by Wayne Jonas
It was after his relapse that Bill came back to see me, this time not to find another “fix,” but to do the hard work of navigating the labyrinth of healing processes until he found the combination that helped him sustain self-healing. The journey was not quick, and, for Bill, it involved facing some deep traumas from his childhood that he unveiled during one of our visits after he started to keep a journal. As the meaning of who he was and why he was here began to help him connect his body to the emotional parts of himself, a deeper healing began. Once Bill understood the connection between his childhood traumas and his bodily reactions he found it easier to do the things he needed to do to keep his back pain at bay—such as managing his sleep and alcohol use, doing regular exercise, stretching, and having periodic massage. Gradually he broke free of his addiction to cures and learned how to support and challenge himself to continually heal. True to his word, he documented his path, and spoke with me throughout the process so I could better understand how he found healing. One day during our discussions of his process, he came out with it bluntly. “Once I stopped seeking a single fix,” he told me, “I realized that all these good-intentioned people and wonderful treatments were actually making me worse. When I decided to find out what I needed for a better life in general, that is the moment I began to really heal from my pain.” Bill had become his own healing agent.
BACK TO AADI
Armed with the growing tools of whole systems science, I went back to India to explore if it could help me understand what was happening to Aadi and his Parkinson’s disease. Did they align with the components of healing and the concepts of whole systems science I was discovering? I took a deep dive into the ancient medicine of Ayurveda with this new lens.
Like Bill, Aadi was not a religious or even very introspective man. His approach to everything was businesslike. He wanted to know what needed to be done and how to do it. Like Bill, problems were to be fixed when they arose so he could move on to the next one. The bottom line of life was the measurable advance in prosperity for him and his family. When Parkinson’s disease struck, he approached it in a similar way. Here was something to be fixed too, and the doctors were ready to help him to do just that.
But when visits and treatments from the top doctors in the world did not allow him to get back to work, he grew despondent. That is when his wife visited the Ayurveda hospital and asked for an astrology reading for him. She felt that they needed to seek a deeper understanding for his illness and why the treatments were not working. Aadi thought it was ridiculous. He had no time for “pseudoscience,” like astrology or prayer to the Hindu gods, in whom he had no belief. Like Bill, he agreed to go to the clinic to get his wife off his back. Anyway, he thought, it might give him some rest. That, he admitted, he needed.
Like me, Aadi was a bit startled to meet Dr. Manu for the first time, with his impeccable Oxford English and his knowledge of Western science. Dr. Manu said that there was no requirement for Aadi to believe in any of the treatments. “Ayurveda has been honed over thousands of years to produce a fundamental change in your mind and body,” he said. “All that is required is that you go through the treatments for at least thirty days. Parkinson’s is a serious and difficult problem, so each treatment is essential in restoring balance and recovery.” Aadi agreed. He also liked the idea of having my team explore the possible biology of what he was doing.
But the evidence using the science of the small and particular was bleak. First, there was no evidence that the treatments and lifestyle changes Aadi undertook could help Parkinson’s specifically. Although he did get some sleep, the process was not a picnic. Each morning he got up early and went to a prayer ceremony in which a Hindu priest went through a long series of chants and rituals. While Aadi did not believe in any of the gods to which they prayed, the rhythmic tone and repetitive motions produced a calming effect to start the day. Since no alcohol was allowed, he soon found his mind much clearer than at home. By the second week, he looked forward to this start of the day. In two weeks, the mental worries around his work and family began to fade. His sleep improved; he began spontaneously waking up early with a clear mind and more energy. Dr. Manu said that Ayurveda had a name for this mental state—sattvic mind. This mental state, he said, is one of the core goals of all Ayurvedic treatment and a foundation for healing. In the West, the closest term we have for this state is the relaxation response, coined by Dr. Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s. Dr. Benson was one of the first scientists to study monks in India who meditated for many hours a day. In the 1960s, he measured the profound changes in their brains and bodies that resulted. Since then, he and others have shown mind-body practices that induce what he calls the relaxation response improves physiology, biochemistry, and genetics for a number of conditions. Eight weeks of mindfulness practice (a method to induce the relaxation response), for example, has been shown to grow areas of the brain that often shrink in Parkinson’s disease.
Beyond that, however, the morning ceremony and other sattvic mind practices allowed Aadi to explore more deeply why he was so driven to succeed in business. He was the second of five children; his father had always praised his older brother for excelling in school and entrepreneurship, and he’d given him money to develop a small business. Aadi, who was four years younger, could never meet his father’s expectations. So he had tried harder. Although he’d become a highly successful businessman, his father had died before seeing his success. Still, the pattern was set from a young age—keep your head down, work hard, compete, and grow wealth. Aadi realized by the end of his thirty days at the Ayurvedic hospital that he had internalized that drive, which often made him callous to others and even caused him to ignore the pain of many whom he loved—and any pain he felt himself. He began to think more about his family and what his life and legacy were about.
