What is Holistic Counselling?
As I was creating my website and seeking feedback, a friend took one look at my home page and stopped to ask, "What do you mean, holistic counselling?" I caught the unmistakable tone of skepticism in her voice and the clear subtext: is this a real thing, or just a trendy buzzword I chose to fill up space? It inspired a long and thoughtful conversation, and with the expectation that others will ask the same question, I'd like to share a few thoughts on the subject - one fitting this inaugural blog post.
Holistic Counselling is indeed an existing term, one that's been growing in popularity as our culture slowly matures in its attitudes and ideas around healing. Western religious and philosophical tradition has generally held a dualistic view of the universe, and by extension of ourselves. The body and mind have conventionally been seen as distinct entities, and when unwell, have been treated accordingly. Physical ills were treated by doctors, and psychological troubles were largely the purview of the church, and more recently psychotherapists and psychiatrists.
The view that mental and physical health issues could be interrelated (or inextricable) was dismissed as naive and pseudo-scientific by many healing professionals, and on my own decades-long journey of healing, I've met many others who have felt gaslit by the experts they entrusted with their health. As a teenager with crippling depression, anxiety, mysterious IBS and respiratory issues, it felt evident to me that my own mental and physical conditions were integrally linked, and likely just different manifestations of the same underlying malady. However, my doctor refused to even entertain the idea, and without asking any questions about lifestyle, trauma or context, busied himself writing a prescription for one of the many antidepressants I would take over those years, without benefit.
Gladly, our society's understanding of and attitudes towards mental illness have evolved a fair bit in the twenty-odd years since then (but how far we still have to go!) Concepts of holistic, integrative and mind-body therapy have gained substantial mainstream acceptance, centering around the idea that we heal more effectively by nurturing our emotional, mental, physical and spiritual aspects in harmonized balance, and that there is so much more to the picture than talk therapy and taking drugs. A Holistic Counsellor may bring in any number of more or less conventional modalities and techniques, ranging from breathwork and meditation to somatic experiencing, from herbal medicine to art or ecotherapy, from narrative or cognitive approaches to yoga and massage, psychedelic-assisted therapy to therapeutic release, and more. The combination of elements will vary between practitioners, as well as for different clients, the particularities of an individual's situation being met with just the right tools.
Just as the techniques employed in holistic styles of therapy vary widely, so too do the conditions addressed. These involve everything from PTSD to addiction, anxiety and depression to relationship and attachment issues, and circumstances both practical and abstract. Holistic counselling may be used to treat specific problems, but the greater focus is on the person as a whole being, in all their complexity, recognizing that when we look deeply enough, all of our issues tend to be inextricably bound together.
This is in contrast to conventional western medicine, which treats problems as separate and individual. In the holistic approach, the priority is to cultivate overall wellbeing, and to bring attention to patterns and connections between different aspects of our lives. Another difference is that while western medicine focuses primarily on treatment of illness once it occurs, a holistic approach prioritizes prevention, and the maintenance of good health.
This is basically the same information you'll find anywhere on the internet with a quick search for "holistic counselling", but I take it one step further than simply integrating the aspects of the whole person. The philosophy underlying Soul and Soil is that healing ourselves in a deep and meaningful way cannot be done without healing our communities and society more broadly, but also not without healing the ecological systems we inhabit. We are as dependent on our environment as each of your fingers is dependent on your body, and if the land, water, air and biological systems we rely on are in a degraded state, we ourselves can never be truly well. It should be news to no one that our world is a mess these days. The insatiable engine of neoliberal capitalism has wrought incredible damage upon the natural world, depleting arable soils and fresh water aquifers, polluting the atmosphere, triggering the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, and sending us into an uncontrolled and unprecedented destabilizing of global climate.
It is no wonder, then, that people around the world are suffering grief, anxiety and despair on levels beyond our capacity to manage, not only about our own lives, but about the future of our families, our societies, and our planet. And this is why my aim with Soul and Soil is to combine the healing of people with the healing of our ecological surroundings. I believe that when we begin to engage in caring for our home, when we nurture our relationship with the natural world, learning to grow food, to identify and utilize medicinal herbs in our environment, to understand the impact of natural forces on our states of being, and to live more consciously and sustainably, we discover depths of power and purpose within ourselves that were previously beyond our recognition. We discover feelings of belonging and alignment that perhaps never felt possible in the past, and our lives become immeasurably richer, more beautiful and vast.
At the time of writing, this project is in early gestation, but over time, Soul and Soil will become an increasing support to both the wellbeing of the people and the natural world around us, through the implementation of a variety of programs and other offerings. I look forward to growing over the coming years, and being able to offer ever more as this project matures. Be sure to keep in touch if this strikes your interest, because it is in community - with a holistic approach to healing - that life will get better for all of us, one step at a time.
