When I saw a man in a rabbit costume visiting Jocelyn Olivier at the Healus Center while discussing Candace Pert and the mindbody system, just after having green tea with Dr. Rosenbaum on video while discussing nutrition, supplements, and his holistic healing practice, I knew spending five weeks in Marin would be a rich and exciting experience to be exposed to various aspects of the holistic health community.
From Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-Discovery
, by Mark Coleman I grew up in the transition zone between the suburbs and farmland, close to the North Sea in England. My friends and I spent our summers playing in farmers fields, creating burrows in hay stacks and tunnels through the wheat and barley fields. The most profound memory I have of that time is perhaps the simplest one. On one particular sunny day, around the time I was ten, I found myself spending the day alone. I tunneled through rows of wheat stalks and lay down in the middle of a fully ripened wheat field on a bed of dry grassy stalks. Held in a sea of warm grain that gently swayed in the breeze, I felt drunk on the musky, earthy fragrance all around me. Looking up at the deep blue sky through the golden heads of wheat, my heart was perfectly content. All seemed perfectly well in the world; everything was just as it should be.
Imagery, the flow of thoughts that one can see, hear, or otherwise experience in the imagination, can be valuable for healing. Research in biofeedback, hypnosis, and meditative states has shown that people have a powerful range of self-regulatory capacities.
Likewise, studies in the United States and England suggest that many health problems presented to primary care clinics are emotional, social, or familial in origin, though these problems are manifested in pain or illness.
Most meditation techniques are grouped into two major categories: concentrative meditation and mindfulness meditation. Concentrative meditation focuses on the breath, an image, or a sound in order to still the mind and allow a greater awareness to emerge.
In mindfulness meditation, the meditator simply witnesses whatever goes through the mind without reacting or becoming involved with thoughts, memories, or worries.
In both forms of meditation, one becomes keenly aware of reactions to stress, providing the individual with an increased internal sense of control. One form of meditation, transcendental meditation (TM), practiced in the West for the past thirty years, can bring about a healthy state of relaxation in which the heart rate, pulse rate, stress hormones, and respiration rate decrease while EEG alpha brain waves, associated with relaxation, increase.
