Healing Chronicles

I tend to believe that anything is possible, that people can move mountains, or travel faster than the speed of light, or solve any health problem.

At the same time, I have to concede that some things may be impossible, especially this. One cannot, no how, no way, attain wellness or really improve one’s life by using approaches that are not wellness creating approaches.

When I was a kid, I had a puzzle toy that could be made to go into myriad patterns. The maker of the toy suggested all  kinds of patterns and I had a great time getting to them. There was one pattern that they said was impossible to get to, the entire puzzle lined up in reverse order. I worked and worked and sure enough I could not get it to completely reverse.

There is a parallel in life that is key.

People do many things which they believe will improve their lives even though simple logic dictates that they will never work.

For instance, even though one cannot medicate one’s way to health, people seek to do this day in and day out. The fact of the matter is that while medication may sometimes aid the healing process, to really get healthy one has to truly resolve the issues underlying the creation of illness.

The non healing ways folly goes well beyond this though.

For instance, some people feel that they can get to better marriages by being mean to their spouses. Others seem to feel that they can raise children to be peaceful by being other than peaceful toward them.

Around us people seem to feel that a better life will come from economic growth. Has growing the economy resulted in life getting better? Not really. While the economy is growing and people have bigger houses and more stuff, many people are getting fatter and fatter from all the food they are eating, and sicker and sicker from the stress of it all and the oceans are dying and the world is beaten up and loaded with trash. In many ways life is much worse from economic growth. While growing the economy may have some benefits, growing the economy is not really a wellness creating approach.

In order to make life better, one needs to use wellness creating approaches to resolve things and achieve balance and create harmony.

Another idea people have is that they can make life better by killing someone or something. I mean some even go to church one day, and talk about “Thou shalt not kill”, and then go out and kill. This killing to make life better encompasses various things from the widespread use of antibacterial products to responding to geopolitical problems by painting some people as the cause of the problems and killing them. The truth is that there is a logic to world problems that involves everyone and everything and goes well beyond the simple formula of bad guys versus good guys, and the only way these problems are going to be solved is by people really seeing this logic and working things out. You just cannot kill your way to a better life.

Other suspect strategies involve the ideas that one can make the world safer by torturing animals to test products or that people can make things better by making more laws or that life in one country can be made better by its people’s competing ever harder with people in other countries to build industry more advanced than theirs or weapons more sophisticated.

What this all adds up to is that if you really want to make life better, you need to carefully look at the logic of what you are doing to see whether or not you are really headed to a better life. If your method involves hurting things to help or disregarding consequences in the process of attaining specific goals like monetary wealth or relief from pain, your method needs some adjusting. Life can definitely get better. The thing is in order for that to occur, the approaches used have to be wellness creating approaches.