Pattern #91
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Whole Healing
Whole Healing
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Pattern Heart
Human suffering arises from many sources, undermining clear presence and responsiveness. Collective dynamics of war, poverty, oppression, cultural narratives, and damaged, damaging environments dance with personal histories, beliefs, behaviors, physiologies, genetics … So work towards healing people and their contexts — their individual and collective physical, social, narrative, and natural life-spaces.
Whole Healing – going deeper …
This is an edited version of the video on this page.
We are not just here to “fix-up“ people. The fact that somebody is sick or hurt is not only worth addressing on behalf of that person, but it is also a sign of something larger going on – and that’s what this is largely referring to.
If they are impoverished, if they are in a war zone, if they are a type of person who is regularly oppressed, refugees, whatever… These are contextual circumstances that undermine health and undermine the ability of people to give their gifts on behalf of the whole which is part of what we in the Wise Democracy movement and paradigm are thinking in terms of.
We want to free up their ability to give their gifts. They need support in doing that. Part of that support is recognizing that there’s more going on than just their suffering, there’s a larger context. That can be internal – such as thoughts that they’re thinking because of the things that happened to them in the past. Or that can be oppression.
In regard to that, in our discussion of the Equity pattern, we talked about oppression and how it can be carried on through generations, replicating itself through history, replicating itself in the ways people think about themselves. This relates not only to the current health issues they have because of poverty or abuse, for example, but also their general sense of who they are can be undermined and that in turn can make them more prone to sicknesses.
Our approach is like holistic health in the sense that we’re interested in medical, herbal, acupuncture, homeopathy, bodywork, psychology, nutrition, etc. There are all these different practices, spiritual practices, and so on… We are not an authority in any of them, and all of them are potentially useful in any given case, but it’s expanding beyond those individual practices to what are the larger-than-human community, society and natural ecological wholes that they are a part of. Whatever is going on for them is probably being expressed elsewhere, with other people, to the extent it is promoted by the larger contexts in which they all live.
There are infinite ways to address these dynamics and conditions. The resources that are being given with this pattern are guidelines to various ways to do this. But overwhelmingly it’s about seeing the larger whole that they are embedded in, and their own personal phenomenon, the individual, collective, systemic things are all part of a whole that we want to address, heal, transform, improve, so that there’s a wholesomeness, a wholeness, an aliveness, a presence that flourishes both in that person in and their context.
Video Introduction (4 min)
Examples and Resources
- Daniel Schmachtenberger: the urgency of planetary and social change to heal the mental health crisis
- Social determinants of health
- Healthy Cities
- A Nation of Weavers (NYT David Brooks) and Weavers (Project)
- Why do we feel awe?
- Permaculture Pattern Language pp. 81-84
- What is Regeneration?: Nodal Interventions
- Resilient Zone
- Restorative Narrative
- Despair & Empowerment / Joanna Macy
- Enhancing Wellbeing, Empowerment, Healing and Leadership
- Holistic Healing
- Five Intelligences for Interconnectedness – Link
Health and healing are about more than the eradication of disease. Health is related to wholeness and holy-knowing who we are and how we are connected with the world around us.
Larry Dossey
I find myself coming back to this pattern once again, this time curious about the question: “what should we attend to if we truly want to make people whole?”…..the pattern language seems to assume as beings, we are already whole. I wonder: what should we tend to if we truly want conditions that enable us to connect with and illuminate our wholeness?”
I think there’s a way we can consider two aspects to wholeness: On the one hand, we can view everything as already whole exactly as it is and any sense that it is not (that things are separate, broken, sick, etc.) is a product of our limited perception (which can be corrected with meditation or psychedelic epiphanies) AND/OR (on the other hand) that wholeness is the opposite of separate, broken, sick, etc., and that it can be recovered through connection, fixing, healing, etc. Both seem valid faces of this mysterious thing we call “wholeness” and can be seen to be part of the same dynamic: When things are alienated, broken, sick, etc., an impulse is triggered to connect them, fix them, heal them, etc., and that that dynamic is part of the perfect Wholeness, which actually evolves from one form of wholeness to another, forever. The dance of opposites is wholeness (as in the yin-yang) and what we can strive for is to achieve greater elegance and awareness in how we participate in that dance.
I like your last question, Jenny. It is open-ended and, for me, finds responses in many of the patterns, including the issue of “who” is the “we” that is (or should be) whole? Which involves the Complex Identity and Universal Intelligence patterns, among many others….
