Restorative or Transformative Change?

We’re all very familiar with ‘restorative’ change.

When we’re sick (or rather, on hiatus from a former state of health) we often say things like: ‘I want to get back to my old self’ or ‘I want to return to the way things were.’

This is the default approach of many modern medicine and therapies - an attempt to restore us to some previous setting of health.

Isn’t that precisely what medicine is supposed to do, you might ask? 

Well, yes. And no.

When we have physical sickness or an emergency situation that is life threatening, it serves us to get ‘patched up’ and stabilised as soon as possible. 

But what happens thereafter?

The vast majority of us are not in clear and imminent danger at this moment. But due to habituated mental projections of fear and anxiety - often fuelled by the media and perhaps even our peers - we live in a state of chronic stress. 

And that means that ‘underlying chronic stress’ is the default setting that restorative health returns us to.

Restoring us back to ‘the way we were’ doesn't significantly change our lifestyle. It doesn't address the mindsets and behaviours that contributed to the state of ill health in the first place. 

We’re therefore highly likely to repeat the cycles of sickness again and again.

In contrast to this, there are countless stories of ordinary men and women who encountered a serious obstacle or impasse in their lives and were able to transform the event into a life-changing epiphany.

By some mysterious and miraculous process, they became a new person overnight.

In the process these people become ‘whole’ - at peace with the formless, mysterious and miraculous dimension of Being, whilst also functioning at a high level in the material world. 

The French Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin, captures this eloquently when he said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

All of us would like to transform in this way, but do we need to face a massive crisis to be able to do so? 

Again, the answer is yes - and no.

Life will always present challenges and opportunities for growth, but we can also make a choice to engage with the process of transformation in everyday life. 

This process has been explored and mapped out by various traditions of alchemy - typically associated with transforming the base metal lead into refined gold. 

The goal of the alchemist was to draw out the intrinsic divinity or integral nature (gold) of a substance - either inanimate or animate. And this model can be applied in our lives right now, to access a deeper spiritual experience that changes us - literally for good.

For me, this model of alchemical transformation far surpases mere restorative change. Because whereas the western science seeks to separate us more and more from the interconnected reality of which we are part, alchemy seeks synthesis and integration instead.

This level of alchemical transformation is universally applicable and robust enough to meet the challenges and crises that befall us - both individually and collectively. It is a process of transforming our life from the ‘lead’ of an ordinary, largely unconscious state, into the gold and magnificence of an awakened life.

This is the level of medicine that enlivens and fills my heart with hope and which I wish to share with my patients and those in the medical and healing professions who are seeking a viable solution for themselves and their patients.