A Vision of Health
This chapter articulates the LOHAS vision of health as a three-part holistic model of self, society, and the natural world. In turn, “holistic” has been described in LOHAS more through Eastern perspectives rather than Western religious traditions in that it presupposes a state of interconnectedness of all phenomena—mind and matter, animal and human, global cultures and ecosystems. For example, the holistic worldview of Buddhism (a frequently called-upon tradition in LOHAS literature), understands that interdependence means that “humanity is only one actor” in the environment and that all actors must remain in balance for the system to be healthy. But this flies in the face of late consumer culture, where the individual reigns supreme, and where LOHAS is predominantly lodged. The final section examines how that problem is overcome, how Mother Nature becomes intertwined with the healed self as part of the healing and a vital component of the model of holistic health. It shows how healing the self becomes exonerated from the “narcissism” of the New Age and instead becomes reframed as the stepping stone to a collective good, capable of initiating global transformation based on the notion of holistic health.