The Meaning of Health- The Experience of a Lifetime

About the Book

The Meaning of Health paints a definitive picture of what health really looks like from the outside, and inspires you by what it truly feels like from the inside. It illustrates how your body, mind, and soulful awareness award you with a greater appreciation of all physical treatments, mental techniques, and spiritual practices.

As a healthy reminder, The Meaning of Health brings to light how your level of intention is the key to the enduring success and enjoyment of all wholesome endeavours. Then, it directly reveals why your level of attention shapes the quality of your experience in good times and bad.

To avoid the false promise of a cookbook prescription, The Meaning of Health skirts around the how-to lecture, flashing a provocative why-to grin that reflects the wisdom-tools within yourself. When you know in your heart the meaning of health, then you will know what to do, and naturally do it with healing in mind.

The pay-off in facing the pain in your life is in the time and money saved on cosmetic cures. But don't take it on faith. Take a chance on this behind-the-scenes look at life's divine comedy of double entendres, double-takes, and catch-22s.

The Meaning of Health is a must read for anyone concerned with the well-being of children, students, or patients, because the purpose and love in your own life are all you really have to inspire and guide anyone else.

"It's never too late to be ahead of your time."

The Meaning of Health sees far beyond the mechanics of conventional and alternative health care. It values your decisions prior to your diagnosis and honours your perceptions long after your prognosis. It clearly points out that the purpose of facing unavoidable pain is to prevent needless suffering.

The Meaning of Health demands a higher context of all scientific, psychological, and spiritual evidence through deeper insights of body, mind, and soul. Then, it excavates the remains of the ancient wisdom and scientific concepts that tend to get lost in the translation.

Recognizing the inherent purpose in your own life assures you a sense of purpose in all of existence. This direct inner knowledge busts through the conflicting and confusing expert advice, making all problems and solutions a little more meaningful.

Feeling the unconditional love within your own nature affirms in you the benevolent support from all of nature. This mature inner love gives you a sense of belonging that lessens your longing, and looking for love in all the wrong places.

Taking responsibility for your own well-being gives you the courage to trust in your innate biological and spiritual healing. This internal strength eases the need for abusing any physical, financial, or authoritative power.

Recapturing your inner freedom releases your enslavement to neuroses, disabilities, and peer pressures, giving you hope for the possible and faith in the probable. This genuine joy also unlocks your sights from the limitations of others to freely see their solemn promise and sacred sovereignty.

It's this living experience of purpose, love, responsibility, and freedom-at the levels of body, mind, and soulÑthat serves up an all-inclusive helping of health that forever satisfies. Of course, the meaning of good and evil, nature and nurture, and science and religion naturally come up when defusing the dispute over mind and matter. However, it's your evolving awareness that is most important for dealing with pain, lessening mistakes, and making all internal debate a little less daunting.

The endless search for the ultimate fix eases up, while the ceaseless struggle for absolute answers calms down, with the inner certainty that you knew all along. The Meaning of Health is written on many levels in a poetic style to induce your imagination wherever you happen to be. A deliberate read, with breaks for contemplation and discussion, helps the digestion of this soul food for thought.

"By sharing my childhood insights about purpose, love, responsibility, and freedom, I confirm that we all share an innate sense for healthy living, if needing only some context, consensus, and clarification."

About the Author

Gary Ratson is a Canadian physician who graduated from medicine at the University of Manitoba in 1986 with an undergraduate degree in chemistry. He began his career in sports medicine in Halifax at the Fenwick Sport Medicine and Orthopedic Clinic of Nova Scotia. Throughout the ensuing decade, he studied mind-body medicine and many ancient healing traditions and practices including Ayur-vedic medicine, acupuncture, hypnosis, meditation, and yoga.

"The Meaning of HealthÑthe Experience of a Lifetime" began as a poem that expressed his core insights about physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It gradually grew into a seminar for the support groups around Winnipeg and then naturally evolved into its present form. By the time each chapter was a bulky thirty or forty pages, Gary decided to set out on the high seas for some final inspiration with other doctors who were sailing around the world.

The conditions sailing across the Pacific Ocean were less than conducive for any heavy duty writing or deep thinking. Reading novels was about the best anybody aboard could muster. But the year-long adventure was indeed the experience of a lifetime. Gary seemed to find his writing voice somewhere in the many humorous novels aboard Stitches Explorer and in the wild adventures waiting on the islands.

Disembarking on the island of Bali in Indonesia, Gary spent the next two months in Sanur whittling his rather wooden tome down to a livelier read. All the while, he tried to block out the wild roosters, screaming monkeys, traditional Balinese drumming rituals, and millions of scooters. Back in Vancouver and over the next year, the final writing and rewriting culminated in what amounts to his life's workÑthus far.

Additional comments:

The author can be contacted at the_souldoc@hotmail.com

"I think it simply magnificent - uniquely brilliant writing - remarkably lucid, intuitive insights. . . every line stops one in his tracks, is memorable, quotable, ponderable."
-- Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of The Magical Child, Evolution's End, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg