Spirituality and Religion for Health and Wellness?

If you know anything about Christianity in America, the phrase "Prosperity Gospel" has probably crossed your path. The question I want to sit with here is whether it holds up biblically. Along the way I'll look at how other faiths approach health and wellness too, because once you grasp the connection between mind, body, and spirit, almost no spiritual teaching ends up sitting that far from the so-called prosperity idea.

Since the start of the 21st century, people everywhere have been drifting toward anything organic, from the food on their plates to the supplements in their cabinets. A lot of that movement traces back to old spiritual traditions, many of them from the East. Take the word "holistic." It means treating the whole person. The "holi" piece shares roots with "holiness," and holiness carries the sense of being made whole.

Scientists are now finding a link between spirituality and physical health. A large share of illness grows out of stress and anxiety. Nearly everything begins in the mind even when it eventually shows up in the body. Consider Gastrointestinal Reflux Disease, or acid reflux. Excess stress or anxiety can set off the digestive problems behind it, so a person's mental state helps decide whether those physical symptoms ever appear.

Modern medicine, which in practice often means billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies, tends to prescribe "lifelong" treatment for conditions like these. Plenty of people are worn out by the side effects and are hunting for something else. One option is the alternative medicine that came out of the East and is practiced mostly by Buddhists and Hindus. Acupressure, acupuncture, and mindfulness meditation all fall into that group. To some, this looks like the lesser of two evils next to a culture of pill-pushing. But are these practices actually evil?

Long before so much of healthcare turned into a profit machine, doctors treated sickness with homeopathic remedies. Today you often have to go looking for the right practitioner: a Doctor of Osteopathy, an Orthomolecular Physician, and increasingly the naturopath clinics and holistic practitioners opening across the United States as demand keeps spreading. And because conventional physicians do study the body in medical school, they already know what research has confirmed, that the body carries its own built-in system and can heal itself of most illnesses, maybe all of them. What we now call medicine, those pills, would have been branded witchcraft a few centuries back: man-made drugs sold to treat illness while turning a profit and keeping patients dependent. Does that ring a bell?

Back to the subject of using spirituality and religion to find healing. Staying with Eastern medicine for a moment, Buddhism teaches a practice called mindfulness, or mindful meditation. The idea is to sit still and quiet your thoughts for at least twenty minutes a day. It can include meditation videos and stretching routines, not unlike Yoga.

In the monotheistic traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the faiths rooted in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, mindfulness picks up an extra layer: meditating on the promises of the One True God as each tradition understands Him. The Bible is full of such verses, especially in the wisdom books of Psalms and Proverbs, and simply dwelling on them while learning to trust God can bring a measure of healing. Illness so often grows from stress and anxiety, and anxiety usually grows from fear. Scripture repeats "do not fear" and "fear not" again and again. Jesus himself talks in the Gospels about not worrying. Even someone who doesn't believe can ease their anxiety by learning to stop fretting over the circumstances of their life.

Conventional spiritual wisdom, particularly the New Age strand with its Eastern origins and Western esoteric streaks, holds that sickness shows up when a life falls out of balance. Given how readily humans swing to extremes, the amount of illness and suffering in the world starts to make sense. Learn to hold your life in balance and refuse to worry, and you give yourself a real shot at managing your illnesses and disorders. Fold in mindfulness meditation, where you practice living in the moment and paying attention to what truly matters, and total health and wellness becomes something you can actually reach. - Erwin Bishop