What is Holistic?
On the importance of reclaiming corrupted words
This essay may be titled what is holistic, but it began with another question. What is light?
Those three words have been spiraling through my thoughts this past week, and I’ve been intending to get them down on a screen and explore them, because I do like to publish an essay ever week, but I just haven’t been able to.
Well, obviously now I have, but only because I surrendered my original plan which was to explore the properties of light as a spiritual path to illumination, and to show how this path can be embedded into poems in order to create holistic works of art.
Which led me to ponder what is holistic? I have a personal definition of the word, but I tend not to use it often because I feel the word has been debased and corrupted through simplistic over-use by over-promising businesses preying on our desire to actually be holistic. This is a noble desire, because to be holistic means to be embodied, to know you belong, which leads to opening your heart and taking action through love, not fear or anxiety, and thus coming into alignment with one’s purpose, which, if you’ve experienced it, leads to a state of flow, but it’s not something that be bought or sold. I’m going to do my best to reclaim the word for us a bit in this essay, because it does mean something important that I feel can be useful to us humans at this point in our evolution. Here we go.
While maybe some of the products being sold that promise holistic healing may actually lead to being holistic, most of them do not. Not that everyone leveling their product or offering as holistic is unscrupulous—more often they are just not thinking it through and using a word they know that works because it taps into peoples’ desire to be fully embodied. It’s easier to imitate than be original, trust me. I exhaust myself sometimes, but when I do step outside the box, although the beginning may be a bumpy ride, eventually I start to flow because I tap into something larger than myself that carries me with it into an unique expression of myself—the circumstances of my life become wedded to a primal pattern of wholeness and everything I generate from that place is holistic because it follows that pattern. When this happens, I am holistic, even if my body is sick. Holistic is not a thing, it’s an expression, and my definition flows from an understanding of the properties of light that is both intuitive and analytical, meaning it can be comprehended by both my brain hemispheres.
It’s intuitive because I was expressing holism before I knew the analytical definition.
This is not a chicken or egg kind of situation. I know the intuitive came first because I have the evidence for it in two poems, the greatest I’ve written, composed years before I learned about the properties of light and how they corresponded to the properties of the oscillation of magic, minus two, in a workshop with Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals.
I wrote a whole series here on the nine oscillations of magic, The Art of Spellcasting, which you can in the archives of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles.
Recently, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of the nine oscillations and the nature of light itself in the process of developing The Coracle, the mythic rites of passage mentorship I will be launching soon once the website is official (though I am working with people now if anyone is interested). As I began to look at fairy tales and myths as rites of passage vessels, I also came into my own fluency with the nine oscillations/properties and understood how they could be a navigational tool for people to develop relationships with the stories that would integrate the old stories’ teachings with events in their daily lives. I named these the Nine Currents. Here they are:
The Nine Currents
1. The Current of Revelation: What does this story reveal to me about myself, others, or the world? Am I available for the disclosure? Am I hiding? If I am hiding, do I consent to exploring why and commit to the disclosure?
2. The Current of Reflection: How does this story expose my vulnerabilities? Am I available to be exposed? Where am I lying to myself or others?
3. The Current of Refraction: How does the story move me physically? What is it quickening in me? Where am I stagnating?
4. The Current of Diffraction: How can this story help me respond and adapt to the challenges it presents to to my ego and psyche? Am I willing to live with the consequences if I don’t adapt when called? How can I continue evolve when fears arise?
5. The Current of Interference: What am I resisting in the story? How can I work with what I’m resisting, instead of flowing with it? How can I overcome self-sabotage?
6. The Current of Polarization: What choice or choices is the story asking me to make? Where do I need to focus? Where have I been noncommittal to something I really care about? Do I consent to exploring that, with myself or others?
7. The Current of Dispersion: What must I do, or who must I be, in order to transform, now that I have received answers to the previous questions? Where or why do I refuse to change? Where am I refusing my own power and agency?
8. The Current of Scattering: What do I need to do in order to let others know I’ve changed? What gifts can I now share? Where am I withholding?
9. The Current of Completion: What am I now ready to release and completely let go? Am I still holding onto something that I want to release? How can I acknowledge I have completed this journey and move into the world in a new form?
Those of you familiar with the properties of light, will know that the first a last of the nine currents are not recognized by science. This has the collective effect of disconnecting us from spirit and disabling us from grounding our visions to completion to spiral into the next level of experience aware of what we have learned. The result is a perpetual amnesia that keeps us in spiritual and cultural kindergarten. By us, I mean members of societies who hold science as the highest law. While science does measure things that actually exist, it is dependent on its tools. I also consider it a distinct possibility that somewhere in time, actual humans made a decision to limit our knowledge so that we’d be easier to control. If we can’t receive revelations or complete cycles, we can’t evolve beyond the control systems who want to harvest our energy to keep the machines of civilization running. We the people are not the ones who benefit from these machines. I mean that materially in a couple of ways. Most of us are not the ones reaping the material rewards, Even if we are, we have most likely sacrificed our souls somehow to get to the top. Competition becomes our god, even if we don’t know it. The result is a hollowness we don’t even recognize. Nothing we can achieve will ever be enough until that hollowness if filled.
