Where is health?

I remember fondly the title of my first essay during my biodynamic craniosacral studies with Body Intelligence: “Where is health?”

It’s a pivotal question in our field of work because practitioners orient around health rather than disease, what feels vibrant or simply okay as opposed to what pains and aches, so this first question helped us shift from the dominant medical dualist ‘fix-it’ model to a non dual approach encompassing the dynamics of life and reorganisation.

The fact that our organisms intertwine with and within other organisms (human and non human) and are not ‘machines’ made up of parts separated from the land they live from is a fundamental premise of BCST and many other holistic practices. The way we participate consciously and unconsciously to many spheres and levels of organisational Intelligence also plays an important part in how we view and connect with health.

I really liked that this intriguing question was framed as a dynamic inquiry. It broadened the scope rather than constrained or contained it which is also a very craniosacral attribute. It picked the curiosity of my inner investigative detective and I remember enjoying this exploration, like many others we were asked to discuss in the essay form.

After 12 years working as a BCST practitioner, and as I’m about to also qualify as a clinical herbalist I feel like revisiting that question and thicken it with my personal and professional experience. 

I’d like to do it in a few parts as it deserves a longer dive.

In this first part I will lay some form of a foundation and attempt to ‘define’ what we’re looking for: what is health/Health? It also feels important to deconstruct/dismantle the linearity of the question which presupposes a destination, a ‘delineated’ place where health resides. This notion of ‘place’ and its inevitable counterpart, time, will be further discussed in future parts.

The standard online definition of health is ‘the state of being free from illness or injury’ but a definition by the World Health Organisation speaks of ‘a comprehensive state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.

The prevalence of words like ‘well-being’ and their commodification by our consumerist, productivist and extractivist society led me to revisit and resituate ‘where is health’ because even within the wider ambit of ‘physical, mental and social’ concerns, ‘well-being’ as a formulaic goal, an optimum to reach towards approves a de facto separation from the collective biosphere Earth and all its living communities, all its intertwined ecosystems of which our human bodies form just one tiny portion.

What do we serve when abiding by all these social media calls to be healthier and live longer, healthier individual lives? A vast industry mainly interested in fuelling our consumption drives while the world is falling apart, and seven out of nine planetary boundaries ( which are said to regulate Earth’s own homeostatic processes) have been broken and ongoing wars escalate our collective unravelling.

Asking and inquiring about ‘where is health’ also merely denotes that we’re lost. We, humans have lost the plot when we severed our umbilical cords to Earth over the last few centuries. Many peoples within each continent have kept this connection alive and remain consciously fed by it. Ireland, where I have lived for over 30 years was colonised for the last few centuries but severed its ties to the land more significantly during the Great Famine, An Gorta Mór, of 1845-52. Rosarie Kingston explores this journey through her book tracing the history of Ireland’s Hidden Medicine (2021), and I will write more about this in a future essay.   

So health as the mainstream definition goes fits into a restricted and siloed approach to medicine. 

It chooses to focus on a ‘state of being’ and to bypass the dynamics and multidirectionality of healing as well as its many relationships to the visible and invisible, the macrocosm and microcosm. 

Yet across all disciplines, within the medical and alternative worlds, we appear to agree that bodies have the capacity to heal themselves and we all seem to operate from this foundational basis. How we consider health’s range and how we ‘help’ it to do its work varies fundamentally from a medical viewpoint but also to some extent in each holistic form of healing.

Not only am I a biodynamic craniosacral therapist but am about to qualify as a clinical herbalist and in this latter discipline I have learned to straddle both the medical and holistic approaches. While modern medicine divides into specialities that hone in on a specific system contained in a body that ‘fights’ stressors and microbes, herbs and herbal medicine teach us about ’communities’ rooted in the land with which we constantly intermingle, and dynamically interact. The former attitude to health is a one-directional fix it mode: I give you this medication for this ailment, or to address this symptom. The latter deploys a dynamic, multidirectional approach based on a multilayered, whole system observation: the herbal practitioner gathered information about where you live, your age, your occupation, your marital/relational status, your children if you have any, what you eat and drink, your hobbies and how you exercise, your medical history, how all your interdependent systems (nervous, digestive, respiratory, reproductive, cardiac, urinary, skin) feel and express …and brings together a community of plants to help address over time not only the symptoms but also the root cause of the imbalance(s) which have impacted your ecosystem. 

Health within the craniosacral paradigm is not a state (which carries the word ‘static’ with it) but a dynamic force which expresses and supports our healing and our constant inner embryonic creativity(through the breakdown(catabolism) and construction (anabolism) of cells, the synthesis of proteins for example). Health is an organisational force in other words which not only creatively expresses and maintains human organisms but also sustains all ecosystems on Earth.

The craniosacral and herbalist paradigms meet in that they both emanate from and participate with and within the wider communities of the living.

The ecosystems where I studied both modalities spring from the island of Ireland, also called Eiriu, after one of three sovereignty of the land sister goddesses, who according to the lore ‘tested’ the will of conquest of the Milesians or Celts led by Amergin. The land is a body imbued by forces we could call divine or simply supernatural in this perceptive prism: Eiriu’s burial mound in the Midde (middle) province is considered the umbilicus of Ireland for example. But even the term supernatural does not quite fit, for the mysterious powers of the wild belong to the land, are inherent to its nature. They are ‘supernatural’ only in so far as they evade our ‘grasping’. Health and its incredibly complex expressions, transformations, transmutations is also inherent to the natural world, to biosphere Earth from which we extend. We may not understand it rationally but we can perceive it and ‘listen’ to it as we surrender to its beauty, its enigmas, its intrinsic magic, and poetry was and still is one pathway to what is called the ‘otherworld’ in Ireland.  Poets were highly considered as seers,  boasting ‘superior’ perceptive powers. Yet it is said that with dedication and 7-12 years of study and practice one could become a poet.

In this ancient paradigm health was an ability to study and navigate personal experiences(sorrows and joys), and gain the wisdom and knowledge which would turn upright the three inner cauldrons.

A monk wrote about these cauldrons for the first time in the 8th century, but we can presume that like much of Irish traditional lore they existed long before. 

They could be interpreted as three energy centres but the original text does not actually situate them anywhere in the body, an interesting reflection of how they saw health in the first place: not limited to one area but a dynamic combination of changing factors relating with each other.

“Coire Goriath, the first cauldron or “Cauldron of Warming”, “distributes wisdom to people in their youth,” including the basics of language that every poet and learned person

needs. “Goriath” means “sustenance and maintenance, as well as the warmth of generosity”. It is upright at birth and acts as a nurturing foundation sustaining the whole.

Coire Ermai or “Cauldron of Motion”, ignites the “fire of knowledge” or our inspiration. We are born with it inverted or on its side at birth, and how we live our lives fills it upright as we lift our poetic minds.

Coire Sois, the “Cauldron of Wisdom”, “is the font of wisdom about which little is

said in the manuscript. This last cauldron is said to start out upside down in all of us, to be turned by mystical joys. The gifts of this cauldron are not limited to poetry. The manuscript says “...out of it is distributed the knowledge of every other art …””

[This information was compiled with the help of these resources: https://thedruidscauldron.org/2022/04/14/the-three-cauldrons/

https://threecauldrons.com/writing/written/ThreeCauldronsMontreal08MPL.pdf]

Such ways of seeing and being with the land also actively participate with it. Embodied in the powerful image of the cauldron they speak of material, emotional, intellectual and spiritual nourishment, without which we could not be born or survive. 

‘Where is health?’begins in this crucible, rooted in the body of the land where I chose to live and in all of Earth which nourished and supported our incarnations as human beings.