Thanks Tom these suggestions are excellent and you provoke many interesting thoughts in return! From the larger perspective of wellness, there is so much more to what makes us whole and healthy than the food we eat and the environment we live in, important as they are. So on reflection, to say we cannot be well on a sick planet seems to deny or rather ignore, our spiritual aspect or the part our mind plays in helping us heal or keeping us sick. From another larger perspective, though global warming and climate change are proving catastrophic for humans, environmental systems and many species, others are and will continue to appear as conditions turn more in their favour. What might we see come into existence as the environment warms? Is this proof that everything already exists in potential? A rabbit hole to be sure!
Love this thread. I think whole healing includes knowing when it’s time for something do end in its current form; when it’s time to let go and move on. I find the practice of conscious closure needs our attention more and more amidst this looping life cycle we’re all a part of and within our cultures that only want to grow more and bigger. In her brief talk, Conscious Closure and the Wild Life of Dying, Vanessa Reid speaks to this so eloquently and profoundly….I recommend giving it a listen with full attention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJyUktH49HM
Wow, Jenny!! What a Tedx talk!!! In addition to Whole Healing, Vanessa Reid manifests SO MANY other patterns in her remarkable sharing – Holistic Leadership and Governance Dynamics, Story, Regenerativity, Spaces for Dialogue and Collaboration, Self-Organization Fostered, Wise Use of Uncertainty, Enough Time, Capacitance, Multi-Modal Intelligence, Groundedness, Wholesome Life Learning…. After listening to this, I looked up her Living Wholeness Institute and was warmed to notice that she works with two women I met many years ago in my one visit to the UK for an “Open Space on Open Space” conference – Sarah Whiteley and Maria Scordialos. Now I want to get in touch with them and share notes! Thank you!
Vanessa is truly remarkable, as is Maria and I spent time with both of them in Greece this summer! They both embody so many of these patterns in how they live and I have deep admiration for them and their work. #moreleaderslikethisplease
Relating this pattern to the creation of a wellness community has given me the aha I need to understand the apparent disconnect between the vision of what I want to create and the requirements of bringing such a vision into a reality where people can see, feel and touch it. The selection of a business model gives structure and life to the concept, the technology facilitates interaction and provides a safe space to connect. Assessments and wellness programs provide the process, but nowhere within each of these aspects does the vision appear. Even the mission statement speaks to an outcome.
Rather than encompassing the larger vision of what a wellness community or well community looks and feels like, it has been squashed into a business plan / model, into a target market with a focus on a specific condition, in order to be relevant online. Nowhere do the on and offline communities meet and nowhere are the challenges of both addressed, even though each holds a part of the others answer.
Can we be well on a sick planet?
Can our earth be well if we are sick?
Can an online community of wellness exist while we live in offline communities that are sick?
So to create a space where whole healing can take place, all groups and entities that are part of the solution need to be present, just as all the aspects of what makes us happy and well must be. The providers of wellness programs and services, the growers and suppliers of food, the keepers of our environment and ourselves. There are not on or offline communities, just communities, but an online space where the skills and knowledge of each entity can be connected and accessed could provide what’s needed to heal ourselves, our communities and planet.
What a remarkable application of this pattern, Sue! I want to make sure you take a look at the patterns Whole System in the Conversation and Inclusive Stakeholder Governance, which speak to your last paragraph. As far as vision is concerned, the pattern Visionary Attractors may be of interest.
In a whole ‘nother realm, your list of questions is particularly provocative for me today, several days after I heard a reading from Lean Logic by David Flemming. The remarkably poetic excerpt was about death, as seen from an ecological/evolutionary perspective rather than an individual life perspective. Death is, of course, a natural and necessary aspect of Life (in the larger sense). After riffing on that for a while, the excerpt moved to a meditation on what constituted too much death, too little death, enough death. Talk about a paradigm shift! So I’m sensing a yes-and-no answer to each of your questions. And the second one – Can our earth be well if we are sick? – makes me think “Yes, to the extent our sickness is part of the food and balancing cycles of nature” and “No, to the extent that our sickness is a sign that ecological systems we are part of are being toxified”. Things get really complex as I explore this, but I find a touchstone in (an unexpected application of) the Life-Enhancing Enoughness pattern. Like I say, your list was provocative!!