Constellations and Wellness

How do we get the benefit of so much wonderful medical knowledge when it's needed, yet avoid the risks, dependencies, and problems of "overtreatment"?

Many of us go through periods of affliction.  An accident, a lingering sickness, environmental toxins, or maybe just the adjustments of natural aging—we all face these.  But we live in a wonderful time for such episodes as these.  Never has there been more exact and detailed knowledge of the workings of the human body.  Right down to the molecular level, there are professionals who know a great deal about each little organ or cell.  But there’s a paradox.  The training and attitudes of so many of these professionals, the pressures they face working in a dysfunctional delivery system—these very often prevent that wonderful knowledge from actually getting us well.

So what do we do when healthcare can’t really care?  How do we get the benefit of this knowledge when it’s needed, yet avoid the risks, dependencies, and even increases in disease that stem from a deeply flawed approach to real health?  As a wellness coach, I am partnered with people facing these issues every day.  In these articles, I try to share with you what’s working for us.

A great many mainstream healthcare providers, and some alternative ones as well, think a certain way.  What’s ailing you is pretty much a mechanical problem.  Some parts are limping or failing.  The job is to find them and retune, repair, or replace them.  But whether the parts are chakras or kidneys, that’s what will fix you.  While understandable, this single-minded focus on finding broken parts is out-of-touch.  Not always, but at times--it’s just plain wrong.  It works great for maintaining automobiles and toasters, but it fails too often in understanding economies, ecosystems, the weather--and oh, by the way, human health.

Why are paraplegics happier than so many chronic disease sufferers? There's a “chronic disease trap” built into our health care system. How do you avoid it?

Imagine you win a major lottery. Anything vast and permanent wealth can create in your life is now yours. That’s bound to make you really happy, right? Alternatively, suppose you lost the use of both legs—wouldn't that seriously reduce any future happiness? Just think: you would never walk again. Surprisingly, careful research shows this is not true. Big lottery winners revert quickly to the same or worse levels of happiness. But, astonishingly, paraplegics confined to wheelchairs end up typically as happy and fulfilled as they were before (Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness, p. 48).

With this in mind, let’s look at chronic diseases. Among these are conditions that don't diagnose easily, won’t seem to go away, and can amount to either minor or major stumbling blocks in life. They certainly do not impact individuals the way loss of two or more limbs would. But here’s what’s odd. These ailments cut very often more deeply into people’s happiness than does living from a wheelchair.

Our dominant approach to health care is impersonal, liability-driven, drug-centered, over-specialized, and largely mechanical (see FAQ’s “Structural Problems in US Health Care”). Together, these create a kind of chronic disease trap. Working as a wellness coach, helping people avoid this trap, I see regularly see the patterns that create it. Watch for these, and your prognosis gets much better.

Our ancestral families form a kind of system or soul that extends across generations and influences our adult lives. We look at one being re-aligned.

Well, some families have soul, you say, and some don’t. It just depends on what kind of tunes they like. Classical types don’t rock. But what’s an “ancestral family” anyway? Well just hold on—I’ll reply—this is not really about music. By “ancestral family,” I mean your birth family two or three generations back. And the question’s really about whether there is some kind of organizing system that distributes roles and functions in that family over those several generations, and whether that system persists and is somehow still active even though various members may have died.

Boy, that’s a mouthful, you say. And this, I suppose, has something to do with this issue’s theme of  “lifestyle”? Well actually, yes—it does. What if, in a great many cases, very powerful influences on your adult lifestyles arise, not from your personal history, but rather from active, present-tense attachments to ancestors already long dead whom you may never have met. By influences I mean chronic problems (or sometimes uncanny good luck) with health, wealth, or relationships. 

While it’s clear that a meditative state requires a relaxed body and a quiet mind, how we do this in our frenzied lives? How do we get there from here?

There’s this video, Ten Questions for the Dalai Lama. Blockbuster has it. I’m sure Netflix must also. If you watch it, apart from stunning visuals of India and Tibet, set to beautiful music--you will see two things. On the one hand, the movie contains a visual chronicle of the atrocities China has committed against the people and spirituality of Tibet. Honestly, I wept. And on the other, you watch images of the Dalai Lama growing up, and an interview with him in which he is asked questions about this whole, terrible experience. And the thing is—he’s laughing. To paraphrase, he sounds like this: “Yes it’s horrible what they’re doing to us, ha ha ha…and we really need to honor them as a people, ha ha—and talk to them with honesty and integrity.” His laughter is not sarcastic. It’s absolutely childlike. Very quickly, you realize, this man is either an idiot or a saint,

Now if he’s a saint, and this present-tense enjoyment of the interview is as real as it seems—how does he do it? Clearly, he’s not in denial. He spreads his non-violent, tolerate-all-religions gospel everywhere, and spends endless hours personally comforting refugees. But the other thing he does, which is much less prominent in the film, is spend equally many hours meditating. What I’d like to suggest here, in explanation of his laughter, is that he’s never not meditating. And that such laughter and easy presence can be the fruit of your meditations as well.