Philosophy

“Holistic Healing always starts with the actuation of the Life Energy, the Spirit—the Healing Power Within.  This, and nothing less than this, is True Health.”– John Diamond, M.D.

Introduction

Our heritage is to lead long, healthy, happy, fully productive and creative lives. This we can do when our Life Energy is optimized. Our ultimate goal is to develop our true potential, aspiring to fully evolve. Some of the avenues through which this can be achieved include reducing stress, raising Life Energy, activating the thymus, and releasing creativity.

Stress reduction is essential. Depending on the nature of the stressful stimulus, it may produce a reduction of thymus activity and overall Life Energy, and/or a meridian imbalance related to a specific negative emotional state. Over the years, negative emotional patterns are established and set as a result of such stress. Ultimately, disease occurs. Dr. Diamond’s research includes the study and delineation of emotional attitudes, stress, and other factors that lead to a diminution of Life Energy. From this we can develop methods for overcoming these factors.

Mother, Belovedness, Cantillation

The anguish of the human condition — the Buddha’s First Noble Truth — arises from the lack of knowledge of our souls. In order to find our own soul, we need to first find the soul of our mother: to go into the mother, beneath her mothering mistakes, which Dr. Diamond calls her MID, Maternal Instinct Disorder, and find her perfection, her MI, her Maternal Instinct. We need to find what Freud called Eternal Eros – the Mother she always yearned to be. That is to say, to first find and then Know in our hearts her soul, her love so as to then Know our own. This, above all else, determines our level of Life Energy, and therefore our overall degree of health. The more loved we feel, the higher our Life Energy and the more truly healthy we become. This inability to feel loved relates at an unconscious level to all our relationships, but that with our mothers is the most important. The mother-child relationship is the fundamental human relationship: She was our whole world when we were young, and she is, in a metaphorical sense, our whole world now. It is our lack of belief in her ever-constant love, her pure maternal instinct that is the root cause of our anguish—the universal anguish of the human condition. This feeling of ever-constant love, Dr. Diamond has termed Belovedness. While Belovedness is the feeling of feeling loved, Cantillation is the response to this feeling – life as a song of love for her love. In a sense, Cantillation is simply a state of very high Life Energy, but it has a specific psychological connection with the mother. Cantillation, therefore, is the ultimate goal of therapy, that which lies underneath the more superficial symptom relief.

Birthing Trauma, Misprocessing

It is difficult for us to truly Know our mother’s love. One main reason is connected with our brain’s misprocessing – a consequence of uncorrected birthing trauma caused by the difficulty of our present evolutionary state: too large a fetal head and too small a maternal pelvis (Christopher Wills,The Runaway Brain [1993]). The school of cranial osteopathy contends that the uncorrected physical distortions of the body, especially of the skull bones, as a result of the birthing process are the cause of so many of our later structural and therefore physiological problems. Dr. Diamond not only agrees with this, but adds that it is this birthing trauma which is the predominant cause of all of our emotional and spiritual difficulties, hence of our anguish. This misprocessing affects us and our inability to receive our mother’s love and it affects our mother, who as the result of the trauma of her own birth hinders her ability to fully manifest her innate Maternal Instinct. The task of our lives may be seen as the overcoming of our misprocessing so as to then see past our mother’s own misprocessing to the Mother she yearned to be. Only then will we be in touch with the higher truth that our mother, and therefore the world, loves us always. Thus the very basis of Dr. Diamond’s work is to help you overcome the impediments of your birthing trauma, your misprocessing so that your anguish may be diminished, and you will hopefully live a high Life Energy life of Belovedness and Cantillation. That is what makes Dr. Diamond’s work—his philosophy—truly unique.

The Philosophy of Positive Health

Five of the primary tenets upon which Dr. Diamond’s approach to positive health rest are:

1. The critical importance of the reduction of stress and the balancing of the concomitant emotional attitudes. Disease is seen as arising from stress that causes a general reduction in Life Energy and specific energy imbalances throughout the body.
2. The essential role of primary prevention — prevention before pathological change, either mental or physical. At this early stage the energy imbalances may be described as fluid or dynamic and readily amenable to correction. If the stress is prevented, if the mental attitudes are changed, then primary prevention will be possible.
3. The individual’s responsibility for taking charge of his own health and his own way through life. In this context the role of the so-called doctor is that of teacher — to explain and to help the individual to see exactly what he is doing to lower his own healing energies. The individual has superimposed maladaptive behavioral patterns upon himself which have pulled him away from his natural, “normal” state, and he must recognize and alter them.
4. That great healing forces exist within us and in nature to enable repair to occur once the stress is reduced and the negative attitudes are corrected. It is recognized that natural methods are essential since unnatural methods often diminish Life Energy. While these unnatural methods may provide symptomatic relief, they ultimately lower the Life Energy, retard the true healing process, and ignore the stress and the attitudinal problems that are at the base of the disease patterns.
5. That most problems begin at an energy level. The first physical manifestation of imbalance within the body is at an energy level and corrections can be made at this level. On top of this are the metabolic, environmental, structural and nutritional problems that also require attention.

When a man is perfect in his own nature, body, and soul, perfect in his harmonious adaptations and action, and living in perfect harmony with nature, with his fellow-man and with God, he may be said to be in a state of Health. The broad philosophy of Life Energy enhancement includes as a goal the achievement of positive health. To assist in achieving this, one is taught the insights and understandings and the methods of preventive medicine, including nutrition, psychological insights, bioharmonics, and psychoaesthetics. Psychoaesthetics is a field of work in which Dr. Diamond has developed techniques for assessing the effects of works of art, poetry, music, architecture, craftsmanship, body movement and dance, gesture and posture on the physical, mental and emotional functioning of the individual. In addition, there are techniques for stress reduction via the aesthetic experience.