Holistic Healing 

Chapters on Wellness
Food
Holistic Healing
Hopi Pottery
Dancing for Healing
Curanderismo

In this essay, social anthropologist Eugenia Roussou considers Southern European holistic healing practices and online observations of such, during this Covid-19 pandemic.

Holistic Healing and Wellness in Southern Europe: Practicing virtual (auto)ethnography in pandemic times

It is Sunday, March 15, and the third day of my physical isolation has almost ended. After a decade of anthropological research into so-called ‘New Age’ spirituality (Heelas 1996; Bender 2010; Sutcliffe and Gilhus 2013) and the ‘alternative’ forms of healing that are an integral part of such practices, I decide that the best way to alleviate my personal distress is to utilize the wellness techniques I have learned from the spiritual healers and teachers I have encountered through studying spirituality and healing all these years. I sit comfortably, and with a couple of spiritual healing crystals in my hand, the room filled with the aroma of the liquid incense I have put in an Buddha-shaped oil burner, New Age music playing in the background, and using the poetry lyrics I have permanently tattooed on my arm as a mantra, I begin to meditate. My tattooed lyrics are part of a poem that speaks about the spiral circles of existence: “to live it only once, you have lived it forever, and it is as if you exist forever”, I repeat mindfully, and I cannot help but think semi-consciously that with the uncertainty and embodied suffering that the pandemic is about to bring, these words are comforting; to know that we shall live forever, spiritually at least, and that life is about circles and the pre-pandemic circle of life will return, albeit transformed.

The wellness practices I have been studying in southern Europe, and more specifically in the countries of Portugal and Greece, since 2011, can be considered to be part of the ‘holistic health movement’. This movement appeared in the USA in the 1970s and includes healing practices that are influenced by indigenous or folk medical systems, alternative medical therapies, mind-body-spirit energy practices, spiritual traditions such as Shamanism, Buddhism and Hinduism, New Age spirituality and so on (see Baer 2003; Poulin and West 2005).  The popularity of holistic healing remains intact within “western” societies to date and, when it comes to southern Europe, in particular, it rises to the level of everyday wellbeing practice, albeit not without criticism from both official and unofficial sources. A few years ago, holistic healing had been criticized heavily in both Portugal and Greece through public opinion articles by positivist scientists in some of the most well-circulated and popular newspapers, while receiving negative reactions from the biomedical community, and even legal attempts to ban it from the healthcare system of those countries. A few days ago, I was sent an opinion article published in Público, one of the largest and most well-respected Portuguese newspapers, where – again – holistic healing practices were mocked and where it was clearly stated that, amidst the pandemic, they are practically useless, as there is no way they can cure from the coronavirus.

During the current pandemic spread, our biological body is potentially under attack, it becomes isolated to avoid contamination, it is masked to prevent infectious interactions, it strategically avoids people on the streets and the supermarkets, it can suffer the dramatic afflictions of the virus. At the same time, however, wellness is not exclusively about the biological body, and suffering in pandemic times does not just consist of side-effects on our physical bodily selves. Mental health, amidst the pandemic, is one crucial factor that also affects our bodies, our wellness and our sense of physical and spiritual being-in-the-world with potentially harmful effects for our health. I have spoken to many individuals in the past weeks, both research interlocutors and friends, whose everyday physical and spiritual well-being has been seriously affected by uncontrollable anxiety and unstable mental health, resulting in an experience of heavy bodily symptoms of illness and ‘compromising my immune system, which can be dangerous for getting the coronavirus at the end’, to use the words of Andreas, a Greek fifty-five-year old male interlocutor of mine.

Having cancelled my fieldwork plans and many research interviews I had scheduled before the pandemic began, I initially felt frustrated that I could not continue with my anthropological flow of duties. Then I realized that I needed to adapt and move my ethnographic research online, by beginning to observe and participate in the new trend of holistic healing in pandemic times: namely, the formation of numerous virtual groups, where holistic healers and spiritual teachers offer their practice and spiritual advice for free, through small donation or for their normal class price, having re-adapted their practices via platforms such as skype and zoom. Having spoken with individuals who frequent these online exchanges and having attended some myself, these vary from yoga practice, exchange of healing energy, collective meditation and reiki, to spiritual meetings with shamanic drumming, ecstatic dancing, sound therapy sessions and Asian healing practices such as tai chi and qi gong, among others. Individually, as part of their ‘homemade’ wellness routines, the majority of the people I managed to speak to – about twenty five Portuguese and Greek individuals, men and women, with age range from the thirties to the sixties, with a middle-class background and all possessing a knowledge of at least one holistic healing practice –  most whom try to meditate as often as they can, practice yoga, read mind-body-spirit books, use objects such as energetic crystals, spiritual charms, but also religious rosaries as part of their daily healing routine, burn incense and palo santo sticks and listen to New Age music. As they claim, such practices that combine spirituality and healing in their core, aid them considerably with regard to their mental health state, boost their immune system and they feel more bodily shielded against a potential attack from any type of virus, ‘including the one that wears a corona’ as Maria, a Portuguese woman in her forties, has jokingly told me.

