On Health, Wellness and Illness

At Raga Svara, we think deeply about what it means and signifies to be healthy, primarily for one's own self but also as a projection in the 'world'. Post-Covid, there seems to be more discussion and intent for seeking 'wellness'. This trend presupposes that health or wellness can be packaged and delivered to those who want it. At Raga, one of our fundamental principles is that the seeker of this illusive thing called 'health' is an equal partner in achieving this state of wellness. We exist in this constant dialectic of illness and wellness.

Health, well-being, and illness are deeply experiential phenomena, rooted in the subjective experience of a person. We would do well to broaden our conception of what such complex phenomena mean. Limiting its exploration and understanding to a 'scientific' methodology, verging on 'scientism' and reductionist, statistical empiricism, makes for a myopic view and conception. Understanding well-being as a collection of biomarkers, such as weight in kilograms, robs us of fully understanding the conception of body image and psychological impact of weight. Giving the legitimacy of existence only to those conceptions that are amenable to scientific method, such as statistical empiricism or reductionism, limits our understanding of the experiential and lived reality of well-being and health.

If we reduce the concept of 'being' to markers, tests, and reports, then we enter a realm of the forgetfulness of being. When we talk of being mindful, what we really mean is mindfulness of being, giving weight and meaning to the idea of being itself. 'Mindfulness of being' involves being subjected to "urgent experiences", "jolting experiences" and amongst all these "limit" situations, death is nonpareil. While death or the idea of imminent arrival of death is jolting, the experience of illness, in varying degrees of severity, acts as a 'limit' situation, a wake-up call. This situation must be understood in its phenomenological sense if we are to fully 'live' it and transcend it to enter a state of well-being. According to Hans Georg Gadamer, "illness make us aware of our bodily nature, which otherwise is hidden. Only when there arise some disturbances, when deficiencies manifest to cripple us, that we are aware of the lack of a healthy body. Thus, though health has ontological primacy over illness, methodologically illness gains primacy over health."

Gadamer says, ‘The limits of what can be measured and, above all, of what can be effected through human intervention reach deep into the realm of health care. Health is not something that can simply be made or produced.’ Ultimately, all our care must be manifested as a participation in the 'wonderful capacity of life to renew itself, to set itself alright.' As Thakaran suggests, 'Despite the obsession with health in the contemporary cultures, wherein one feels complacent amidst diverse technological and ‘spiritual’ means that assure physical and mental ‘fitness’, sanity and longevity, health still ‘evades’ us.'

In the modern system of medical treatment, there is no space of the lived reality of the patient to be expressed and acknowledged, let alone be factored in the line of treatment. This reminds of the dying child Amal, in Rabindranath Tagore's The Post Office, who is prescribed total isolation, 'quarantine', in his home.

There must be a greater representation of the phenomenological truth of a given situation in the pursuit of health, for as Heidegger claimed, 'mood is the fundamental ground from which life develops.'

We must work, together, hand in hand, to restore to patients their own sense of self-identity. This can be done only when the 'unwell' are able to return to and take up again their own particular way of life and are able to exercise their own particular abilities.

I am also reminded of Hannah Arendt, who said that “the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all.”

So we are left with a situation where, to centralise the lived experience of a person, we must turn to that most incommunicable of experiences. Perhaps, ability to listen and acknowledge the life-world of each person can show us the way. Ultimately, we must also come to the realisation that there is perhaps no strict boundary between illness and wellness, that these states are not exclusionary, but overlap and co-exist.