Health Beyond Civilization

The challenge of achieving and maintaining a truly healthy state of being requires us to develop a far more personal relationship with ourselves. I always maintain that the best help is self-help, simply because no one knows you better than yourself, and moreover, no one can act for you and take the responsibility for your own health and well-being. This is not to say that you should never ask for outside help; quite the contrary, sometimes another’s help is necessary and much appreciated. But healing goes much faster and is much more effective when you are an active participant in the healing process.

So what does it mean to be an active participant? First of all, it means being interested and curious in what it feels like to be healthy or unhealthy, as I discussed in my last post. This seems like a no-brainer, but I do occasionally treat patients who maintain that they are absolutely fine, when I can see that they’re full of problems. And maybe that’s okay with them. Everyone sets their own standards. But, I would encourage everyone to raise their standards, because we are all capable of so much more.

By the way, this is not to say that you should become a hypochondriac. The opposite of the example I just gave is the person who is full of health but constantly worrying about every little thing. That’s not the goal either. If the first example is someone who’s in denial, this person is someone who is always living in fear.

The goal is to be awake, alive, curious, without getting trapped. Sure, we all live in denial or fear now and again. But overall the appropriate attitude to cultivate is a centered awareness of what we feel. That’s the first step.

The second step is the process of gathering information. This has two facets to it. First is the sustained effort of penetrating and exploring even more deeply the specific complaints, sensations, and experiences you’re having, turning them over in your head and trying to understand them as best you can.

The other facet is, of course, gathering outside information on the various diagnoses or conditions or methods of treatment that correspond with what you’re suffering from, or learning specific techniques about how you could be healthier.

One facet is an internal exploration, the other an external.

Finally, you have to put all of this to use. What good is awareness and knowledge if it’s not put into use? You have to formulate a plan of action and implement it.

So those are three basic steps toward helping yourself:

1. Awareness
2. Information gathering
3. Implementation

All of this sounds very simple, but it takes a certain degree of risk and effort. It’s not necessarily easy just to be aware. You may not even know what kind of information to gather. And applying what little you know may seem difficult if not impossible. It may, and probably will, seem like blunder after blunder. But after all, this is how we learn about ourselves.

One of the most astonishing and embarrassing things for me to remember about my time living out in the woods is that I was in constant back pain. The astonishing and embarrassing part is that I didn’t know it. Oh, sure, every now and then I noticed that my back ached or was kind of stiff, but I was, ironically, so divorced from my body that I had no clue as to how constant it was. All I knew was that the longer I stayed out in the woods, the more vaguely unpleasant and uncomfortable it was. While everyone was hiking around and exploring, I just wanted to stay at our home base all the time and sit around.

It was not until much later that I started to wake up to the pain; and then it all started to make sense. But awareness alone was not enough. It took a lot more exploration of body mechanics and movement and the relationship of thought and attitude to posture before I began to make real headway with the back pain.

Such things can seem minor, irrelevant, or peripheral. But believe me, if you are planning to “rough it” for a long period of time, a minor irritation can become very, very major, even if you bury awareness of it. It’s far better to start engaging those problems when you’re relatively safe and comfortable, using the basic outline I’ve described.

No one can help you like you can help yourself. I encourage everyone to take steps toward doing so. The reward is worth the effort.

If you are interested in a more in-depth approach following this outline, please read the article, The Roots of Illness.