Sublime

For better or worse, humans are holistic. Even the human body does best when its spiritual and physical sides are synchronized.

To integrate is to bring together into a nonconflicting, noncontradictory unity those elements that are being integrated, in accordance with a goal, need, or standard that operates as the organizing principle. The ultimate biological principle of integration is, of course, that which is required for the life of the organism. All self-healing, at th

Whereas one’s cosmology provides a context for ecology within the nature of the universe, one’s ontological assumptions and perspectives take into consideration the nature of being, existence, reality, and relationships between all things. One ontological or spiritual stance is that all individual minds, human and nonhuman, participate in a collect

Embracing the whole of reality is an act of love that utterly transcends the mind-created dichotomy of right and wrong. We don’t need those labels to take beneficial action.

Enlightenment thinkers once disparaged animist ideas as backwards and unscientific. They considered them to be a barrier to capitalist expansion, and sought desperately to stamp them out. But today science is beginning to catch up. Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which

A SYSTEMS APPROACH To do this, functional medicine takes a systems approach to the body. We’ve already spoken of the network of organ systems in the body—immune, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, etc.—but here the important word is “network”; in other words, all these systems are linked. Therefore, as we know, an event in one system can affect so