CHAPTER 1
What is the Cura?
Cura in Latin means the cure — restoring the body, mind, and spirit to health. Restoring health can be a simple process, but usually the more complicated the cause, the more complex the cure. Science tries to impose objectivity over healing while each one of us lives a life of subjectivity. We always ponder: Do we inherit our health? Has our lifestyle made us sick? Why do some of us get well while others don't? Most important: how can we heal and stay well?
Our body wants to heal. It has the capacity to restore itself to stasis — the state of health and wellness. In a dynamic, multidimensional convergence of energy, biology, and spirituality, the true Cura is working towards this end at every moment in every way. When we understand the way of restoration and healing, then we understand the essence of Cura.
It's not magic, it's science. It's not just science, it's miraculous. What if we knew how to engage the miraculous because we understood it scientifically?
Actually, the science behind explanations of energy began to emerge as early as 1900 in the west, although it had been a traditional practice in China for over two thousand years. What was being discovered by astrophysicists would take decades to apply to the field of medicine. It would take much longer for Quantum physics to be understood as a kind of lexicon for Chinese medicine. Merging Eastern and Western medicine Is the next frontier. The future of medicine depends on this kind of thinking: the Cura is merging and converging the things that need to work together for healing.
What we're learning is a new kind of science. It's an inner science that marries the subjective and the objective, in which you become familiar with the workings of your own body. That doesn't mean that you could write a scientific treatise about it. What it means is that you'll live more intelligently. You'll make decisions that are more apt to bring you in touch with the way things work for you in the world. - Jon Kabat-Zinn1
The Cura Convergence is the threshold where science and spirit merge in the restoration of healing and wholeness. This point of convergence is where the construction or deconstruction of health and wellness happens, and where true healing must focus. At the quantum level where formlessness manifests into form, there is Divinity — by whatever name — that permeates every aspect of a profoundly complex and beautiful process.
As I watch my patients heal in ways that defy their diagnosis, I feel compelled to share that this new frontier is a miraculous place. There is no doubt that all healing is happening here, even if we don't always recognize the efficacy of it or how to get here intentionally.
All over the world, there are medical establishments, offices, and centers where patients search for healers who have responded to a sense of calling to serve their communities as wellness and health care professionals. Doctors, nurses, and practitioners of every healing modality from Western or Eastern approaches are motivated by a love of people and an instinctive desire to end suffering. Yet, they face barriers to act on those good intentions.
There is a crisis within the health care system today. More specifically, a conflict between health care modalities, techniques, and professionals — a tension that has been reinforced with years of history. In recent decades, this debate has focused on the real and perceived differences between Eastern and Western healing.
Within the last few years, science has made enormous strides in understanding the universe and providing state-of-theart medicine and care. And yet, even as science is making advancements with technology and medicine, we are losing ground between doctors and patients. Individualized therapies, direct communication, and continuity of care are outmoded in favor of specialization. Patients must seek advice from multiple doctors, each with a different focus, and most of whom do not communicate with one another. The patient is left to decide which opinion, medication, or treatment to follow in order to maintain or regain their health.
It will be detrimental to society if the health care system continues in this manner. Medical specialization takes an expert but myopic view. What we have gained with professionals who have a distinctive expertise has been critically important in diagnostics, but this often costs us the bigger picture. Instead of looking at the dimensionality of an individual, it breaks up the body into organ system functions: digestive, immune, pulmonary, cardiovascular, etc.
While it is imperative to understand how the physiology of each organ system functions, we do ourselves a disservice when we base healing on the notion that these systems work separate and distinct from each other. The body utilizes and relies on all aspects of its being in order to heal and function. The body is synergistic and integrated. It is best understood from both Western and Eastern perspectives. Good medicine and effective healing must be as well.
The healing of mind, body, and spirit requires a multidimensional approach. In an age of increasingly detached doctoring in silos of unshared information, the holistic relationship between mind, body, and spirit is often overlooked. Therefore, a lot of healing potential gets missed. How did these paths diverge so distinctly? You'd have to go back only a few hundred years to find the point of departure.
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Throughout human history, healers used both Cataphatic knowledge and Apophatic wisdom to treat the sick. Cataphatic knowledge is associated with left-brain, analytical thinking: things that are proven, deducible, objective, predictable, measurable, palpable, and "scientific." Every civilization recognized healers who were trained in this tradition — it isn't new. Mummified skeletons showed evidence that the first primitive brain surgery was performed over two thousand years ago in ancient Egypt. That emerging knowledge was added to ancient Apophatic wisdom — the kind that draws from the right-brain. It uses homeopathic, herbal medicine, intuition, tradition, dreams, signs, symbolic sight, animism, and many other intangible but important ways of knowing something. Both approaches were recognized, respected, complementary, and integrated.
Whatever balance had worked for centuries began to shift in the early 17 century. The father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, posited that man consisted of two things: mind (his consciousness and spirit) and matter (his physical form). Referred to as Cartesian Dualism, this view that the...