Natural healing falls short of the ideal capitalist model, which is part of the appeal. Remove financial motivation, and you’re left with something closer to altruism. Monastic medicine (known in Germany as Klosterheilkunde), developed by monks and nuns, was borne from the motivation to help people, not to create repeat business.
Body and Spirit of Monastic Medicine
As our quasi-free market medical system treats discrete diagnosable physical or psychiatric symptoms without consideration for the whole of the person’s actual life, a renewed interest in retrieving monastic traditions is sprouting up through the cracks in the system.
Curing the body and caring for the soul is a notion that needs to return to the system at-large. But for now, this is something that we must do for ourselves.
Modern Monastic Medicine in Germany
Since we have no singular, dominant culture here that embraced monastic medicine as part of its history, we look to our roots in Europe to rekindle this relationship. Germans are exploring old forms of treatment, by way of monastic medicine and Traditional German Herbal Medicine. Many of such were never fully abandoned because the legacy of natural medicine has been carried on through the culture.
Revisiting Long Lost Traditions
“Nature is the best pharmacy” -Sebastian Kneipp
Spiritual treatments focusing on the spirit mind body connection have proliferated and are achieving validation within the mainstream medical community. Within the tradition of monastic medicine, we believe there is a wealth of old knowledge full of potential to improve our lives.
Together with the momentum of a growing movement to incorporate these traditional, natural remedies and ideas into modern medicine, we are poised to bridge the great divide and regain what we have lost along the way.
Hildegard’s Role
This brings us back to who Hildegard of Bingen was, a formidable champion of medieval medical treatments. Though she died more than fifty years before the Inquisition started, her lifetime corresponded with the secularization of medicine away from the Church.
Yet Hildegard and her nuns refused to abandon medical treatment and scholarship. In fact, the only two medical books written in the West during the twelfth century, are both attributed to Hildegard: Physica and Causae et Curae.
Hildegard’s Cure
For Hildegard, true healing couldn’t occur from an outer source alone. Hildegard of Bingen medicine was a multidimensional process, including the unity of spirit mind body.
Above all, Hildegard believed that burying human potential, inevitably created pathology. So we look to the past, the practice of monastic medicine, to better understand our path forward.
We invite you to join us, to unlock your potential to become the whole, healthy person you know you can be.