True Holistic Care
To understand True Holistic Care, and why it is faster and more effective than other methods for addressing certain conditions of the mind and body, we first need to understand the nature of pain and other problems relating to activities of our mind, the movement of our body, or our responses to the stress of life.
When successful, True holistic care is not gradual, it is transformative, creating immediate total change of whatever it has targeted.
Our brains are like supercomputers that control our body and interactions with the world. Our awareness is like its screen. We are only able to be aware of a speck of the brain’s activity, and then only indirectly through thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are assigned meanings. The brain is self-organizing. We cannot directly change its settings. The brain excels at accumulating information, but it does not have a ‘delete’ key. The programs or apps that our computer runs are launched automatically, and take over the internal functions of our computer.
Our biological computer is optimized for survival, and its memory functions are hyper-sensitized by anything we might take to be trauma or failure — pain, conflict, negligence, threat, and so on. These experiences leave imprints that are Enduring (long-lasting) and Complex, potentially involving every system in the body. This gives our brain a Harm-based Orientation — a default based on our worst experiences. This orientation predicts danger while overlooking our actual resources. As we navigate the world, these past experiences create ECHOS, Enduring, Complex, Harm-Oriented Schemas that dictate how we process reality.
Any time we experience “dis-ease” — conditions that cannot be directly attributed to toxins, infections, tissue damage, or other physical cause, we are experiencing ECHOS of the past.
More technically, ECHOS are maladaptive re-actions — re-action is literally repeating actions or behaviors that we used in the past to fit in, avoid rejection, or cope with trauma. Behavior is not just the way we act in the world, it includes the physiological and muscular patterns that take place in our bodies. When they persist into adulthood, these behaviors become problematic. Now, they can interfere with our relationships, work, play, and general well-being. Physical pain, and mental pain, including depression, anxiety, and many other symptoms can be caused by ECHOS from our past.
It is natural to accumulate outdated survival strategies; they are not signs of weakness or moral failure. For example, avoidance of conflict that seemed to protect me from a parent’s anger now interferes with my relationships by sabotaging honest communication.
When ECHOS occur, the brain is re-calling and re-establishing a coordinated set of physiological, energetic, muscular, and mental states from the past. These states shape how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the people and events in our lives today. Following a ‘better safe than sorry’ logic, the brain typically reaches for our worst, not our empowering memories as its model for the strategies it automatically employs.
The more our brain re-enacts the past to interpret current situations and predict their likely outcome, the more difficulty we have in our lives. If my brain tries to understand the present based on what happened when I was 10, I internally feel like the 10 year-old I was.
A similar circumstance occurs with movements. Past injuries or pain cause the brain to inhibit (shut down or weaken) muscles associated with the trauma, causing muscle and joint imbalances that make us more susceptible to future pain and injury. I call this condition (on which I have written three peer-reviewed papers) “muscle PTSD”.
Current “solutions” rarely transform us
Psychotherapy can help us recognize when our maladaptive re-actions do not reflect the reality of our situation and our ability to handle it. But awareness and willpower do not easily change maladaptive re-actions. They occur across multiple levels of physiological and psychological function, which are automatically activated before our conscious mind can have a say.
Even in the best cases, holistic care paradigms do not directly address maladaptive re-actions either. Holistic care typically has us hopping from one thing to another: psychotherapy, yoga or pilates, mindfulness or meditation practices, journaling, dietary and nutritional interventions, or complementary therapies like acupuncture or chiropractic. Each of these can be helpful, but none directly target the underlying maladaptive re-actions themselves.
Neurologically speaking, many approaches operate by helping us develop and learn new responses — albeit with more conscious control — on top of the maladaptive re-actions. Cognitive-behavioral therapy helps us to recognize self-defeating thoughts or feelings and design better responses to them, for instance, but it does not directly change those re-actions. It is well known that under stress, this kind of new learning is likely to fail — like the willpower to keep the diet you have been on disappears when your relationship or work environment becomes chaotic.
True Holistic Care erases the effects of your past. Here’s how:
In short, True Holistic Care, by incorporating multiple innovative practices, can actually erase the effects of past trauma on your thoughts, feelings, and movements. The maladaptive re-actions disappear, leaving behind feelings of ease, confidence, contentment, resilience, love, strength, or other qualities that many consider expressions of our deepest nature. Some take these qualities to be part of our spiritual essence. Using these practices, it is common to transform from trauma to tranquility in the space of a single visit, though the process needs to be repeated with each ‘issue’ we want to clear. Over multiple visits, the experience of our true nature can become the default, rather than a brief respite from the burdens of life.
Here’s the explanation. Our ‘issues’ are not just in our head — they are formed from layers of physiological, psychological, muscular, and energetic patterns that have been developed during our lifetime. We cannot directly perceive most of these patterns, nor can we change them with the power of our mind. Instead, we perceive their whole effect. It is like eating soup; even if you can chew the chicken, smell the garlic, taste the oregano, and feel the cayenne pepper, what you taste is whole soup.
Ideally, we might go back in time and change the recipe. This is impossible, of course, with chicken soup. The brain, however, prepares our experiential recipe fresh, moment-by-moment. The recipe for our immediate experience is information stored in memory, but like a kitchen that has not been cleaned in decades, much of that information has gone bad. Imagine that you could eliminate spoiled ingredients from the recipe that forms your experience.
To elucidate the difference, the book “Chicken Soup for the Soul” provides comforting stories meant to inspire us in the difficult work of trying to change ourselves. This kind of change works from the outside-in. The Sunya Way applies “Information Technology for the Soul”. Working from the inside-out, it eliminates outdated stories that drive negative experiences. These stories are written in the brain’s coded language of physiological states, which we cannot understand with our minds.
Even when we deeply sense the feelings in our bodies, what we sense is a vague representation of the coordinated activity of neurons, organs, hormones, muscles, and so on. This activity forms our experience.
I might know, for example, with the help of psychotherapy or through my own inquiry, that I am projecting my mother onto a friend, and that this association is causing me to feel like I felt around my mother when I was five. Even if I understand it is happening, my brain continues to re-enact the physiology of my 5 year-old self.
Like clicking on the icon for an app on a computer or phone, when my brain launches the re-enactment of my 5 year-old self, the entire re-action is launched as a single unit. But if we provide the brain with awareness of individual parts of this re-action, it has built-in functions capable of discerning whether each is necessary. This internal BS detector knows when a particular activity — physiological or psychological — is untrue or unneeded. Unneeded activity wastes energy, and when given a choice, biological systems default to activities that use the least amount of energy. Thus, the brain itself eliminates the physiological and psychological functions that expired long ago.
Attempting to eliminate maladaptive re-actions through usual methods — even many alternative methods — is like trying to remove malware from your computer by reading through every line of code. The methods used in the Sunya Way work like an anti-malware app, accomplishing in minutes what other therapeutic approaches cannot, or might take months or years to achieve if they can.
