“Always remember, truth cannot be said, it can be shown. It is a finger pointing to the moon. All words are just fingers pointing to the moon, but don’t accept the fingers as the moon. The moment you start clinging to the fingers – that’s where doctrines, cults, creeds, dogmas, are born – then you have missed the whole point. The fingers were not the point; the point was the moon.”  —Osho  

In this piece I am pointing to the moon.

I am pointing to a way of embracing health as our path of awakening, as our ground of being. I recognize the rarity to be doing so as a physician, and that reality only deepens my inquiry and exploration into what it will take to shift our individual and collective orientation to health — from the finger to the moon itself.

I’ve been studying this territory intimately for a number of years now while quietly observing myself navigating chronic illness, engaging in the studies, teaching, and application of Naturopathic medicine, witnessing the growth, healing and transformation of people I work with as a physician, and participating in conscious and spiritual communities.  What I have come to see is that individually and collectively we are living with a disconnect in relation to health that we are largely blind to, wrought with much shadow and unconscious patterning that has us focused so fully on the pointing fingers, that we are not even aware that there is a moon.

I am going to boldly propose that it is this disconnect that is ultimately at the root of all of our struggles.  And it is this disconnect that I feel I am here to help heal.

Healthy Evolution?

So many of us today are waking up in our lives, expanding our awareness and capacities so that we can more fully show up in service in a world that is ripe with great challenge and complexity.  It feels like our individual and collective evolution is accelerating.  And yet even as we have worked to actualize ourselves so beautifully in these ways, we struggle a great deal with sustaining the ability to truly care for ourselves.  Avoidance, self-sabotage, long mental lists of what we should or shouldn’t be doing, and an orientation of needing to manage or overcome ourselves, all make up how we relate to health.  We are living with a constant subtle conflict; it is as if true health is something that is always out of reach.

This dynamic can be wrought with so much shame and confusion. How is it that we can feel ourselves to be so consciously focused on our growth and evolution and still feel so stuck around our own self-care?  How is it that we can see spiritual teachers who look like they are running themselves into the ground? How is it that it is so very easy to nurture and care for others, yet so very hard to support ourselves in the same way?

What is the disconnect here?

It is that most of us have not consciously integrated our relationship with health into our spiritual and evolutionary journey.  There is a fundamental split within as our orientation to health has remained rooted in a conventional paradigm as we have been expanding our presence and capacities in other aspects of our lives.  Our development is complex, with the various parts of ourselves evolving at different paces.  It can be easy to forget that, and to be blind to where there are mismatches within.  For example, sometimes the language we use is not aligned with our own embodiment and way of moving through life.  We can think and speak about things that we do not really understand, that we have not truly grown into.  And the tricky thing with this is that we do not know what we do not know.  We can only come to see the mismatch when we have had a true lived embodied experience of the moon that reveals to us how we had not been inhabiting what the fingers were pointing to.

Our orientation to health is like that; in our individual and collective evolution it has been left behind.  We may speak holistically or integrally, and yet on a fundamental level we are still living and relating with health as if it is one aspect of who we are. But in reality, in a truly holistic paradigm, health is not separate — our health is our entire, lived embodied experience.  And the path for us to truly come to know that, for us to truly integrate and live from that wholeness, is a tremendous journey of awakening for all of us.

When “All of you” truly means ALL of you

A lot of us may have convinced ourselves that we are living from that place already.  We may have embraced practices or begun to work with teachers that help us address our mind and emotions, to strengthen and heal our body, to work on our spiritual development, to shine light on our shadows, and to cultivate greater intimacy.  There is a sense of wholeness there, that we are actually focused on healing these different aspects of ourselves.

Yet what I am suggesting here is deeper and more foundational.  There is an incompleteness and a lack of integration in this approach which keeps us still in a place of needing to manage ourselves.  The way in which we are oriented towards the practices remains reductionistic, as if it is a part that can be separated from the whole.  We are seeking health and thinking we’ll find it through attending to our check list of what it takes to be a whole person.  Whether we are succeeding in sustaining our practices or not, we are still living with the dualistic tension of wanting and trying to be healthy; without consciously realizing it, we are still deeply rooted in the conventional orientation to health care.

What I am pointing towards is an opportunity to relax into a ground that can hold all of it, our entire life journey, as our health journey.  I’m not just introducing a new paradigm.  I’m pointing at the moon, a truth that the majority of us have at most only glimpsed.  It is an entire reorientation of how we relate with ourselves and our lives.  It is what happens when we wake up to the incredible miracle of being alive, of being present to this creative life energy that we are expressing through our entire beings.

When we live from the place of that sacred gift, we awaken to see the inherent responsibility in it:  that we each are here to tend to, nurture, and love this particular life expression that we are.  This is the heart of our evolution and self-actualization.  When we nourish and care for ourselves we allow our life energy to blossom and move in the world aligned with the unique aliveness that is our essence.  This the service we are here to offer to all.  From this ground of health we truly are able to show up and nurture and support not only ourselves, but the healing of our collective planetary future.

And so I wonder if you who are reading this now are able to feel the possibility that I’m pointing to?   Of what it would mean to heal the split, to truly integrate and embrace health as being at the heart of our life journey, of our spiritual and evolutionary path?   Health then shifts from something we are seeking, grasping, and trying to achieve, to something we allow, something that nourishes the creative life energy that we are, simply by opening up to it.  True healing and true health are realized in resolving this disconnect.  This is the integration and wholeness we are all seeking.

And so here I am, pointing to the moon.  I am opening the door and inviting us all, individually and collectively, to connect with health as our ground of being, to awaken and move through life with that guidance at our core.  This is my medicine, and this is my own vital journey.