And what should it be filled with? I’m not a fan of the word should because I rebel at being told what to do, as well as believing that it’s a shaming tool that keeps us from accessing our own way to move through the world, though I’m not against encouraging people to correct the distorting thinking or practices that result in harming others. Humans are social creatures. We live in collectives and cooperation is necessary. Sometimes you should act a certain way for the good of others. However, I believe it’s a choice. Nobody should do something because someone says they should. Choosing to act for the good of others, until it comes from the heart, will never result in the completions that will move us into the new spiral of human expression in the cosmos. In the meantime, the word should is sometimes a useful tool, even if only to gauge how dedicated you are to your own choices.
So what should fill the hollowness of living without revelations and completions?
I would choose water. First in the form of tears, but then flowing into all its forms of stream and cloud, wave, whirlpool, and waterfall. Water is the universal solvent. That metaphor works both scientifically and poetically, which makes it holistic, uniting the bridge between left and right hemispheres, logic and intuition, bridged by the corpus callosum that sends electrical pulses back and forth keeping the currents in good flow. Everything we need to be holistic is inside us. We don’t need to buy any products or take any course, although sometimes those things can assist in the process. We are already holistic. We just need to remember that.
I know this is true, because of this poem I wrote, “Breathing Again After A Long Time Underwater.” I wrote this years before I had any concept of the properties of light or the oscillation of magic, but contains them all, in the sequence they occur in science and Heka, Mū Hawaiian magic. I find this astonishing, but also not. I am holistic, of course I knew. I did have help in tapping into them, a simple path of inquiry suggested by the poet of Li-Young Lee in a workshop.
In my next post, I will share that path, and parse how the Nine Currents work in this poem. Meanwhile, I encourage you to read this poem, first without looking at the Nine Currents listed above, then after. See if you can identify them moving through the poem.
For those wanting to go back to or read for the first time, my series The Art of Spellcasting, where I demonstrate through language as a process, the nine principles of light/oscillation, here are a couple of links. You can find them all through searching through the archives for anything titled “The Art of Spellcasting.”
I love to year your responses to my offerings in the comments and I always answer. Don’t be shy about reaching out, even if you disagree with me. We live in a world of contrasts and the more we realize that, the wider the oscillations become. I am interested in wider circles, not because I want to possess more knowledge, but because I am devoted to more awareness. The more aware we are, the more contrast we can tolerate, and yes, enjoy, without going to war. That is my dream and I believe it is impossible.
Here is the poem. Links follow. Tune in next week for a detailed analysis of how the Nine Currents move through this poem.
Breathing Again After a Long Time Underwater
Reaching my hands into the late afternoon light
glowing on the river's final curve, I didn't believe
I was beautiful,
like the valley's wild horses
hiding in high ferns I parted with my hands like
lace curtains, air
closing behind me without a ripple.
I came to a clearing. Light streamed down.
From the far side a mare rose from crushed ferns.
She watched me with the liquid eyes of one
who can see in the dark without stumbling.
I wanted to come closer, but her foal,
still in its slick caul, stood on shaky legs,
fell back onto ferns slippery with birth blood.
For a few moments I forgot I was a human
who could kill what I loved.
At dusk I bathed at the river's edge
where the horses came out of the ironwoods
to face the river's mouth. Sharks waited there
for pig carcasses to wash down,
jaws hacked out by hunters to mount.
People disappeared all the time in that valley.
I was just a girl at the edge of a clearing.
I don't need to tell the story of how I was
broken anymore.
Now I can speak
of how a wild horse watched me from the ironwoods
and of how warm the river was when I knelt
to lift late afternoon light out of the water.
How I
poured it over my head. How it flowed
down my hair and shoulders, gilding my skin,
returned to river unbroken.
—Jennifer LightyHere are those links:
Circling Back: The Art of Spellcasting Part 1
The Art of Spellcasting Part V: On Interference
The Art of Spellcasting Part 1
Resources:
To learn about Mū Hawaiian culture and the body of work of Ke’oni Hanalei, of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals, visit his site, Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals, or follow him on Instagram at @pohalahawaiianbotanicals.
To read some poems and learn about the incomparable Li-Young Lee, click here: Li-Young Lee. He also has many books in bookstores and online.
The poem I shared here first appeared in my chapbook, Breaking Up With The Moon, published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.
About Jennifer Lighty
Writer, mentor, storyteller. Author of the mythopoetic memoir, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, and founder of The Coracle, an online mythic rites of passage mentorship through fairy tales and myth. Reach out to inquire. Website coming soon.
Paid subscribers receive a 96-page PDF of my book, Weaving a Basket of Words: How to Write a Poem to Carry Water. Click below to subscribe or upgrade and I’ll send it to your email.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light