CONCLUSION

Much of the above detail might be confusing or just too much detail for some. However, it is important to realize that the pursuit of good health through proper supplementation is just not as straightfor­ward or simple as we might like it to be. Furthermore, it should be apparent that improper supplementation is not only of little or no benefit, it can be an additional source of toxicity, either through overaccumulation of supplements or by overstimulation of detoxi­fication. If this information overwhelms you or leaves you frus­trated in your pursuit of good health, seek out a health care practitioner who appears to understand the principles presented and will help you incorporate them into your lifestyle. If you choose not to do this, then at least follow the principles that make good sense to you. Some improvement in your habits of supplementation is better than leaving the entire matter unaddressed.

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162 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

predominate. Toxins can also interfere with the ability of the im­mune system to properly protect your health. The immune system is complex, and the potential interactions of toxins with different immune system cells and other components are numerous. It is commonly accepted that a strong and competent immune system is the body's most important protection against disease. Any compro­mise of the immune system through toxicity is an important factor in compromising your good health.

CONCLUSION

The regular and adequate drinking of pure water is not only an ex­tremely important factor in maintaining good health, it is also one of the easiest factors to incorporate into your lifestyle. Many toxins are difficult and expensive to avoid. Don't pass up the opportunity to eliminate one significant source of toxicity that can be completely and easily avoided without major sacrifice. Drink lots of pure water, and you not only avoid a major source of potential toxicity, you pro­mote good health and the elimination of other toxins.

 

124 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

When you add to this initial depletion the depletions that occur in modern food processing, the nutritional value of many of our food staples plummets even further. Canning, freezing, and other methods of storage take a substantial toll on nutrient content. More­over, nutrients are sometimes removed deliberately. Most grains have had the nutrients stripped out to make refined flours into com­mercially acceptable breads and cereals. The nutrients are then later sold separately as foods such as wheat germ or utilized as supple­ments in themselves. When a label says that a food is "enriched," BEWARE. This enrichment is analogous to getting robbed of $100 and being given back $10 by a sympathetic robber. When you re­ceive the $10, you have not been "enriched"; you have only been a bit less massively depleted. Also, as we shall see, the chemical forms of the nutrients that are put back into these depleted foods are often not even beneficial; in fact, they can actually be toxic.

The unfortunate bottom line is that in today's world it is almost impossible to have a diet that will meet all of your nutritional needs. However, recognizing this issue overcomes only the first hurdle in reaching optimal nutrition. Supplements are literally assaulting us daily with ever-rosier promises of how you can get everything that you need. How can you tell which claims are true and what supple­ments are really best? This chapter will be directed at helping you make this evaluation intelligently, and, hopefully, it will further assist you in your quest for the best of health through optimal nutrition.

Conclusion

To conclude, it has been argued that hope is evidenced in treatments which: 1) promote mastery, 2) provide meaning, 3) reduce anticipated isolation or alienation, and 4) increase one's sense of dignity and self-worth to face the future positively. Spiritual practices such as religious services, study of sacred texts, and prayer and meditation have the potential to accomplish these ends. In working with patients, the religious professional can choose to emphasize those aspects of the patient's spiritual tradition that are self-empowering, promoting basic human goodness and the divine self within. And since many patients already have a keen understanding of evil and sin, confession and forgiveness also can be therapeutic.

Individuals around the world derive hope from a multitude of spiritual traditions, yet to date little has been done to examine this relationship in the context of psychiatry. The examples offered in this chapter suggest that religious and spiritual traditions can offer hope through: promoting connection with something greater than the individual, promising support by divinity and community, permitting grief and the expression of complex emotions, enabling a ministry of presence, affirming the inherent worth of the each individual and his/her gifts, refraining obstacles as challenges that can be overcome, and looking to the future rather than the past.

While religion does not always foster hope, their linked psychological origins suggests that hope is built into a religious world view. The religious professional needs to approach his/her job with great care, as there is much at stake in how religion is conveyed to the individual diagnosed with a mental illness. An approach centered on human depravity and an authoritarian God can take away personal agency rather than promote it. In contrast, a perspective centered on the loving, forgiving divine nature within all of us is wholesome, healing, and entertains a hopeful future. Fostering hope is a core feature of any spiritual intervention, and we now turn to ways it can be fostered in cases of mood and anxiety.

Conclusion

A theme in the examples presented here is creativity as both a search for self and a search for the sacred. We have seen that the creative process involves connecting with one's inner self, that is, finding and expressing one's inner voice. One might ask, What is it about creative expression that promotes finding one's voice? Earlier I suggested that both creativity and mysticism involve the paradoxical co-existence of "I" and "not-I." In Milner's work (1950), for example, we saw that art can be seen in terms of its capacity for fusing, or con-fusing subject and object and then making a new division of these. Mystical experience, moreover, involves an undoing of the split into subject and object that is the basis of logical thinking. As stated, for Milner the importance of creativity and mysticism alike is that they undo the overfixed separation of self and other, self and universe, caused by tyranny of the conscious mind.

In addition, the work of Mahler demonstrated that self consciousness and self absorption are the two polarities with which we move, with varying ease and in varying degrees. We live in the tension between self and other, connection and separateness, the entirety of our lives. Creative expression, I have suggested, is a vehicle for negotiating this dialectic between self and other, and in this capacity it serves a healing role.

In the above sections we observed that creativity at times allows for a new notion of self to emerge, even a different identity. Flo, for example, used art to

Spirituality and Creativity: Theory and Practice 53

recreate herself at the time of her father's death. Hildegard's visions allowed her to express a suppressed self in a patriarchal world. Frida tried to make sense of her suffering in the context of her gender and culture. In each case, the self is understood in relation to a larger community. Sometimes creativity expresses less "I" and more "not I," or merging with a larger whole, as we found in the mystical experiences recounted by Wuthnow, e.g., the playwright who had an experience of cosmic consciousness that led him to write plays promoting social change. Einstein's music gave him insights into the theory of relativity - a cosmic order or order beyond the individual "I." Finally, dance can also express the merging of "I" and "not I," for through body-centered mysticism the dancer can sense being part of a larger life force.

In sum, creativity can loosen the hold on a fixed "I," help one negotiate a different "I," facilitate temporary loss of "I," assist one in regaining a suppressed "I." Finally, the sacred dimension within art, as Viladesau has suggested, can be understood in a number of ways, among them explicitly or implicitly. As Pargament has pointed out, the sacred can be found in the self: e.g., virtues, a divine spark, a soul. In attempting to know God or the cosmos, it seems, we are attempting to know ourselves. Creative expression, as a means of striving towards something beyond the moment, of expressing deep emotion, and of exploring spiritual questions such as the meaning of suffering, is one such medium for both self and sacred knowledge. As such, creative expression is also a source of hope, a subject to which we now turn.