"Etymologically speaking, the word health means nothing other than 'a state of wholeness.' Any conception of health that depends on separating a person’s physical, mental, emotional, familial, social, and spiritual being, cannot truly be health in the deepest sense.

Physical health, for example, is impossible if you harbor burning resentments. It is impossible to be completely healthy when your relationships are not healthy. It is impossible to have completely healthy relationships when the society in which they are embedded is sick. Nor can our society be healed without also healing its relationship to the Earth.

Therefore, even the most physically oriented practice, if sincere, inexorably extends into every corner of life: relationships, means of livelihood, diet, social interaction, and political activity.

The reverse is also true: no genuine healing of a society or the planet is possible without a concomitant transformation on the individual level. Even if the planetary environment were miraculously restored, in the absence of a spiritual transformation we would just go about ruining it again.

Our poisoned world is a refection of our poisonous thoughts and feelings. You can’t build a solid house on a rotten foundation, and our minds are the foundation of our common world. Yes, we must address the crisis of the Earth, but at the same time we must also address the source of that crisis in ourselves.

The same goes for social change: if, say, a utopian socialist state were imposed without eliminating the roots of greed and competitiveness in each one of us, the old injustices would quickly reappear. In fact, one could argue that all such attempts have failed precisely because a social revolution cannot revolutionize the deepest reaches of the human heart; that the urge to power, to domination, to profit can only be cleansed from the inside out."

~~Charles Eisenstein, from his book The Yoga of Eating: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self