Holistic Healing

Holistically refers to considering something as a whole, rather than focusing on just the parts. In healing work, this means considering not just one aspect of health, such as physical health, but also taking into account mental, energetic, environmental factors, and so on. Holistic healing is so powerful because treatment is not limited to one modality or one cause. It takes a far more in-depth and broad approach to healing. On the plus side, this means that there are many more options for bringing about transformation or healing, and a greater chance of success — sometimes what works for one person doesn’t work for another.

A potential drawback to holistic healing, however, is that it is not always simple finding a practitioner who has a broad enough toolkit, with sufficient expertise in each modality, to be effective as a holistic practitioner.

If you just want, for example, Reiki healing, and you are 100% sure that you are after this type of energy healing, you may want to find someone who does just that.

But if you are unsure what you need, consulting a holistic practitioner can be very useful in determining the best approach and modality. This can be time-saving as well as saving you from the expense of trying, say, five different modalities one after the other just to see what works!

Alternative medicine and holistic healing: Mind-Body Connection

As part of the alternative medicine movement, holistic healing views physical symptoms as just one aspect of the disease. In the holistic view, physical symptoms are often the result of psychological or emotional life events or patterns. They might reflect imbalances in a person’s overall energy system, or be the result of early trauma that can be accessed and relieved via memory with NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) or hypnotherapy.

Example: Shoulder pain = burdens

To give an example from my own work, I have seen how a recurring shoulder pain often presents when a person feels the ‘weight of responsibility.’ For men, this means mostly financial and career responsibility. By using NLP, hypnosis, and time-management to re-frame one’s experience of responsibility, I have seen clients with shoulder pain much alleviate or even eliminate it altogether.

Holistic = whole = interconnection with all things

Holistic healing brings a gift not just in its ability to effect healing, but in its power to expand one’s experience of consciousness beyond a limited view of just the body, or just the psyche. The beauty of a holistic approach is that in emphasizing the connected nature of ourselves, body-mind-spirit, we are able to see interconnection in all ourselves, as well as with each other.