmful level of stress can vary from individual to individual, and stress takes many forms—physical, physiological and psychological. You will need to search more, in this magazine and elsewhere, for how to balance these risk factors into a lifestyle that is best for you.

Increasing our functionality

While getting more exercise is a way of reducing your risk of contracting chronic diseases, the concept of increasing your physical functionality goes beyond that, to performing important survival functions, to embrace the essence of life itself. Much of what we associate with old age and frailty is actually the result of disuse. As with, any skill or craft, we lose our ability and functionality without practice.

Thus, in life we must also move, with sustained effort to be able to keep on moving. After the age of 30, remaining functional requires approaching our bodies and our minds with a “use it or lose it” mentality. Disuse is not a survival option.

The words ‘health’ and ‘function’ are inseparable aspects of remaining physically and socially engaged in life. A healthy body is one that is working well. So too, a healthy intestine, leg, or brain are each an organ that performs its dedicated duties in the most functional fashion.

Endowed with more than we need

We are blessed with much redundant extra functions—we have two eyes, two ears, two lungs, two kidneys, two sex glands, when we really only need one to get by.

I can run a Marathon with one lung; I can excrete my waste material with one kidney, or overpopulate the world with one testicle. The Darwinian reason for this apparent excess of function stems from the fact that we do not simply live in the idle gear. The environment delivers constant challenges that force us to do more than merely “get by”. Hence, we have the survival imperative of “extra health” or “reserve health.”

In this regard, scientists have even found that pieces of the “junk DNA” in the human genome can turn themselves on under certain circumstances, as if they are there as a “rainy-day reserve,” to insure that we have the genetic capacity to adapt to a changed environment in the future, with completely new demands on our bodies.

Dynamics of usage and function

Consequently, our biological system is one of excess capacity, allowing us to surrender at least half of our original capacity with no apparent functional loss. At 60 per cent loss there is still no problem with any deterioration of function. However, when only 30 per cent of our original functionality is left, we start to have symptoms of shortness of breath or a pileup of waste materials, and we develop chronic diseases.

With another 10 per cent debit from of our 100 per cent, we are brought down to 20 per cent of our starting total. This means either a profound loss of function, or death. But we do not die in our sleep from old age; we die from lack of function. This is, therefore, a good-news/bad-news story, as with a bank account. When you have extra cash in the bank, you can be a big spender. But when your balance declines below your debts, you become bankrupt.

However, if we increase our physical strength and our aerobic capacity, we can gain the extra margin needed to remain healthy and functional until at least age 100. The extra fitness margin that we accumulate makes all the difference when it comes to handling the next debt—that next stress or challenge—be it running up the stairs, lifting a child, avoiding the flu, or sleeping through another night.

The vast majority of medical encounters and expenditures are in this narrow 20 – 30 per cent margin of our starting function. Prevention involves making the efforts to remain as far above this level as possible.

Enhanced function facilitates prevention

Thus, one of the two main principles of prevention is to preserve and enhance function. This is accomplished by good preventive maintenance, thereby avoiding the trouble and expense of being sick. Health, and the extra margin afforded us by increased fitness, trumps illness by any possible measure.

Western Medicine spends all its intellectual and fiscal capital in trying to repair the damage or loss of function. Eastern medicine places its emphasis on retaining health and function.

Health and the whole

Aristotle observed the truth, “Man is by nature a social animal.” As such, our social life determines our health, as, in turn, our health determines our ability to have a social life.

In the Eastern concept of health, remaining socially engaged is an integral part of our health, harking back to the root word of “health,” in the Proto-Indo-European word kailo, meaning “whole.”

Thus, the Eastern concept of being in good health means to be in balance with one’s entire environment, to remain whole, physically, spiritually and socially. No matter what our age, our physical and psychological wellbeing also depends on us remaining socially engaged, doing things that we are passionate about and interacting with others.

This prevents loneliness and boredom, and increases our general feeling of wellbeing. It also increases the flow of endorphins, which boosts our immune system.

