Pay attention
This week’s blog is from chapter 4 of How to Heal Yourself and is about paying better attention to our parts and their messages in order to heal and live whole. The following is an excerpt.
In our journey to healing we need to pay attention to our whole self. This is hard to do because we are so used to living in a semi trance state and not paying attention to our lives. We let ourselves coast along and forget that our bodies are designed to help us find our way. In Holistic medicine – Beyond the Physical I explained more fully how to pay attention to our parts. I used the metaphor of each of us being composed of earth, fire, air, water and ether and described how we can pay better attention to each part.
Earth is our physical body and we pay better attention to this by looking at the meanings behind our symptoms and illness and also looking after the physical body better with good diet, exercise and sleep.
Fire is our intuition, our passions and our creativity and when we pay these more attention we find more joy in our lives.
Air is our rational logical thinking mind. Too often we pay this part of ourselves too much attention but we do need to listen to our logic in combination with our intuition; we need to pay attention to both.
Water is our feelings and emotions and by paying attention to these we find ways to deal with the issues in our lives.
Ether is the energy connections that bring about the signs and synchronicities that help us on our way.
So when we pay attention to the five elements – earth, fire, air, water and ether our lives become easier. It’s like we have a road map on how to live. Our soul and spirit are in charge and they let us know what to do and what we need through our five elements. As we get better at paying attention to all our parts we begin to live a life centred upon the needs of our soul and spirit. It’s a new way of living so it takes some practice and perseverance but as we pay more attention we get better at it. It’s a paradigm shift from the Western reductionist way of thinking and being to a holistic way of thinking and being. Holism is the theory that all our parts are intimately connected and they cannot exist independently. We cannot understand the parts of ourselves as completely separate from the whole and the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.
Everything in our lives has a meaning beyond what is just the physical meaning.
My next blog will be on Chapter 5 – Look after the physical.
If you would like to buy a copy of my book – Holistic Medicine, Beyond the Physical – copies are available on my website for $30 including postage in Australia.
I acknowledge and pay respect to the Elders and Traditional Owners of the land on which I work and live.
