Embracing our wholeness

I love Tantric philosophy, it is so liberating! I especially like Christopher Wallis’ interpretation of various Tantric texts, including The Recognition Sutras.  

In his interpretation, Christopher was recently suggesting that the only thing which exists in our awareness is light – that there is no darkness in our being, because to see it (for it to exist) it must be light otherwise it can’t exist. And what really exists is not ignorance, but partial knowledge – there is always the potential to see more of our light, if only we had the knowledge and awareness.

But of course this creates a problem in our Western take on challenging personality traits such as ‘the shadow’ and ‘working with the shadow’.  All too often this is just another way of saying ‘my dark side’ and therefore reinforces the idea that that we have within us the dark and light, the angel and the devil, the good and the bad.

Tantra doesn’t agree with this Western take on things, the notion that something is wrong and we need to fix something. This because it doesn’t allow us to embrace and recognise the whole of our being and it is only through love and integration – a gathering of the fragmented parts of us we have previously ejected - that healing can occur.

As Christopher writes: “Demonizing your anger, or desire, or whatever, does not lead to healing – unless of course you are following the Tantrik practice of feeding your demons instead of fighting them. The affirmation that there is no darkness within, only light unseen, or light that is stagnant, reorients us to do our work with great courage, confidence, and love”.

He continues:

“When you see yourself as complete just as you are, you realize that spiritual work involves neither getting rid of what is ‘bad’ within you, nor acquiring something that is lacking; rather it centres on learning to work with old energy in new ways, creating more alignment throughout the system, and moving that which is stagnant. In this scenario, everything naturally finds its place; you allow that which ‘wants’ to depart to flow out (and when it does, you are somehow still perfectly whole), and allows that which ‘wants’ to enter to flow in and through, without grasping at it. When you see with the eyes of truth, you see that nothing could be added to, or subtracted from, this moment to make it any more perfect”.

I find it extremely liberating to move away from the Western perspective that there is something wrong with us, which needs fixing. This perspective is rampant not only in the allopathic world but in new age spiritualism, where we are encouraged to reject the dark in favour of the love and light. Yes, I’m all up for love and light – this is the essence, vibrationally at least of this cosmos, although we are now very far removed from it – but not at the expense of parts of ourself, because then we overlook wholeness. And there can be no light and love if we are not also whole – for the light and love is pure awareness, it is all.

It seems to me that to truly embrace the love that we are, and the light too, that we have to stop them, rejecting parts of us that we feel are dark. They are not dark, they are just hidden from our awareness. As children, often aspects of our personality are rejected, we’re told we are too much, or too quiet or too energetic or not enough, and we then reject those parts of ourselves that we now perceive on some level as bad. And so we have made our light good. But light is all, as is love. It is only our conditioning (ignorance), which tells us otherwise, hence the need these days to differentiate between conditional and unconditional love.

Unconditional love is love, it is light, it is all things and does not try to label and reduce. Conditional love is loaded with the idea of there being good/bad – it is the “I will only love you if you do this” approach to relating, which is not love, because it has separated love into good/bad behaviour. But still it is a term which exists, because of our separation from truth and our habit of making things good/bad, heaven/hell, dark/light.

All of this – this rejection of parts of ourself - keeps us trapped in the idea that we need to do more outside of ourselves to become whole and fixed. It is common to believe that this fixing and wholeness has to be bought through some form of acquisition whether that be achieving more, buying more, acquiring more, or somehow

adding more. Because this is external and doesn’t necessarily shift the internal, we then give ourselves a really hard time when nothing changes. This of course feeds more of our inherent insecurity and beautifully supports consumerism, capitalism and more of the same.

I love reading Gabor Mate too as his book When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress is a gem (as is his one on ADHD btw and should be read by anyone seeking a diagnosis and yet wanting to understand the root). In this book he tries to highlight that the mind and body are not separable and he tries to hold a mirror up to our stress-driven society so that we can recognise how, in a variety of unconscious ways, we help create the illnesses which affect us.

He stresses that his book is not one of prescriptions, but hopefully a catalyst for personal transformation, and writes:

 “Prescriptions come from the outside, transformation occurs within…Prescriptions assume that something needs to be fixed; transformation brings forth the healing – the coming to integrity, to wholeness – of what is already there. While advice and prescriptions may be useful, even more valuable to us is insight into ourselves and the workings of our minds and bodies. Insight, when inspired  by the quest for truth, can promote transformation”.

This of course, is were yoga is so helpful. In essence it is a spiritual practice which allows us to increasingly know more of our own mind. Through asana (postures) we can also understand more of our body and the manner in which our mind and body are interrelated. Reiki helps enormously too, in taking us deeper into our body and gifting us the space to notice our mental patterning and psyche and the manner in which this is disturbing our energy flow and restricting our consciousness.

