There is so much information out there on social media these days on health and wellness, I often get sucked down a rabbit hole researching some hauntingly beautiful aspect of nature, only to discover a link to a product. I find myself ChatGPT-ing and uncovering that the sweet, old doctor with an accent was brilliantly AI-generated by purveyors to sell a supplement or medication. The words are intentionally confusing or manipulative, a word salad. This doesn’t mean the facts aren’t correct—for example, a traditional Jamaican elixir made from soursop, a tropical fruit also called guanabana, does help with inflammation, stabilizes blood pressure and supports the immune system—but the end game is just a nuanced marketing strategy targeted at this holistic seeker.
There is one area of health and wellness I do find accurate, where there is nothing to buy and the healing is free: spirituality. Not the buzzword, but the practice of opening our sensory gates, peeling the onion of our human layers right down to the energetic layer where faith resides.
True healing (from the immune response our bodies have from, say, stress) is only possible with an inward glance beyond this thin spiritual veil. There, one will find the axis of one’s inner life: love, the source of this energetic realm.
“Trying to intellectually define the undefinable is the antithesis of mystical practice,” as Amely Greeven, our wellness editor (and my cousin, who is on this healing path with me), writes in Angel at My Table on our website, thepuristonline.com. My general rule of thumb: When you sense truth, that is truth, and that is your innate ability, your universal characteristic.
As the great French scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote so poetically to describe the union of science and faith: “Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a Universe that is Person—and through all this there blows, animating it and spreading over it a fragrant balm, a zephyr of Union—and of the Feminine. The Diaphany of the Divine at the heart of a glowing Universe, as I have experienced it through contact with Earth—the Divine radiating from the depths of a blazing Matter…”
Yet, not so simply, this spiritual, emotional connection to oneself, to the universe, can be felt and understood through the joy found in knowledge, in creation, in discovery, in loving. See this practice as the dressing, what we put on the word salad we all battle, online and off…that adds not only flavor but our own individual sense of satisfaction.
