Transforming the Nature of Health

Book excerpt: A provocative blend of personal memoir, new science, and philosophical treatise, this book presents a fresh model for healing by rethinking our relationships with one another, the natural world, our bodies, and our innermost selves. Dr. Marcey Shapiro focuses on eliminating us/them or friend/enemy dichotomies, shifting instead to a model based on enduring values of love, compassion, harmony, and peace. Throughout the book she reevaluates prevailing cultural beliefs about the causes and meaning of illness and offers a vision for a different type of societal understanding of health with a new view of the possible role of medicine in healing. Interweaving inspiring anecdotes from her experiences of the natural world, in medical training and practice, and with mystical exploration, Dr. Shapiro includes examples of medical advances that honor our interconnectedness and provides practical tools like breathing techniques, tips for self-examination, and methods for expanding awareness. Transforming the Nature of Health traces the roots of the matter/spirit split in contemporary science and medicine, evaluating its constraints as a paradigm for us as evolving beings. Dr. Shapiro presumes that we are much more than our physical bodies and asks readers to join in cocreating a new language and new science that express the whole of our miraculous existence.