The path to complete wellbeing

To maintain our psychological wellbeing and in turn physical wellbeing, each of us must find our path to what renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wrote about in many articles and books, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Csikszentmihali’s studies have shown that people are happiest when they are extremely focused on an all-absorbing task that is difficult enough to be challenging, but not so easy as to instil apathy. Great athletes are said to be “in the zone” when they are in a state of flow.

What they do is a result of thousands of hours of training and experience, to be “naturally” in a state of peak performance. In this regard, American mythologist Joseph Campbell had one mandate for life and the prevention of illness, “Follow your bliss.”

If we cannot find our bliss or flow at work or at home, we can often find it in our hobbies or in volunteer work, or in amateur activities [the things we do, by definition, for our love of them] in a path that can help us fulfil our interests and our passions, to realise our human potential.

Thus, the path to prevention of disease is the same as the way to complete wellbeing.

An integrated approach

For millennia, the East and the West have followed divergent maps to guide them in their practice of medicine—preventing and treating disease. The difference between the two approaches extends far beyond the physical territories demarcated by their geography and languages. The East and the West have been guided by vastly different mental constructs of the concepts of medicine and health. The West has illuminated components and events as integral landmarks of its territory, while Eastern medicine has highlighted systems and processes as fundamental focal points of its provinces.

» The East focuses on the whole

In Eastern Medicine, the main focus is on life-energy, or Qi [also called chi, prana, and life force]. Eastern medicine defines health as a state of wellbeing, in which the Qi is the invisible essence of life, maintaining itself in harmonic equilibrium with its environment, through the balancing forces of Yin and Yang. The Eastern approach has embraced the principle of emergence, insisting that the whole is much more than just the sum of its parts. In this formulation 1 + 1 = 3, the final result of the energy forces emerging in a non-reductionist response to inputs, as extolled by the spirits of Aristotle and Confucius.

Huang Di, China’s legendary Yellow Emperor, who reigned from about 2,697 BC to 2,597 BC, is credited as the founder of traditional Chinese Medicine. He emphasised prevention as the best way to ensure that one remained in a state of good health. One of his more-profound expressions in this regard is, “To fight a disease after it has occurred is like trying to dig a well when one is thirsty or forging a weapon once a war has begun.”

Eastern medicine uses ancient techniques and is high on touch. It carefully looks at changes in the patient, palpating and touching, listening, asking questions, smelling, and using the senses to locate and treat subtle changes, taking in the entire body, in all its complexity, as a whole system.

» The West concentrates on the parts

Western Medicine has taken a different approach to medicine, defining health as “the absence of disease, pain, defect, or symptoms of illness.” The West has no holistic theory of health. Instead, Western medicine has emphasised reductionism as its primary scientific methodology, by taking the body apart, breaking it into ever-smaller units. The Western approach has yielded the genome and molecular probes. Yet, these do not show us how to live better or to prevent illnesses.

In regard to disease, the Western orthodoxy has centred on the extrinsic agencies; throughout the West’s recent history, the major threats to human health were thought to be the by-products of adverse encounters with external hostile threats. Technological advances have allowed Western Medicine to address and redress countless states of illness that were unapproachable just a few decades ago. The conventions of Western Medicine yield quantitative metrics derived from empirical experimentation, with the dominant mantra being evidence-based medicine. Western medicine is high-tech and low-touch.

Western Medicine has had ‘disease’ as its primary compass setting while the East has steered towards ‘health’

» The key difference

Underlying all of the important divergences between the continents is the fact that Western Medicine has had ‘disease’ as its primary compass setting while the East has steered towards ‘health’. Thus, the West has pointed to what makes us sick, while the East has been guided towards what keeps us well.

» Opening up to the Eastern way

At the beginning of the 20th century, eight of the top 10 causes of death were infectious diseases. Since then, Western medicine has largely eliminated these. At the beginning of the 21st century, those eight leading causes of death have been replaced by chronic diseases. Unfortunately, these diseases cannot be eradicated, as smallpox was in 1978, or banished by a pill or medical intervention. Indeed the causes of these diseases emanate largely from our lifestyle and our man-made environment.

