Читать книгу Holistic Herbal: A Safe and Practical Guide to Making and Using Herbal Remedies - David Hoffmann - Страница 13

The body maintains a steady internal state, where temperature, blood sugar level, and other variables are kept within narrow limits, this process being known as homeostasis. This ability is fundamental to life, an expression of a force within working toward harmony and integration. If the body were not able to maintain this state of homeostasis we would not survive long.

This principle of homeostasis also applies to our environment. Our environment adapts to changes, but, like us, it is only able to do this within narrow limits. Beyond those, it dies.

As human beings we live in contact with two environments, the outer ecological one and the inner physiological one. Herbs can be seen as a bridge between the outer and inner environment, augmenting health by facilitating harmony and resonance between the two. Once we are in balance, we can radiate our higher state of health back into the ecosystem from which the herbs came.

If we slightly shift our view, we can see that we are really part of the whole of ecology, not separate from it. When we are healed with the help of plants, a part of the ecology is healed. By healing our bodies and our minds we will be more present as whole beings. And it is hoped that health will enable the growth of new awareness so that we can become conscious co-creators with nature and not remain the abusers and rapists that recent history shows us to be. A state of wholeness and health can affect our whole environment. It can affect our relationships, which affect society, and so potentially act to heal all humanity.

If we consider the concept of Gaia and remember that the Earth constantly works towards staying in a state of homeostasis, we can see how herbs act as homeostatic agents. Their purpose is to keep an element of the ecology—humanity—integrated and in harmony with the whole ecology. We can compare it to the purpose of hormones. Hormones released in one part of the body lead to a specific action in another part, integrating and harmonising our inner environment.

Chemotherapy cannot be substituted for this work of herbs. Chemicals do not work towards the integration of a system; at their best they bring some elements back into alignment. We can look at health as at any ecological system aiming for homeostasis. It is always in motion, with varying elements from outside influencing the system, which does its best to stay in balance and thus to stay alive. Health is when the personal ecosystem, the inner space that has been called the ‘milieu interieur’, is in balance with the outer space, and both of them are one. As J.Z. Young says: ‘The entity that is maintained intact, and of which we all form a part, is not the life of any one of us, but in the end the whole of life upon the planet.’^*