The second research methodology, when one studies holistic healing practices before and during the current global pandemic crisis, is, somewhat inevitably, auto-ethnographic narratives. For an anthropologist to fully analyze and have a sense of the field, be it real or virtual, when dealing with wellness practices that are physically embodied and spiritually engaged, and which also involve the creative negotiation of emotions and of sensory perception, s/he needs to use his/her own body, mind and spirit to filter and understand profoundly the practices s/he studies. It is April 19, a couple of days after finding out about the death of a neighbor I have known since childhood in my Greek hometown, due to coronavirus; my physical body has already reacted to the news by developing (psycho-) somatic symptoms of illness, and I feel emotionally drained. I have a video chat with Fani, perhaps the most important spiritual healer I have met during my fieldwork in Greece and Portugal, whom I have known since 2014 and who is now a dear friend, while we still continue our ethnographic encounter and learning exchange. One of Fani’s primary healing practices is a combination of color therapy with passe, a Brazilian energy healing technique that is directly linked to Kardecian Spiritism, where the healer uses his/her hands to cleanse the physical, ethereal and spiritual body of someone, while receiving the assistance of invisible spirits in the process. I have had many ‘cleansings’, as Fani calls them, in the course of all these years, initially to understand Fani’s healing performance at a deeper level, and then as a part of my personal pathway to wellness.

In the beginning of our virtual meeting Fani asks me if I would like to try an online ‘cleansing’ healing; she must have sensed my distress, I remember thinking, although I have not mentioned anything to her. I agree, and we – somewhat cautiously, since it is the first time for both of us to be engaged in a virtual healing performance – prepare ourselves for this novel therapeutic process. She performs the passe but without the colorful lamps she normally uses, I go through all the somatic responses that all her ‘patients’ usually feel during the ‘cleansing’ – ranging from coughing to feeling dizzy, and from extrasensory perception to meditative visions – and, despite my trust in Fani, I partially feel surprised as I realize her healing has actually had an effect in its virtual version too. Fani leaves our chat silently, to allow me to remain in a serene, post-healing state. As I mentally thank Fani for her “radical empathy” (Koss-Chionio 2006) – a common characteristic of holistic healers – and her spirits, my eyes cannot help but focus on my arm, like that day at the beginning of my self-imposed house confinement. ‘It is as if you exist forever’, I read again, and I feel that if we all believe in the “reality of spirits”, as Edith Turner (1993) has inspiringly argued, and their healing capacities, we have a chance to exist forever or, at least, far beyond the coronavirus pandemic, after all.    

Author: Eugenia Roussou
Eugenia Roussou holds a PhD in Anthropology from UCL, University of London (2010). She is currently a senior researcher at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA), ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal, with a comparative research project that focuses on transnational religion, New Age spirituality and holistic healing in Portugal and Greece.

References
Baer, A. H. 2003. “The Work of Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra: Two Holistic Health/New Age Gurus: A Critique of the Holistic Health/New Age Movements.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17 (2): 233-250.
Bender, C. 2010. The New Metaphysicals. Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Heelas, P. 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Koss-Chioino, D. J. 2006. “Spiritual Transformation, Ritual Healing and Altruism.” Zygon 41(4): 877-892.
Poulin, A. P., and W. West. 2005. “Holistic Healing, Paradigm Shift, and the New Age.” In Integrating Traditional Healing Practices Into Counseling and Psychotherapy, edited by R. Moodley and W. West, 257-268. California: Sage.
Sutcliffe, S. and I. Gilhus. 2013. New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion. London and New York: Routledge.
Turner, E. 1993. “The Reality of Spirits: A Tabooed or Permitted Field of Study?” Anthropology of Consciousness 4 (1): 9-12.