 As Robin Norwood writes in her book Why me, Why this, Why Now? (especially worth a read if you have narcissistic parents or have experienced other trauma repeatedly):

"Healing comes about through a change of consciousness, a change of heart; through forgiveness of others, forgiveness of ourselves, forgiveness of Life and of God. Healing comes when we relinquish our beliefs about what the conditions of our lives should have been and become willing to accept  and eventually appreciate what simplicity is.  By opening to a view of adversity as a path to our healing we can feel trust even in times of despair. We can trust not only that the pain will pass, but that our suffering has meaning and purpose and dignity”

There is no doubt that healing and a shift in consciousness go hand in hand and it is this which leads to our transformation. But for healing to take place, we need to go inside and truly recognise the connection between body and mind.

In 1993 Gabor Mate wrote his very first article for The Globe and Mail – “When we have been prevented from learning how to say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us” He cited some medical literature discussing the negative effects of stress on the immune system. However a rheumatic diseases specialist at a major Canadian hospital sent a scathing letter to the editor denouncing Gabor’s letter and the newspaper for printing it. She claimed that he had done no research and was inexperienced.

Gabor writes, “That a specialist would dismiss the link between body and mind was not astonishing. Dualism – cleaving into two that which is one – colours all our beliefs on health and illness. We attempt to understand the body in isolation from the mind. We want to describe human beings – healthy or otherwise – as though they function in isolation from the environment in which they develop, live, work, play, ,love and die. These are the built-in biases of the medical orthodoxy that most physicians absorb during their training and carry into their practice.

The more specialised doctors become, the more they know about a body part or organ and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that part of organ resides. The people I interviewed for this book reported nearly unanimously that neither their specialists nor their family doctors had ever invited them to explore the personal, subjective content of their lives. If anything, they felt that such a dialogue was discouraged in more of their contacts with the medical profession,. In talking with my specialist colleagues about these very same patients, I found that even after many years of treating a person, a doctor could remain quite in the dark about the patient’s life and experience outside of the narrow boundaries of illness. “

And this is why it always amazes me when those who understand and recognise the mind-body connection, who might work in holistic health even, will give their power away to others who are merely treating their symptoms through allopathic care without any awareness of the bigger picture – what factors played into the loss of wellbeing in the first place? What stresses do we have going on in our life? Where are we living? How is our relationships? Have we recently lost someone we love? Have we experienced trauma in our younger years which we have still not processed? What is our environment like? How are we treated in the work place? Do we have money concerns? Are we able to love an honest life? And on the list goes.

Fortunately I am not alone in my take on things and having worked with hundreds of people over the years I recognise how important it is to look at our emotional body and its various repressions and our psyche too, the mental impressions, the belief system, the conditioning and our relationship to soul and spirit.

Gabor uses one of his clients as his case study, a lady who has an auto immune condition that eventually kills her due to complications. He took the time to speak to her, to find out about her life and found it a revelation. As he writes:

 “Beneath her meek and diffident manner was a vast store of repressed emotion. Mary has been abused as a child, abandoned and shuttled from one foster home to another…She had never revealed her traumas before, not even to her husband of twenty years. She had learned not to express her feelings about anything to anyone, including herself. To be self-expressive vulnerable and questioning in her childhood would have out her at risk. Her security lay in considering other people’s feelings, never her own. She was trapped in the role forced on her as a child, unaware that she herself had the right to be taken care of, to be listened to, to be thought worthy of attention”

He continues, “Mary described herself as being incapable of saying no, compulsively taking care of the needs of others…perhaps her body [which is sick] was doing what her mind could not: throwing off the relentless expectation that had been first imposed on the child and now was self-imposed adult – placing others above herself”

This is a trait many women share, one of never saying no and putting everyone else’s needs above their own. Then they get sick. There will have been signs along the way, but it is only when things get critical that people seek help and by then the patterns are so well established that it can be difficult to unpick them. But it is possible.

I work with lots of clients who are deep diving into the embedded stuff. A loss of wellness causes them to realise they need to do something. And while some will inevitably reach out to the doctor and start taking medication to treat their symptoms – and hammer home the message to others that they are sick, so take extra care, because maybe they can’t express this need in other ways, especially if it affords them time away from work to have the space that they cannot create for themselves -  others will recognise that they need to unpick how they got here in the first place, with or without the help of drugs.

Others still, the hardcore holistic, will take a purely natural route and recognise the need to make life changes. Usually that change is on the inside. I had a client recently who has been sick for  a very long time, but all of a sudden she has started healing. The reason? She finally put her foot down to a situation where she has been giving her power away and sticking herself (and wondering why her life was stuck) and that was enough to change everything. Now she is honouring her heart and soul and all of a sudden, there comes the healing.