Had this been all the mental work Aadi did, it would have been little more than a type of psychotherapy. However, other practices were used to reinforce this relaxation and induce a physical response to the soul he was discovering. The goal was to deepen the meaning he found and embed it into his bodily response. The chief method for this was yoga and diet. One hour of yoga each day not only reinforced the relaxation response and improved circulation to all areas of Aadi’s body but also strengthened his muscles and reduced his tremor and unsteadiness. It was not easy; in fact, it was at first downright stressful.
“I didn’t like yoga,” Aadi admitted. “I was never one to exercise, and this was hard. My muscles were sore the day after the sessions for the first fifteen days.” What yoga was doing for Aadi was like what Norma’s activity did for her—it introduced a mild traumatic stimulus that produced healing. Over thirty days, Aadi’s mobility, strength, balance, and flexibility improved, and parts of the activity—primarily the ending—started to grow on him.
“I loved the ending of the yoga sessions,” he said. “It is a posture called ‘the corpse’ in which you just lie still on your back with arms facing up. It was then that a flood of love would come to me. I would imagine my wife and children and all the affection I had for them and them for me. It was wonderful. I saw and felt what was really important to me.”
Finally, his sattvic mind was linked to his body through an oil massage once a week. But the oil massage of Ayurveda is not like the spa treatments given in the West. Two masseurs, one on each side of the body, would rub his body with warm sesame oil in a coordinated and rhythmic pattern, infusing his body with oil and heating it. This was followed by running a small stream of warm oil over his forehead (a procedure called shirodhara) with the goal of inducing a sense of relaxation and mental clarity. I asked Manu about this seemingly strange practice.
“Both yoga and shirodhara are done for the same purpose,” he said. “To cleanse the body and mind and to help link the understanding Aadi is getting from prayer and meditation to his body, so that both his spiritual and physical life are balanced and function as one.”
I did not buy that explanati
on. When we looked at these and other practices Aadi received, we found the primary molecular changes they produced had nothing to do with cleansing. Instead, they all seemed geared toward inducing nonspecific changes in Aadi’s psychological and physical healing responses through repeated mild stress and trauma, followed by deep relaxation during which repair occurred. This happened also with the diet and herbal treatments he underwent. The prayer was followed by a light breakfast, the yoga, a midday meal, and sometimes cathartics and enemas all geared toward “cleansing” as Manu explained. But the food served during his stay was very different than his normal fare. It was all vegetarian and high in curcumin, garlic, and other Indian spices. Fasting was also introduced. Once a week, he fasted for a full twenty-four hours, taking in only vegetable broth and water. Basically, Aadi was undergoing a controlled form of starvation. I was shocked. How could mild starvation help heal Parkinson’s?
THE STIMULUS TO HEAL
While periodic starvation may sound harsh and not healing, studies show the exact opposite—when carefully done. Extensive research on large populations, as well as in controlled studies with animals and humans, shows that periodic low-calorie intake, whether through eating foods with lower caloric density (vegetables and fruits), fasting, or simply removing protein from the diet for short periods of time, rapidly stimulates a number of healing responses. Would short episodes of fasting and low protein intake, like those Aadi had been experiencing, increase biochemical mechanisms that preserve and repair damage produced by eating?
To find out, I asked Dr. Mark Mattson, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Aging, part of the NIH. He has been studying effects of diet and fasting on healing and aging for over thirty years. Dr. Mattson is one of the most cited scientists in the world. I asked him, “Could periodic fasting and low-calorie or low-protein intake, like Aadi went through, produce benefit?”
Dr. Mattson had a long and detailed answer, but the short version was a definite yes. Eating both nourishes and causes damage in the body. It supports and feeds the body with nutrients, and it stimulates oxidative and inflammatory processes that, over a lifetime, accelerate aging and damage organs. Refraining from food, or certain types of food, both helps heal some diseases and reduces the risk of chronic disease. Managing the dance between eating and not eating is key to healing and longevity. Periodic fasting (not prolonged starvation), according to Dr. Mattson and other brain researchers, enhances a whole soup of gene and biochemical factors associated with better health, lower disease, and longer life. It also improves mental function and lowers the risk for several diseases of aging, including diabetes, heart disease, brain decline, and cancer. Like exercise, Aadi’s lower protein and calorie intake was a periodic stimulus to healing, which conditioned him into a regular pattern.
“The problem,” Aadi readily admitted, “is that it was hard to keep up these behaviors once I left the hospital. Outside I relied more on supplements and herbs.” But, he concluded, “they were not as powerful as what I got at the hospital. That is why I come back every year or so for a booster.” Then he asked me, “So what did you find out about these treatments? Is there any science to them, or are they all just magic?”
