Thought this an interesting concept....
OPEN HEARTED, OPEN MINDED?
The UK government sends out a Census every 10 years. If you live in the UK, you will be asked this year to fill in the Census form and that must be done by 27 March.
One of the questions on the census is What Is Your Religion? If your approach to spirituality is open hearted, open minded and respects the essence of all traditions, then I hope you too will consider putting HOLISTIC in the Census Religion Box.
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Hi Celia, I read something a short while ago about putting 'spiritual' in the religion box. Again as a lot of us take ideas from a variety of relgions and ways of honouring life, Mother Earth etc. If my tiny brain can remember where I read it I will try and put a link on! :rolleyes:
I couldn't put holistic in the box because it's another way of overloading a much abused word.
My spiritual beliefs are in common with many who live a holistic lifestyle, but they are not exclusive.
Perhaps we should have a debate about what a holistic lifestyle is. IMHO is you ask 10 HP members what holistic means to them, you will get 10 different answer.
Myarka
I guess it depends on where and why you apply it. If talking in terms of health : holistic medicine, a doctrine of preventive and therapeutic medicine that emphasizes the necessity of looking at the whole person—his body, mind, emotions, and environment—rather than at an isolated function or organ and which promotes the use of a wide range of health practices and therapies. It has especially come to stress responsibility for “self-healing,” or “self-care,” by observing the traditional commonsense essentials of exercise, healthful diet, adequate sleep, good air, moderation in personal habits, and so forth. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
The concept of holism was introduced by the South African prime minister and philosopher Jan Christian Smuts in 1925 as an alternative to the prevailing analytical and reductive way of scientific thinking. In Smuts’s theory of holism the whole organism and its systems are greater than the sum of their parts.
But I suppose if I narrowed it down to how I personally see it - I would probably say its looking at more than the immediately obvious but trying to see and work with how different aspects of a situation (be it health, spirituality, whatever) are all part of an integral "system" with the different aspects impacting on each other to good or bad effect and the cumulative effect of all the overall parts making up the total picture.
I could probably put it better with more thought but right now I need to apply some holistic thought to why I seem to have a sore throat - AGAIN!