FAQs

Okay — is this a frequently asked question? Not really. But - I’d love to share some history around these healing practices for those who, like me, are interested in this sort of thing.

The separation between conventional medicine and energetic or symbolic understandings of healing is, historically speaking, relatively recent. Early medicine, herbalism, and pharmacy often existed alongside spiritual, energetic, and philosophical frameworks for understanding the body.

You may notice that a medical symbol still often seen today — the caduceus, a staff entwined with serpents — is itself an esoteric symbol.

The caduceus became associated with medicine partly through its links to Hermetic and alchemical traditions. Before the modern scientific revolution, many natural philosophers — what we might now call scientists — believed that nature reflected divine intelligence. Many studied stars, medicine, plants, and chemistry partly because they believed they were coming to understand God’s design; scientific inquiry was, for some, also a spiritual activity. The boundaries between science, spirituality, philosophy, and medicine were far more blended than they are today.

One such figure was Paracelsus, who is widely regarded as a founding father of modern toxicology and a pioneer who revolutionized pharmacology by introducing chemical remedies. His worldview also heavily featured natural magic. He understood science, religion, and magic as intertwined, seeing magic not as supernatural, but as an expression of the natural powers of God and the universe.

He argued that nature possessed hidden powers and “signatures” that physicians could learn to read and utilise in healing. He viewed the natural world almost like a book filled with symbols and correspondences. Through working with the energetic principles expressed in plants and nature, balance could be restored within the body. Every natural thing has its own wisdom.

He also believed celestial bodies, metals, and earthly elements directly influenced human health and behaviour, and openly subscribed to folk concepts of elementals, such as gnomes, nymphs, and spirits.

There are parallels between this and many other medicinal, alchemical, and healing traditions around the world, particularly within this idea that the universe is filled with reflections upon reflections — “as above, so below.”

One example can be found in Traditional Chinese Medicine, where practitioners have worked for thousands of years with the idea that nature expresses repeating patterns reflected through the body, emotions, and environment — patterns that can be observed, understood, and worked with to support health and internal balance.

Traditional Chinese Medicine uses Qi and the balancing of it to improve health, often understood as a life force or vital energy moving through pathways known as meridians.

Within Tibetan medicine and Vajrayana Buddhism, healing has also been understood through both physical and subtle dimensions. Teachings describe energetic channels, inner winds, and contemplative practices as part of maintaining balance and wellbeing.

In Ancient Greece, healing temples devoted to Asclepius — the god of healing — combined herbal medicine, dream work, ritual, prayer, bathing, rest, and observation as part of the healing process. People travelled to healing sanctuaries where care often integrated both physical and spiritual approaches.

It can sometimes be tempting to imagine that ancient healing systems belonged to less educated times. Yet many cultures that explored symbolic, spiritual, or holistic understandings of healing were also among the most intellectually sophisticated civilisations in history. Ancient Greece gave rise not only to healing temples, but also to mathematics, philosophy, political thought, and systems of reasoning that continue to shape the modern world.

In China, highly educated physician-scholars developed sophisticated medical systems centred around observation, herbs, and bodily balance. In Tibet, monasteries often functioned as centres of medicine as well as spiritual practice.

Interestingly, some of the thinkers whose ideas continue to shape the modern West did not necessarily divide rational thought from questions of meaning, soul, symbolism, or unseen realities in the way modern culture often does. Plato, for example, explored ethics and politics, but also dreams, symbolism, metaphysical questions, and stories such as Atlantis. Many of the philosophical foundations of the modern world emerged from thinkers who comfortably explored both reason and mystery.

So, when did healing become understood differently?

The sharper separation between medicine, philosophy, spirituality, and symbolism familiar today emerged more strongly during the Scientific Revolution. Extraordinary advances in medicine, surgery, antibiotics, anaesthesia, sanitation, and technology brought immense progress and saved countless lives. Precision matters deeply. Careful, analytical thinking has given humanity extraordinary tools — particularly in areas where reliability and exactness protect life.

At the same time, symbolic, spiritual, and subjective dimensions of experience increasingly became separated from mainstream medicine and intellectual life.

More recently, psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist has offered an interesting perspective that may help illuminate this shift. In his work, McGilchrist suggests that human beings relate to reality through different forms of attention. One mode tends towards precision, categorisation, certainty, analysis, and control — qualities essential for science, technology, and medicine.

Another mode appears more attuned to relationship, context, intuition, symbolism, emotion, metaphor, and the living whole.

In his view, both ways of understanding are necessary.

Problems arise when one dominates to the exclusion of the other. For example, if we assume that only what can be measured is real, we may overlook aspects of human experience that profoundly shape wellbeing and our lived experience positively— meaning, relationship, symbolism, ritual, grief, hope, or belief. Equally, relying only on the subjective while dismissing real evidence could also become unwise.

True balance perhaps lies not in choosing one map over another, but in understanding where each is useful, and even understanding the limits within our own perspectives.

Psychology offers another perspective. Human beings generally seek certainty and coherence. The mind often feels discomfort when holding unresolved contradictions — something psychologists describe through cognitive dissonance.

We tend to think in maps and connected systems of understanding, often struggling to reconcile ideas that feel distant from our inherited beliefs, institutions, or ways of seeing the world. Predictability and reliability help people feel psychologically safe, which may partly explain why cultures increasingly shaped by science and institutions often privilege what feels measurable, repeatable, and certain. For example, we are more likely to be persuaded by something someone says if they fit a certain ideal or character we assume to be intelligent or that the majority deem normal- perhaps unconsciously.

Yet human beings are also deeply responsive to meaning, ritual, story, symbolism, hope, relationship, and experiences that are difficult to fully quantify. And the mysterious, the unknown, or existing within maps that have no solid boundaries may become psychologically unappealing.

There is also the question of acceptable knowledge. Philosopher Michel Foucault explored how cultures shape what is considered legitimate knowledge and how ideas are organised within systems of power, language, and institutions. Across history, ideas once viewed as ordinary have later been dismissed, while practices once rejected have later become accepted.

Healing temples once sat comfortably within respected systems of care. Meditation, once considered fringe in much of the West, is now widely studied for wellbeing. Hospitals themselves often emerged from religious and monastic settings where care included spiritual support alongside physical healing.

At the same time, some thinkers — including Foucault — raise deeper questions about how societies shape collective ways of thinking. What feels unquestionably “true” in one historical moment may shift dramatically in another. Language, institutions, and culture do not merely describe reality; they also help construct the lenses through which we understand it.

Much of what we know about the past comes through fragments — surviving texts, ruins, translations, archaeology, and stories preserved across generations. History is real, yet our understanding of it is always partial. We inherit pieces rather than certainty.

This raises an interesting possibility: perhaps different cultures have not simply been right or wrong about healing, but have understood it through different maps. I believe there are many maps for understanding reality.

Perhaps the more interesting question is not why healing has been understood differently, but what each culture may have seen clearly — and what it may, at times, have overlooked; what we ourselves might be missing, and what we may discover if we learn to look through different eyes.