The Body Is A Trailhead- To Your Inner World, Your Relationships, Your Outer World & Society At Large
Unpublished Excerpt From Sacred Medicine
Although I’m generally not a Ken Wilber fan, although I agree with many of the critiques of his work and his ethics, and although I chose to cut this segment from the final manuscript of my book, I began my research into my book Sacred Medicine by pondering the idea of what Wilber calls “integral medicine,” based on his widely touted “integral theory” or “theory of everything.” In Consciousness & Healing: Integral Approaches To Mind Body Medicine, Wilbur breaks down the integral approach to medicine through his typical four quadrant model, adapted specifically to a medical approach. Using a 2x2 statistician’s table to describe his integral model, Wilbur’s “integral medicine” model includes the four quadrants as they apply to medicine.
The upper left quadrant focuses on the invisible interior of the individual, the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, meanings, and concepts we hold in our consciousness, which affect our physical bodies in a variety of ways.
The upper right quadrant refers to the visible exterior of the individual, the organs, tissues, cells, and behaviors that shape our visible life.
The lower left quadrant references the invisible interior of the collective, the shared meanings, cultural beliefs, worldviews, values, and the way the dominant narrative of our society colors the world.
The lower right quadrant relates to the exterior of the collective, the social structures, families, ecosystems, communities, nations- all the way to our place in the cosmos.
The health of the physical body is affected by all four quadrants, yet conventional medicine tends to focus exclusively on the upper right, the visible exterior of the individual, narrowing down our definition of health and disease to the reductionist’s view of organs, tissues, cells, enzymes, and their biochemistry, neglecting the validity and impact of all of the other quadrants. Because of this massive blind spot in modern medicine, it makes sense then that Americans spend out of pocket about $34 billion per year on CAM modalities, which tend to address the other three quadrants of what affects the health of the body. We are proving with how we spend our disposable income that narrowing the scope of medical treatment to the upper right quadrant is grossly inadequate, confirming with our economic power how much we need a more balanced approach to health care.
According to Wilbur’s integral medicine model, disease-inducing issues that affect the upper right tend to be described in the third person, with “it” language. An organ become “it.” An enzyme deficiency becomes “it.” A hormone imbalance fits with “it” language. The absence of a necessary neurotransmitter gets reduced to “it.” Such a reductionist approach neglects the language of the upper left, the interior of the individual, the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, meanings, and concepts, which require first person “I” or “my” language, such as “I need to quit my job so my body can be more healthy” or “I feel unsafe in my toxic marriage and it might be affecting my health” or “My childhood trauma might be underpinning the chronic nervous system dysfunction that might have made me vulnerable to cancer.”
By neglecting the lower left, we ignore the influences of our cultural beliefs and priorities, the way the culture traumatizes our innocence, and the impact of our collective mythology on the body- the “we” language of health. For example, “We have lost our cultural systems of meaning and it’s impacting our health” or “We prioritize hoarding of resources over intimacy with one another and intimacy with the land, and this is not good for us” or “We need to break the chains of generational trauma and change the way we parent so fewer children are victims of narcissistic abuse.”
By ignoring the lower right, we fail to acknowledge and validate the importance of how our bodies are impacted by our families, our nations, our systems, our politics, and what it means to be citizens of Planet Earth right now at this potent lynchpin of human and planetary evolution- the exterior “it” factors beyond the borders of the skin of the body. For example, “Climate change (it) and the traumas of how we are killing the biosphere impact the health of all citizens of Planet Earth” or “Systemic racism (it) is killing people.”
In Sacred Medicine and in Mind Over Medicine, I tried to devote some attention to all four quadrants, including pointing out upper right factors Western medicine doesn’t validate because they are subjective aspects of healing and are hard to prove scientifically using our current scientific paradigm. But even still, those of us in health and wellness have a tendency to focus on the health of the individual, without enough concern for the social determinants of health, over which we as individuals have little control.
Wilbur sums up integral medicine in the book Consciousness & Healing: “What if in our little black medicine bag we had- not just 20 pills, two scalpels, and an orthopedic hammer- but also all quadrants, all waves, all streams, all states, and all types? What if our medical bag included a more comprehensive and integral map of the human being who has come for help, such that you can engage in a truly integral diagnosis covering all the known bases of what might be ailing?”