As healthcare costs accelerate in the West at unsustainable rates, carving out a larger share of the total economy, the West is starting to realise that it cannot rely on expensive new technological interventions to solve all of its healthcare needs. The West is slowly recognising that the progressive dissection of the body into its finer parts is insufficiently relevant to the concept of health. This is particularly evidenced by the two epidemics of ageing and type-2 diabetes. These two conditions affect East and West alike. But their adequate treatment is more in accord with the Eastern medical model with its approach toward treating the whole person.

Ageing and type-2 diabetes are not conditions that lend themselves to cure and repair, but they present magnificent opportunities for prevention. The operational tools in Western medicine’s black bag are pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. But these two tools are simply not relevant to ageing or diabetes.

In the West, the issue of prevention has only recently been presented as a health-determining agent, though less than five per cent of the West’s healthcare spending is currently allocated toward prevention. According to the WHO, chronic disease accounts for at least 60 per cent of all deaths. The WHO reports that most of these diseases are preventable, or their onset can be considerably delayed. The prevention of these diseases is not only cheaper, but is far more preferable than curing them after the fact. Addressing this point, American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “To guard is better than to heal—the shield is nobler than the spear!” The insistence of the West on repair, with its obvious financial implications, cannot resolve the current and increasing challenge that medicine faces. It inevitably must look to the East for answers.

» What took West so much time?

Though the Eastern preventive approach to Medicine dominates good sense, why does the West emphasise repair instead of prevention? It is because repair pays well, while prevention does not. Zimmerman’s Law asserts, “Nobody notices when things go right.” Such a perverse reality is now coming under increasing scrutiny as the costs of Western healthcare [read illness care] begin to threaten the fiscal solvency of the nations that have embraced the repair model of Medicine. The West has started to look to the East for an alternative solution.

» A broader view

At the end of World War II, the United Nations was already taking a broader view of health than most medical doctors in the West. It was looking East and West to insure global health. The World Health Organization [WHO] was formally launched in 1948, with its definition of health as follows:

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”—Signed by representative of 61 nation-states in 1946. Entered into force by the World Health Organization, April 7, 1948 [Not amended to date].

The WHO saw global peace and global health as integral parts of its goal, since war was seen as a disruptor of social wellbeing, and therefore of health. Thus, while wars and diseases continue, the United Nation and the WHO have tried to have fewer of them, and to alleviate their impact, largely through efforts of prevention.

» The choice is ours

Fortunately, on a global scale, medical science is slowly maturing sufficiently to provide a rigorous, more inclusive, science of health. Health is no longer a bland platitude, but a firm format. Health is not simply the absence of disease but a physical state of specified content. The determinants of lifelong health are not to be found in hospitals or pharmacies, but in our everyday lifestyles. We must either select health or illness. We can either deliberately select the path to health or neglect it—it is our choice.

The ancient precepts of self-knowledge and moderation in all things have been rediscovered, uniting the East and the West. The future will decree how effective we will be in the integration and broadening of our curriculum for health. We must reduce the harmful risks to our health, while taking personal responsibility for preserving and increasing our functionality—physically, physiologically, socially, and even spiritually.

» Welcome World Medicine

Now that the notion of East-West convergence is gathering momentum, a major ideological gulf no longer separates the two. The mysterious and elusive Qi, drives both systems, and will ultimately provide the paradigm shift that will unite us. No longer can we afford to have just Eastern Medicine or Western Medicine as separate practices. The ultimate approach unites them into the notion of World Medicine, as envisioned in part by the WHO.

This approach is gradually capturing the hearts and minds of the medical fraternity across the globe. Instead of the highly-restricted, reductionist emphasis on disease, as I experienced in my years as a medical student 50 years ago—and was the prevalent Western attitude even 10 years ago—World Medicine promises a much more holistic approach, with broader horizons.

As the hemispheres and continents connect by building bridges and isthmuses, the universal hope for world peace and world health will inevitably come closer to realisation under the rubric of prevention. In this process, we must banish health illiteracy wherever it exists, since it is inconsistent with the concepts of prevention and world health.

Enlightenment and enrichment remain for us all, as new hope for health and the prevention of disease arise from convergence.

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