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The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning... There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning[1]. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.
Laurens van der Post
It is not possible to rapidly or easily neutralise all of those modern influences (that have "gone wrong") and the generational imprints [2] that most, if not all of us carry. Nevertheless, they can still be ameliorated and largely compensated for in a way that brings the nervous system into more order – made possible by the fact that Health is a survival imperative for our evolved body .
Your evolved biological self still works according to the "rules" that grew the entire planetary ecosystem. So inside each person lives a willing and powerful biological intelligence that can be recruited.
Living organisms (species) do not survive unless they have health (including boundaries/ defence, maintenance, repair and constant return to organisational integrity) as an inbuilt high priority survival imperative. Therefore in every organism including humans there are evolved and "simple" everyday pathways whereby overwhelm states are "reset" and normality is restored. This can be thought of as a return to health; or a return to a sense of safety; or perhaps a return to a coherent responsive (instead of reactive) state in which the background expectation of the world (on a biological as well as a cognitive level) is inherently optimistic. It is not so much a movement fromtrauma or overwhelm - but instead is a movement that returns back to a normal state of safe-enough relational engagement with a vibrant relational world.
In contrast, our medicalised culture has imposed a set of belief systems and ways of living that perhaps make that general rule difficult to imagine for the case of humans. After all, we see ourselves as different, and difference can include some form of existential damage. I strongly suggest that way of thinking of ourselves being fundamentally damaged is itself a damaging and self-fulfilling myth. It is a re-telling of Adam, Eve and the Fall from Grace, adopted into a secular and supposedly scientific medical framework.
The process of recovery of wholeness (also) requires a personal re-framing of language, along with deliberate shifts of conscious sensory attention (as described later). It then becomes more easy to have a spacious awareness that can more easily take in beauty and listen with the heart (instead of only with the head). It then becomes possible to settle more deeply into ways of feeling that enhance connection to everything that is alive and not be dominated by ideas. And it then becomes easier to experientially recognise fellowship with all Life (including all human beings).
Using Health (rather that pathology) as a starting point to describe the fundamentally healthy process of adaptation (that inadvertently leads to the accumulation of chronic overwhelm and trauma) provides a very different perspective (from the normal way of thinking in the 21st Century techno-industrial culture). It points towards simple but highly effective strategies that can:
This is a bootstrapping process in which small apparently trivial changes accumulate – which is exactly how ecosystems adapt.
I personally feel that – although these two effects are themselves are important, much needed, and can be life-changing - they are only a starting point. The consequent potential for positive shifts in relationality within the body-mind complex, personally, socially and with the extended web of Life is of even greater value. This then leads to a more healthy and embodied mental-emotional state in which some of the causative social factors can be directly addressed and put right in a way that does not just lead to more trouble.
In short, why employ "Health" merely as a palliative to a "profoundly sick society" when just a little more effort and focus could make it a more general state of being? Each individual person is, of course free to choose how to use the material.
References & Notes
1 Note that within 8 weeks of being released from Auschwitz, Viktor Frankl had written a book about his experiences, what he had learned and how he survived – titled "Man’s search for Meaning".
2 In particular the first two major industrial wars in 20th Century Europe and various other conflicts around the world over the past 150 -200 years (I include the American Civil War), plus the slave trade and 500 years of European colonialism have left an immeasurable amount of psychic damage.