I have no doubt her life will move forwards now because she changed her internal narrative, no longer just putting up with a situation but taking action to change it, honouring her heart, which has been suffering, her heart denied the love it deserves and desires simply because of a mind in fear of being alone and not being loved, and yet the irony that the love is not true love in the first place but a need by both parties to at least have someone, even if that someone is not aligned and not truly opening his/her heart, because it is safer that way, but slowly killing my client. My client has taken action and  the universe applauds action so now her life will unstick.

We are more too than our mind and body. We are a soul also. I am grateful to one of my students for sending me this article about Dr Casey Mean who waqs once a Pharma insider and rising star in the medical field. However she left her surgical residency to embrace root-cause, holistic healing. Her book Good Energy is a New York Times bestseller and in just a few years she has become a popular speaker in the American conversation on health – not just physical but spiritual. See article - https://substack.com/home/post/p-163555322

 As the article writes, “She speaks of mitochondria and mineral depletion, yes; but also of moonlight, of meaning, of the soul’s relationship with Source. It’s the language of old. Older than biomedicine, older than science, older even than empire. And it terrifies people. Because Casey is not merely preaching health. She is reviving the sacred.

She reminds us that we are part of Gaia, not metaphorically, but materially; that we were never meant to be severed from the Earth’s rhythms. That concrete cubicles, processed food, blue light, and sterile hospitals are not neutral conveniences; they are slow poisons that unmoor us from our biological and spiritual design.

When we starve ourselves of sunlight, when we trade touch for texts and nature for screens, when we dull our symptoms rather than listen to them, why are we surprised that we are chronically unwell?

Casey’s diagnosis of our culture — disconnected, dysregulated, diseased — is not radical. It’s obvious. But she dared to say it plainly, publicly, and as a woman.”

Needless to say she is viewed as ‘woo woo’ by many and has even been accused of practicing ‘witchcraft’ as if that is a ‘bad’ thing, and means that she is somehow unfit for public life because she dares to meditate under moonlight and talk about God.

This harks back to days long gone but shows how much our psyche is still conditioned to cultural and religious control, of how we are still (sigh) so scared of our connection to earth and herbalism and magic. Many would probably like to see her burned at the stake – see things really haven’t changed in all those years of supposed empowerment and acceptance.

As Lauren Lee writes: “Some call her rise “suspicious.” But what I see is a mirror: a collective cry for healing in a post-COVID world where people feel spiritually starved and physically broken. Her popularity reveals the vacuum we’re all trying to escape: a society that treats symptoms, not causes. That isolates instead of connects, that pathologizes grief and prescribes pills for a broken spirit.

We know this.

We know the endless doom-scroll robs us of joy and comparison poisons our minds.

We know the ultra processed food is engineered to addict and inflame.

We know casual sex often leaves us emptier, not freer.

We know modern work culture drains our life force.

We know traditional medicine has become industrialized — quick to medicate, slow to understand.

We know, metabolically and emotionally, that we are not okay.”

Dr Casey Mean has been appointed surgeon general in the US so it will be interesting to see what results from this, what changes. She is a threat of course to those who profit from our disconnection, and there are many who risk losing out because of this, as there are many corporations with a lot of money and a lot of power, so it will be interesting.

We have seen this recently in the UK where Government legal guidance urging retailers in England to offer millions of consumers deals and discounts on minimally processed and nutritious food was dropped after a lobbying campaign by the world’s biggest ultra-processed food firms.

The new regulations banning junk food promotions were meant to come In in October and was expected to improve the diet of millions. But the healthy food push was dropped on 1 June 2023 after the Food and Drink Federation, which represents corporations including Nestlé, Mondelēz, Coca-Cola, Mars and Unilever repeatedly demanded the government do away with it.

Now the new regulations coming into force in England still limit the promotion of food and drink that is high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS), but guidance issued to retailers no longer urges them to switch their deals to minimally processed and nutritious food.

It shows that yet again consumerism and capitalism come first and actually encourage a sick society to feed their bottom line and corporate growth.

I am especially grateful to Christopher Wallis and Gabor Mate for their writings, and for having the courage to stand up and change the narrative. We do not need fixing – we are already perfect and whole, we just need to let go of everything that prevents us from seeing this truth. We are a mind, a body  and a soul and the three are inter-connected. More often than not our suffering is due to our mental imprinting, our emotional repression and our soul disconnection – treating the symptoms will not get to the root cause, it just gives our power away to a system which doesn’t know the wider picture of our life.

Going within and truly taking responsibility changes things. We don’t change things by feeding more of the same. For example, buying an electric car is not going to save the planet – not buying a car in the first place might though. It’s letting go which positively changes things, not acquiring and feeding consumerism and capitalism, Big Pharma or not.

Life becomes simpler the more we tread this path of holistic healing and personal and spiritual development, because we really do shift the perspective, that it is not about adding, but about taking away, and that we are whole in essence and all we need to do is become increasingly conscious of this. And really the key - love, loving all parts of ourself.