What if medicine did not negate all the technology we’ve developed to treat the Upper Right, but rather expanded upon it to also include therapies that tend to the inner life of the individual, awareness of systems of meaning specific to each patient’s cultural background, and public health measures, laws and public policies that attend to the larger systems in which we struggle to be health, thereby treating all four quadrants as a way to optimize Whole Health? This does not mean that a Whole Health or integral approach to medicine requires tripling the number of therapies you throw willy nilly at the patient. It also doesn’t mean throwing evidence-based, rigorously tested treatments out the window. Patients are already overwhelmed with what conventional medicine alone offers. What we need to consider is a more holistic approach to an individual’s place within the collective whole as we consider treatment plans that address physical, mental, spiritual, and energetic health.
Sadly, these quadrants get siloed rather than integrated. The upper left subjective “I” quadrant gets dealt with by psychologists and therapists. The upper right objective “It” quadrant gets tended to by conventional medicine. The lower left intersubjective “we” quadrant is lucky to get any attention at all, and if it does, might wind up with a religious or a shamanic approach. And the lower right interobjective realm tends to get dealt with by lawyers, politicians, and public policy makers.
As long as we silo the way we approach health, we are limiting what’s possible in the realm of health and healing, both personally and collectively. Through this lens, we can approach the body as a trailhead to explore all four quadrants:
-How is your body a trailhead to your inner world- your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, meanings, and concepts you hold in your consciousness/
-How is your body a trailhead to your organs, tissues, cells, and behaviors that shape your visible life on the exterior of you as an individual?
-How is your body a trailhead to the interior of the collective- the shared meanings, cultural beliefs, worldviews, values, and the way the dominant narrative of our society colors the world?
-How is your body a trailhead to the exterior of the collective- the social structures, families, ecosystems, communities, nations- all the way to our place in the cosmos?
-Is it even possible separate your individual body from the collective body when we view health this way?
It makes no sense to approach the body solely from an organ-centric perspective. I wonder what it will take to wake up those of us in the medical world to begin to see the body not only as a machine made up of parts that break down, but as a sensitive canary in the coal mine that alerts us when something in not right- in our families, in our relationships, in our jobs, in the priorities of the societies in which we are imbedded, in the laws of the land, in how we view ourselves as humans and the role we play on Planet Earth?
After learning about his ideas about integral medicine, when I read that Wilber was diagnosed with the chronic illness RNase Enzyme Deficiency Disease, which he claims is responsible for his chronic fatigue syndrome symptoms, I wondered how and if he applied this integral medicine model to his own health condition. When I looked up whether he’d made any statements about his own medical condition, I found this in his explanation of the condition he was struggling with:
“let's pause for a fun one-minute rant: do i spend much time worrying about the ‘lesson’ i am trying to teach myself by giving myself this illness? go fuck yourself. answer the question? treya and i spent 5 years listening to people telling her why she got cancer. all of them were telling her what she had spiritually done wrong in order for this to happen to her. problem is, none of them really agreed with each other, and only thing they had in common was a particular person's arrogant assumption that they knew what was really moving treya, or their deep fears projected onto treya and read back to her as the cause of her cancer. of course there are spiritual, mental, and emotional factors in all illness. if you want to know what mine are, ask me, don't tell me. if i want to know your opinion, i promise i will ask. otherwise, keep your projections to yourself, because i already have one frightened and confused asshole to deal with—me—and really, one is enough. especially in my condition. (:-)”
I agree that it’s abusive to try to project our own judgments, interpretations, fears, vulnerabilities, or discomfort with the uncertainty of illness on any other person- and if you’re sick and someone tries to tell you what your body is trying to tell you, you can quote Ken Wilber- “Go fuck yourself.” Nothing but compassion is appropriate when any of us are sick or suffering. But if we use the body as a trailhead for inquiry- for ourselves, free from anyone else’s judgments or projections- we just might discover mysterious insights that could help us heal. And if those trailheads lead us nowhere, well…that’s fine too.