Right questions lead to right answers - answers that sometimes push beyond comfort zones into the space where inquiry, creativity, and Truth converge. Often such essential questions begin with “why…” because “Why” questions are the staple of intelligent discourse and of intellectual revolutions, otherwise known as paradigm shifts. In 1994, medical intuitive, teacher, and best selling author Dr. Caroline Myss posed a crucial "Why" question: "If we create our own reality," she asked, "why don’t people heal?"

In this one question she exposed a model of holistic healing that works for a significant number of people facing serious medical challenges.

In the 1980s, we rode a wave of high optimism as people began to believe they could heal debilitating, even life-threatening conditions, using positive mental attitudes, visualizations, affirmations, and other alternative therapies. By the early 1990s, holistic health care was, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, a $13.7 billion industry (including supplements); by 1997 that number was estimated at $21.2 billion. These figures have continued to grow even as the high optimism of twenty years ago appears at best naïvely simplistic, at worst the cynical deception of con artists.

There were some successes that feed hope, but there was also a distressing number of very sick people who turned to highly publicized, sometimes expensive holistic methods that could not work the miracle they needed.

Fortunately, most people still had traditional medical treatment for more serious illnesses, and as we were fond of saying about alternative therapies, “they can’t hurt you.” But that simplistic response left unaddressed the questions of “how much alternative therapies can help in serious illnesses” and more importantly, “how do we know which ones help in which types of illness?” These are questions that doctors of western medicine grapple with daily. Holistic practitioners have not yet even begun to define the boundaries of holistic healing nor voiced a central prototype to address such questions from a unified platform, one developed not out of western sciences but out of the unique perceptions held in holistic practices. In short, we have no standard for holistic disciplines, no vocabulary that allows us to talk with one another, and no set of a priori principles on which we all agree.

The tendency among holistic practitioners and their clients is to blame the medical community for not embracing holistic methods and practices, to see doctors as the enemy of healing, the purveyors of unnecessary pain and suffering to the very ill, and the intellectual enemy of all forms of healing not sanctioned by the AMA. We forget that to the extent most people are able to survive life-threatening illnesses, they do so through western medical care not through holistic treatments. And we fail to recognize the fundamental differences between holistic and western allopathic medicine. Allopathy is firmly grounded in materialism (only what is seen is real), the western scientific method, and the mechanistic model of the universe. Holistic healing comes out of ancient spiritual and metaphysical traditions that posit a much broader definition of reality and the potential for non-material, non-visible components to wellness and illness. By definition these are mutually exclusive world-views.

Such are the harsh realities that holistic practitioners feel powerless to change and prefer not to contemplate, yet social circumstances are thrusting core decisions on us, ready or not. When Caroline Myss asked her question most people still had insurance; the medical community was still a safety net for the majority of people in medical crisis. In the first years of the twenty-first century, however, we are witnessing a frighteningly steady decline in the ability of the medical community to address the needs of ordinary people. Science is not failing; the medical delivery system is failing. There is now more science in the laboratories, more new drugs in the PDR, and more beneficial surgical procedures than can be delivered to the hospital or doctor near you, and when such miracles of modern medicine are brought to the street, there are too few doctors and nurses to oversee their use and tens of millions of people with no or insufficient insurance to pay for them.

Such are the harsh realities for those who are ill, yet most of us within the holistic community know intuitively if not statistically that many of the answers people and society need are within the holistic disciplines. The vision of powerful help for humanity in a gentler, more spiritual, more empowering format shimmers like a mirage on the horizon. But like a mirage, it disappears before our own lack of delivery system, our lack of intellectual and practical organization, and before negative assessments based on a scientific model of proof designed for a materialistic not spiritualistic world view.

Caroline Myss did not ask her question and sit down. She has spent the last twelve years putting together answers based on new understandings of energy anatomy and the mind-body relationships that create our physical realities. Others as well have pushed the boundaries of knowledge and wisdom in their own modalities adding to the cumulative if still disorganized body of holistic knowledge. Perhaps the moment is ripe for another pivotal question, for what Chopra calls a “discontinuous quantum leap of creativity” into an entirely new healing paradigm that transcends and unifies the parts within the whole, a truly "wholistic" paradigm. And so I urge holistic practitioners to formulate larger questions than the ones we have yet asked, to devise questions that incite revolution or at least evolution in holistic healing. Myss’ question serves as template: "If we create our own reality, what is our paradigm, what are its rules?" or put differently, "Who are we, what do we do, how does it work, who does it help, how do we know?"