Mind Body

From an interview with Barbara Gibb 

NHE: First of all Barbara, how would you explain ‘mind-body’ work?

Touching with the intent to heal has an ancient pedigree. Eastern philosophy has for thousands of years, studied and treated within a whole mind-body (or soul and body) paradigm of health care.  So modalities like traditional Chinese herbal medicine, yoga, acupuncture, Ayurveda (the ancient Indian sanskrit word 'Ayurveda' comprises the words ayus, meaning 'life' and veda, meaning 'science'), herbal medicine, come from an integrated whole body, or soul-mind-body, perspective.

The mood of modern healthcare is moving with much momentum away from high-technology, pharmacological, invasive, paternalistic and non-intimate medicine towards a more client-centered whole-person approach. This approach recognises the importance of the client's belief system and attitudes in influencing the 'natural history' of an illness.

Western medicine has really only recently started to explore Eastern psycho-spiritual healing traditions and re-integrate a whole-person approach, since the 1920's. So modern psychology was among the first branches of modern Western medicine to investigate the interaction of lifestyle, belief, thought, emotion and physiology, with health and disease patterns.

Psychology systems exploring Mind Body relationships in a Gestalt of therapies include the work of Jung, Reich, and Lowen. 'Hakomi', developed by Ron Kurtz would be a contemporary example of body-centered psychotherapy and an excellent exponent of Mind-Body work.

So the connections between goals, motivations, emotions, thought and physiological processes have been observed - and they're now starting to be scientifically backed up. The research of Dr James L Oschman and Candace B. Pert, Ph.D. are notable, but many streams of science are starting to research and validate what natural health practitioners have known for quite some time. Evidence based health care research is the cutting edge of practice now. (See Touch Research Institute, University of Miami School of Medicine.)

Emotional imbalance and dis-ordered thought processes can have a profound influence on the endocrine and immune systems of the body. Eastern philosophy has known this for aeons, through the focus on somato-emotional balance offered in Yoga, meditation and Tai-Chi. The mind-immune system link is being researched in the twined fields of pharmacology and immunology.

Mind-Body is a synthetic approach. It's about bringing harmony and re-connection to all the inter-weaving systems of the Mind Body. It's a paradigm that says "We recognise and meet your whole system (your innate, whole, healthy system). The Mind Body therapist is not there to fix so much as to gently remind, resource and encourage your psycho-physiology to re-align to the full health that it is innately underpinned by.

So dis-ease or disease states are veils to the whole healthy system. Our mind-bodies tend towards health, and that is an important self-view to embrace. Inherently our bodies want to be well - they strive to be well. Our disease states and dysfunctions, or our small fevers or colds, are an attempt by the mind-body to re-instate harmony. That's my belief of healing.

So that everything is an initiator in the continual dynamic balance of that body system. And that's why I say, "You'll only catch a cold if you need one", because from the Mind Body perspective, the body has been under-resourced or overwhelmed and it's needing those processes to release it back to homeostasis (balance).

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