The short answer to the question “What are the healing arts?” is it depends. This is because the term is used as a catchall for complementary and alternative practices. But, which practices are included depends on the source.

The Many Different Views

Some people and internet sites interpret the word “arts” in healing arts as the fine arts such as dance, music, and painting. So, when they say “healing arts,” they focus on creative expression and how it can contribute to healing by offering a medium for people to explore and communicate their thoughts and emotions related to their circumstances and prognosis. Listening and exploring thoughts and emotions can help release them and introduce more compassion, support, and optimism into the healing space. This enhances healing and quality of life. In other words, it uses the term “art” quite literally.

Under-appreciating Holistic Practices

Some conventional medical practices view modalities such as massage, acupuncture, meditation, Tai Chi, Reiki, and singing bowls as self-care options that complement but do not replace their conventional services. In other words, they acknowledge the soothing benefits of nature and creative expression in healing as complementary, but not primary, elements of their conventional medical service. 

For example, a psychotherapist may conduct therapy outdoors, or an addiction clinic might offer clients hikes. The connection to nature is considered beneficial but often not necessary for healing to take place.

Nevertheless, these slightly more progressive health practitioners still view the primary and critical role of their patients as complying with their health providers’ orders, getting rest, and manage stress or anxiety. The latter role is the entry point of the healing arts. The idea is that their primary function is to reduce stress and anxiety and thus support the recovery process. It’s extremely rare to find a medical practitioner who would begin treatment with the healing arts. And, they don’t incorporate them into their protocols.

In truth, the healing arts include a wide range of practices such as chiropractic, art and music therapy, homeopathy, hypnotherapy, acupuncture, massage, aromatherapy, naturopathy, various energy channeling modalities, Tai Chi, sound healing, crystal therapy, and numerous other health and wellness practices. More and more people embrace them as entry points to their healing journey even if they complement them with particular aspects of conventional medicine.

The General Public’s Increasing Interest in Healing Arts

However one describes healing arts, what’s clear is the types of practices they embody are increasingly more diverse and popular. But, while their appeal and acceptance have exploded among the general population, conventional medical circles and health insurers remain skeptical and their views significantly lag behind this trend. It’s unfortunate the general public does not have greater access to their benefits.

Defining Healing Arts

You won’t find “healing arts” in most dictionaries. And, if you search online for a definition, you might find a few definitions, but they’ll be different from one another.

The Art In In Healing Arts

One reason why it’s difficult to define healing arts is that the term stresses healing as something inexact, somewhat intractable, and ultimately personal or individual in nature. In this sense healing is kind of an art with its efficacy in the eye of the beholder. The vast array of practices that are seen as candidates for inclusion is a testament to subjectivity.

More important is the fact that some people find specific practices helpful while others do not. Some practices seem to promote healing and wellness in some circumstances but not in others. In other words, their salubrious effects are not easily incorporated into prescriptive protocols – standard tools of conventional medicine. And, the variable nature of the healing experience is challenging to monitor and measure quantitative health and wellness outcomes and causal relationships.

The Healing In Healing Arts

Healing can be defined as the process of becoming sound, healthy, and well again. Alternatively, it’s viewed as the restoration of original purity or integrity (Merriam-Webster dictionary). Notice there is nothing in either definition that implies “the how.”

It’s important to stress here that many clients and health practitioners see healing as inextricably linked to the physical body. More progressive practitioners acknowledge the importance of mental and emotional well-being as well.

However, unlike conventional providers, most holistic practitioners view a person, client, or patient as an integrated whole who is more than the sum of his/her parts. They take a whole-person approach. (See Healing the Whole Person).

For them, healing is the process that restores balance within the whole of a human system and experience. This includes all physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and energetic attributes, systems, processes, and interactions. It’s holistic.

Healing Arts Promote Self-Healing

Self-healing is essentially the notion that individuals heal themselves. Medical treatments including drugs and surgery, can initiate change and thereby facilitate healing. But, from a self-healing point of view, it’s the individual who consciously or subconsciously reestablishes a balance and heals. (see my blog post on How You Can Heal Yourself – 7 Ways to Take Charge and Do It Your Way).

A growing minority of conventional practitioners within the medical and the broader wellness community adhere to the notion and acknowledge the benefits of patient centrality as an important aspect of self-healing and recovery (National Institutes of Health and Harvard Business Review). Thus the boundaries between conventional and nonconventional are beginning to blur, albeit very gradually.

The very fact that healing arts are personal and flexible is likely what’s fueling their increasing popularity, hence evitably pulling conventional medicine along with it.

Starchaser Healing Arts Modalities

For more on the Healing Arts see my offerings and in particular my Mind-Body-Spirit Sessions and Natural Healing and Wellness Workshops

• Mind-Body-Spirit Sessions
• Energy Healing
• Coaching
• Shamanic or Embodied Practices
• Subtle Aromatherapy
• Natural Healing and Wellness Workshops
• Mind Body Spirt blog

or, contact me