INTEGRAL HEALTH: HEALTH, CONSCIOUSNESS eftHUMAN FLOURISHING

Abstract

Ours is a precious human life. It is so because we are gifted with capacities and possibilities unknown to any other species. Through our own efforts we can gain freedom from suffering and achieve a sustained wholeness, peace, love and joy that surpasses the understanding of an ordinary consciousness. With this achievement all effortS at healing come to an end as we have reached the quintessence of human life-a health and life divine of body, mind and spirit. Bur for this level of healing we must look beyond our remedies and therapies ro the second grear force of healing, the inner force, that can only be activated and mastered through a progressive expansion of consciousness. This is what the ancient healing traditions have always whispered to us if we would but listen. Their healing elixir is simple: larger consciousness, larger health, larger life. As individuals and practitioners, our personal healing, as well as our capacity ro assist others in thei[ own healing, is especially dependent upon our abiliry to access higher levels of consciousness and their naturally emergent qualities of wisdom, wholeness, peace, love and compassion. A vertical leap in consciousness, we discover, is both the ground of our being and the ground of our healing. To arrain such an uncommon health and life requires that we invest in the development of our inner life, our consciousness. Utilizing rhe many traditional contem· plative, meditative and other paths that have been left to us by the great sages we can each tap into this singular essence of all healing practices. It is an essence that transcends yet simultaneously infuses all of our manifold metbods with an expansive consciousness that is the great elixir and essence of all healing and simultaneously the source of a remarkable human f1ourishing-a completion and perfection of our humanity that is unknown ro ordinary awareness.