alicia h.

--- On Fri, 18/12/09, WeStrive eNews <info@westrive.org> wrote:

From: WeStrive eNews <info@westrive.org>
Subject: WeStrive eNews December 2009
To: skottehund@yahoo.com
Date: Friday, 18 December, 2009, 4:34

Dear WeStrive Community Members,

“In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.” - Henri Frederic Amiel

Health is easily alleged to be the greatest of human treasures. It is a valuable and fundamentally essential quality of our existence and generally perceptible only when it is lacking. But can we also understand its nature when it happens to be present in our lives?

I invite everyone to reflect on this question. For it seems that a true understanding of health is intimately tied into a deeper understanding of ourselves, which as living dynamic beings, suggests our understanding of health must reveal an equally living and dynamic complexity.

As it is stated in the above quote, health can be traced to questions of freedom and also in turn, necessity. Being able to fully live out life’s destiny is an intimate question that can become intensified for many who struggle and suffer through illness.

However, by virtue of health’s absence, many often wake up to new levels of consciousness and degrees of focus when faced with the necessity of restoring themselves to wholeness, pointing to how illness is like a profound question that if properly addressed and understood, contains within its often arduous and painful challenge, an answer to a more enriched and liberated existence.

Ironically it is by virtue of what it is not, that we come closest to a visceral and initial experience of what health is and can be.

To add to this irony, it is often a sign of health itself that the body, for example through fever, deals with disease.

Such a fact of nature points to the fundamental need to go beyond assumptions about health and illness we all carry, which many of this season’s contributors and articles masterfully address from varying perspectives.

One valuable insight I’ve gained is that a distinction needs to be made between what medicine concerns itself with and how it goes about achieving its goals. If it is concerned with wellbeing and with the proper functioning of the whole, are the methods used truly serving such an outwardly noble purpose? Is there medicine in the world that functions from an understanding of what “wholeness” is? Do the esteemed varieties of practice we consider to be medicine achieve their goal of restoring us to “wholeness” when we are ill?

From what I’ve come to understand, it is size and not the function that ultimately seems to determine whether something is termed a whole or simply a part of a whole. Whatever is “whole” can include and range from the most imperceptible to the most immense living entity.

If “life contains life,” whether in one aspect or another, then why not explore both microscopic cells or the cosmic expanse of a galaxy as though they were each an ecosystem unto themselves and simultaneously in symbiosis with one another as living systems?

In contrast to the failure of scientific reductionism to further explain such living systems, new, revived and continuously renewed medical paradigms are offering viable alternatives and answers as to how to connect the dots in the picture of what health-as-a-dynamic-whole looks and feels like.

Allopathic medicine, though necessary and valuable, fails to address beyond its scope of vision what is assumed by alternative medical paradigms to be qualitative and spiritual in origin, with great results!

With such holistic views capable of integrating multiple and complex insights into health, we can then speak of the health of the world, just as we discuss the health of a person.

What then is medicine for this earth and its abundance of challenges?

How can human beings themselves become a medicine unto themselves as well as to this world we have the task of caring for as stewards?

WeStrive’s focus on health aims to offer an abundance of insights into these most pressing and timely questions, especially in light of current global pandemics and general anxiety around the spread of disease.

We hope in this way, to be part of a health giving impulse to both the body of beings and the body of social life, by opening the forums for conversation and exchange of ideas around health.

We hope you enjoy this festive season’s offerings!

Vassag Hovsep on Behalf of the WeStrive Leadership Council

New Content
True Botanica™ - Anthroposophical Nutritional Supplements and Social Impulses by Ross Rentea MD and Mark Kamsler MD
Organizational Spotlight – PhilaHealthia By Paul Glover
Swine Flu Misinformation by Ansley Simpson
Food Inc. – A Review by Mike Harrington

RS Archives’ Recommended Articles
Health & Healthcare What is health? How do we actually become not only healthy individuals but ensure that the initiatives, organizations or communities we are engaged with are healthy? Perhaps the most important question, though, is how we recognize health.
Steiner gave a lecture in August 1923 on how, and why, therapeutic treatment works on the human body, and how nature can effectively be used to view treatment techniques (and hints at the initial work of Weleda, then known as the Arlesheim Institute is the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory) for the whole human organism; this lecture is focused on developing treatments and their pros and cons (including bacterial treatments) for the ailments. This lecture, titled “Polarities in Health, Illness and Therapy,” is available at http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/Polart_index.html.

Suggestions for further reading:

• Nutrition and Health - http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/NutHealth/NutHlt_index.html

• Hygiene: A Social Problem (also known as Health Care as a Social Issue) - http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/Hygien_index.html

• Basic Issues of the Social Question, Chapter 2: Finding Real Solutions to the Social Problems -http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_c02.html

  Leslie Loy
  With Permission from the Rudolf Steiner Archive

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