Healing in Community

Healing in Community

By 2023 apprentice Grant Munro

 

“The art of healing comes from nature, not the physician.  Therefore the physician should start from nature, with an open mind.”

              Paracelsus

 

The health and wellness industry has taken on massive growth over the last ten years – probably in part due to the introduction and wide spread use of social media and unrestricted access to the internet. No longer do people have to rely on the chance discovery and passing around of old copies of The Alchemist, The Celestine Prophecy or The Prophet to name but a few.  Nowadays it´s easy to scroll the page on our personal screens and come across cherry picked quotes, soundbites and memes and it’s clear to see from their popularity that people are yearning to be heard, felt and understood.

What leads us to pain

I’ve dedicated the last 14 years of life to learning to try to understand and coach others on how we can grow towards the expression of greater physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health.  From working with thousands of people I’ve come to understand that although we all start from different places in life with a diversity of opportunities, we tend to have common pitfalls which lead us towards ill health and/or expression of pain.

On the whole, we tend not to move enough as humans were initially intended to, we have a habit of disconnecting from and avoiding our feeling bodies, we engage in repeated unhelpful thinking habits (such as catastrophizing, making assumptions and taking things personally), and we have had our connection to something greater than ourselves eroded over time – be that nature, a higher spiritual power or community.

A chink in the fullest expression in any of these four areas has an effect on the others to greater or lesser degrees. The acknowledgement of all aspects are essential to growth and restoring the adaptability to all life throws at us.

Using Permaculture Principles to Heal Social Issues

Permaculture’s design and problem-solving framework - at it’s core holding there are a set of twelve principles and four ethics – that can be utilized to address issues of almost any nature.  It´s easy to see how principles such as observe and interact, apply self-regulation and accept feedback, integrate rather than segregate, and use value and diversity can be used to come up with solutions to some of the social issues we have in our relating circles and wider society.

When we look to the four ethics we could argue that the success in implementing earth care and fair share don’t really stand a chance until we reclaim our connection to all aspects of self, the people around us and understand what it is to be human . Until we reach this, we can’t accomplish the change that is being called for to create a healthy society and a healthy earth as a group of individuals.

Community Living and the importance of communication

As far back as the ancient Greeks (and undoubtedly further) we have understood that a strong connection to our community is essential for human health.  Like many others of my generation, I don’t feel I have ever really experienced what it means to live as part of a community - so arriving in the jungle five months ago for the year long apprenticeship was an opportunity to truly lean in to the practices I felt I had been cultivating over the last seven years for my own healing/growth journey.

It’s been an, at times, a wild ride of ups and downs internally, and the number one practical thing I feel I’ve taken from it is: it’s important to have that difficult conversation in a timely manner. Feelings through miscommunications and misunderstandings can fester and be felt as an undertone by many in the group and can lead to what feels like fragmented energy. The stress of it can slowly eat us up and create a filter which can colour our whole experience. When something arises, ask clarifying questions, lead with what you are feeling but without blaming the other person.  Perhaps describe what you are feeling in your body without naming an emotion can be helpful, too. Listen to the other person and accept responsibility for your part (there’s generally always a part we’ve played!). Sometimes it’s helpful to come back to a conversation a day or two later.  Have compassion – we all have our own filters, biases and past experiences we are often living on autopilot from.

It has been well established now in the scientific literature that the brain doesn’t greatly differ in its response to an actual threat and a perceived threat – such as a repeating thought or judgement.  Just thinking about a stressful event causes a discharge in stress hormones which our systems are not evolutionarily adapted to deal with for extended periods of time. Just as our physical body can bleed out from a thousand tiny cuts, we can look at these things that we are not facing as tiny cuts in our energy systems. Chronic overactivation of our stress response is implicated in almost all chronic disease.

It still blows my mind to this day how the impact of committing to practices of self-regulation can have a ripple effect throughout a community. When working in London we were measuring how after a relatively short period of time chiropractic was objectively helping people regulate their nervous systems more effectively than at the beginning of care.  Subjectively, these clients would routinely mention how their relationships to their kids, spouses, friends, work and recreational acquaintances would improve. 

Similarly, I’ve noticed at the Ranch that from one conversation between two people the whole group feels like it relaxes – not to mention the perception of my whole personal experience can flip 180 degrees in a matter of minutes. In reality, the conversations are very rarely as terrible as we build them up to be once we initiate them. That conversation may only be with one person, but the pent up energy can be liberated in you both, to ripple through time and space, in ways in which we may not be able to yet fully comprehend.

“We never know how far reaching something we think say or do today will affect the lives of millions tomorrow.”                           

              B.J Palmer