| Originally published in
Health and Healing
Wisdom, the quarterly journal of the Price-Pottenger
Nutrition Foundation.
Traditional Cultures
We often think of the mental
and emotional aspects of healing as well as the
physical. My purpose in this article is to consider
the feelings and thinking involved in healing
chronic medical problems, the unity of mind and
body that we bring to bear on the healing process.
In his observations of indigenous
cultures, Weston
Price made some interesting comments about
the relationship between the physical and mental
aspects of people’s lives. He wrote of the
Swiss people in the Loetschental Valley, “One
wonders if there is not something in the life-giving
vitamins and minerals of the food that builds
not only great physical structures within which
their souls reside, but builds minds and hearts
capable of a higher type of manhood in which the
material values of life are made secondary to
individual character.”
Commenting on the eastern
African country of Uganda, Price wrote, “The
happiness of the people in their homes and community
life is everywhere very striking. A mining prospector
who had spent two decades studying the mineral
deposits of Uganda was quoted to me as stating
that if he could have the heaven of his choice
in which to spend all eternity it would be to
live in Uganda as the natives of Uganda had lived
before modern civilization came to it.”
Price’s contemporary
F.M. Ashley-Montagu, a world-renowned anthropologist
and author of various popular and scholarly books,
wrote in his article in the June 1940 issue of
Scientific Monthly, “The Socio-Biology of
Man”: “In spite of our advances, we
spiritually and as human beings are not the equal
of the average Aboriginal or Eskimo – we
are very definitely their inferiors. We lisp noble
ideals and noble sentiments – the Australians
and the Eskimos practice them – they neither
write books nor lecture about them.” Over
six decades of genocides since those words were
penned makes the truth of Ashley-Montagu’s
statement ever more apparent.
In the years since Drs.
Price and Ashley-Montagu made those comments,
scientists have made great progress in elucidating
the physical basis of thinking and feeling. While
much remains little understood, it’s nevertheless
fair to say that thinking and feeling may well
be as biological as digestion. It’s undeniable
that our physical state, and everything that affects
it, especially perhaps our food, may have a profound
effect on the processes we call mental or emotional.
The opposite effect – that of our thoughts
and feelings upon our physical wellness –
is less understood, but equally accepted as being
of great significance.
The effect of thoughts and
feeling upon the process of recovering from chronic
medical problems is what I hope to shed light
on in this article. When someone is ill, he or
she is rarely at peace with himself. Physical
problems cause turmoil. Who hasn’t thought,
when ill, “What’s wrong with me? Why
is this happening to me?” The flip side
of this is that turmoil may cause physical problems
– a vicious circle.
Personal turmoil in so many
people today is at some level a mirror of the
turmoil in modern culture, which in so many ways
is radically different from traditional cultures.
The term “the diseases of civilization”
reflects an understanding of this fundamental
principle.
It follows that recovery
from any of the diseases of civilization may be
facilitated by embracing ways of thinking and
living that have roots in traditional cultures.
The dietary principles Weston Price elucidated
are central to this approach. But how to apply
traditional ways of thinking…what is one
to make of this challenge? How might you go about
changing the way you think to facilitate healing?
It’s one thing to consider what we’ve
learned from anthropologists about the way people
in traditional cultures approached life, but quite
another to apply any principles learned TO our
lives today.
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