They were not magic, but they were also not proven with the science of the small and particular. Were the potions and pills he was given specific treatments for Parkinson’s disease? Not likely, I said, given what I had seen about both drug and herbal research for Parkinson’s. But from a whole systems science perspective, the rationale of these treatments made a lot of sense. Most of the herbs Aadi was given had anti-inflammatory effects, as did the spices in his food. One, a powder from a tropical legume, Mucuna pruriens, had been studied for its effect on the level of L-dopamine in the brain, but the amount was too little to produce the magnitude of improvement he had experienced.
As I pieced together the various approaches Aadi underwent during his stay at the Ayurveda hospital, it became clear that the most likely explanation for his recovery involved the same factors that had healed Norma, Sergeant Martin, and Bill—just differently organized and in a different context. These had helped Aadi find meaning in his life, even though he did not believe in astrology or Hindu gods. The space and time to reflect, think, and talk; his improved sleep; and no alcohol all helped him gain insight and grow new brain cells. This helped him discover meaning and guide him toward recovery. He exercised more, and his nutrition improved with the plant-based diet and spices. More omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids from the oil massage reduced the inflammation in his brain and nourished his neurons. The herbs and supplements increased his dopamine level—although mostly through the placebo effect from simply taking them. Finally, numerous methods for regularly stimulating a healing response with low-dose stressors were administered. Yoga, fasting, cathartics, massage, heat, and enemas were given rhythmically to keep up a steady response. From a whole systems perspective, these small challenges induce stress proteins and genes that our bodies use to repair and defend itself. These were the nudges to his whole system that induced healing.
The problem with the traditional systems is that the practitioners do not know if what they are doing is, in fact, properly dosed or delivered. While I discovered several healing approaches with factors that could enhance healing, the effects of these treatments were not measured or tracked, except for the patients’ subjective reports. No modern science had been applied to them. Of course, that does not mean this science can’t be done. Recently, a growing number of studies has looked at the intersection of whole systems science and traditional medical systems. An example of this growing intersection is a course taught at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Dr. V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai, CEO of a systems science company called CytoSolve. The course examines the relationship of whole systems science and Ayurveda. Clinical verification of these concepts is also beginning. A 2016 study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, examined more than fifty metabolic pathways altered by a six-day course of treatment using ayurveda approaches like those Aadi had received.
THE PRINCIPLES OF HEALING
In condition after condition, system after system, and person after person, I found three common factors that induced healing: (1) the rituals that helped a person have a meaningful experience, (2) the support of the whole person, and (3) the regular stimulation of a biological response. The specific treatments and agents used varied by person, culture, theory, and place, but the processes were the same. Whole systems science showed us that a person is an ecosystem—more like a garden to be cultivated than a car to be fixed. In systems science, the safest and greatest effects occur when the whole person is nudged toward a meaning response, using the universal need to maintain dynamic stability as the healing force. By taking advantage of this force, health and resilience emerge. Instead of manipulating our network nodes and attempting to produce specific effects (and side effects), we strengthen our network links and stimulate our own healing capacity in nonspecific ways to achieve a deeper and more lasting healing.
Healing emerges when we support and strengthen the connections within us—body, behavior, social, and spirit—making us more whole. Using the science of the large and the whole, we now understand that both healing and wholeness involve the same processes and that inducing a meaning response enables both.
Whole systems science, the biopsychosocial model, and the meaning response also allow us to personalize healing in precise ways using almost any agent or behavior. This understanding opens new worlds of opportunity. Treatments usually dismissed—because they do not fit the science of the small and particular—now become available for effective use in a new way. We know that both before and after a diagnosis, and between states of health and disease, there are health-promoting conditions and actions that can prevent, slow, or reverse chronic disease, strengthen overall health, improve function and quality of life, and enhance overall resilience and well-being. We can reduce suffering, regardless of a person’s illness o
r stage of life, provided our behaviors are meaningful, they support and nourish us, and we challenge ourselves to respond.
This is how healing works.
CHAPTER 5
Coming Home
The place where you live can heal.
Our external physical environment affects our mind and body in ways that heal or hurt us. And that happens mostly outside our awareness. Sometimes, if we simply immerse ourselves in a healing environment, our body responds and we get better. Sometimes the environment is what is making us sick. Cultures around the world have systems to design a space and environment to impact the mind, body, spirit, and well-being. The Japanese tea garden is a well-known example of this. Other approaches include sacred geometry, healing design, feng shui, anthroposophical systems, and Ayurvedic systems. Until recently, modern health care has largely ignored the effect of space on health and well-being. Yet everyone can describe a place they have been where they feel whole and well. And some of us have spent time in “sick buildings.”
The key to using the external environment to stay or get well is connecting the physical aspects of your life—the aspects you can see, smell, hear, and touch—with the inner aspects of you—the ones that give your life deep meaning and value. This involves paying attention to how your body and mind already respond to the space you are in, and then organizing the elements of your own healing environment to maintain and restore health. Create your own stage, so to speak, for the drama of healing to happen.
