The Holistic Approach

I think I’ve mentioned this not once or twice by now: In recent 2-3 years I’ve changed a lot. And when I say “I”, this refers to my physical, spiritual and emotional world. I started to work out and got interested in stuff like human anatomy, workout schemes and fit-being as a whole (I deliberately don’t use the word fitness – just want to stay away from the conventional, commercial meaning of fitness). In some way I developed a new way of thinking – my view of many life aspects, of dealing with problems etc. The thing is, I started to change in many different aspects but still I had the feeling that they are all very strongly connected with each other although I couldn’t explain why or how this happens to be so.

A few months ago I came upon articles of one of the best authors – by the way, a personal trainer as well – I have ever come to read. In many of his articles I bumped into the word holistic. After a few attempts to ignore my lack of knowledge of the word (you know, in school they’ve taught us not to look up every single word in the dictionary but to catch the overall meaning), in the end I nevertheless looked it up. What was my surprise when finding some kind of a definition of the way I felt about the changes I mentioned above! Here what my dictionary said:

holistic:
1. based on the principle that a person or thing is more than just their many small parts added together;
2. (holistic medicine) medical treatment based on the belief that the whole person must be treated, not just the part of their body that has a disease.

There it was!

Since then I have been keeping myself busy with this topic a lot. The paradox is, there are not so many books or medicine textbooks which carry the word „holistic“ in their titles. So my attempts to find literature which concentrates on the holistic concept were all doomed to failure. But after all – that’s ok! Because the holistic approach is everywhere. Whether you read Shakespeare, your physics textbook, a history book or maybe fashion magazine - you can apply the holistic approach to interpret anything that you come across not only in books but in everyday situations as well.

Here is a short overview of the holistic approach concept. It refers to:
· the connection of mind, body and spirit
· taking responsibility of your own level of well-being and welfare
· treating the body/a situation as something more than the sum of its parts
· the interrelationship between all aspects of who we are and the world we live in
· the concentration on the internal and not the external aspect

There’s a lot to be said on the topic. What I would like to point out to in the end is the thing which fascinates me the most: in the beginning I used to understand the holistic approach as something referring only to the single human organism, to its fit-being and welfare. Now I’ve realized that the holistic approach can be “practised” in all different areas – human relationships, life philosophy, education, dress code, training programs, eating habits, attitude to money and so on and so on...

HA-HA! (Holistic Approach Holistic Attitude)
:-)