The transformative power of harmony
So often wellness is seen as being about curing all that ails us. Sometimes with an endless list of ills to be ticked off.
But wellness can be so much more than this — not about having a perfect body free from all ill, but about how we nurture the flawed body with compassion and dignity, whether we happen to be incredibly fit or negotiating serious illness.
As a herbalist I’m more and more suspicious of the urge to fix people. And more interested in cultivating the compassion to walk beside others as they work with the plants on their own healing journeys. ‘Healing’ has many roots —
wholeness
soundness
restoration to wellness
abundance
safety
happiness
what is holy and sacred
I’ve sat with people in their dying who have been sound and whole in those last moments. Once I had a friend who was also our church organist. He wasn’t old. He’d been widowed and held his grief close. He returned from a holiday with his daughter and grandchildren and told me he had a tiredness that nothing would shake. Nothing else, but the fatigue was extreme. A couple of weeks later he was diagnosed with liver cancer. The prognosis was bleak and he decided not to have any treatment other than palliative care.
We planned his funeral together and in less than three months he was visibly yellowing, losing weight fast and very weak. But he was at peace with his decision. He wanted to die knowing his family and on his own terms. For someone else a completely different decision might have been there wholeness, but this was his. The last service he played the organ for was at All Soul’s — a service to remember loved ones.
This service was always an emotional occasion, but seeing him shuffle down the aisle to the organ, taking more than ten minutes for a a walk of less than a minute for others, several of us wondered if he could possibly make it to the end of the service. He did. His playing was superb and I wasn’t the only one to feel we’d just seen a man play his own requiem.
The herbs can do remarkable and transformative things. Often our ‘dis-ease’ calls out for allies to change things for us, but the metaphors we use matter. I had another friend who I lost in when we were both in our twenties. She had two young children and at every stage of her treatment she was urged to ‘fight’. When she ‘lost the battle’ it felt like a moral judgement on top of her grief and her family’s sorrow.
But her body was never a battle ground, it was the terrain of her life. It had birthed and fed two sons. Her marvellous body might have been unbalanced by environmental toxins or a genetic susceptibility. It might have had its roots in stress or something no one will ever know, but whatever the cause, military language didn’t help.
Herbs, any good medication, offer us harmony and support. They might strengthen and nourish an area or help to cleanse tissues or an organ, to let go of what is not needed. They might build up and alter the balance of elements. And they will always consider the whole person — a complex of emotional, spiritual, psychological, physical elements and needs…
Some illnesses are in the air, on droplets of moisture from the breath of others, in bad food… but the language of war is still not helpful. Nurturing our bodies with sleep, immune-building herbs, good foods, nurturing our souls with small rituals that sustain us emotionally… won’t stop us ever catching a cold or eating something that gives us food poisoning. But it will give us healthier boundaries, both physically and psycho-emotionally.
And when illness does come, finding balance rather than waging war on our bodies is so much more humane and whole. Sometimes we have no idea where a dis-ease comes from. Sometimes it’s clearly our body’s response to a life that needs adjusting.
When I was in ministry if I ever got ill it would be with a viciously sore throat. There is no way to take a service without a voice. My body would shut me down when I’d been working insane hours and refused to stop. I haven’t had one of those sore throats in more than two decades.
Asking ‘How do you want to feel?’ is a question about how we want to think, create and live small lives well. It’s about how we want to cultivate a sense of deepening self-knowledge and connection to the world. How we want to feel about and in our bodies is a question of deep healing, even if we are feeling unbalanced by a chronic condition, or managing our final months or days. This kind of wellness and healing is for everyone, particularly from our plant allies.