Are we all now on the same mind, body, spirit page?

Have you attended a Mind Body Spirit Festival lately? The festivals are experiencing phenomenal growth in popularity in New Zealand. There'll likely be one coming to a town near you.
A fortnight ago thousands of people attended the Mind Body Spirit Festival in Brisbane. There were a surprising number of Millennials and Gen Ys amongst the Baby Boomers and Gen Xs in attendance, as ready to explore the ideas of philosophy and religion, as they were to try out the organic tea or get their 'reading'.
I got the impression that there was general agreement between those on stands and within their vibrant audience that health is about very much more than treating a body.
Quite a few I spoke to had pondered the mental nature of health, had heard about the medical research into the effects of spiritual and religious sentiments such as forgiveness and gratitude.
Don't get me wrong. The majority of these people harboured a healthy scepticism of anything nonsensical or obviously geared to a purely money-making concern.
The astounding thing is that these were your average men and women. Just like the lady I met today. While her job was in real estate, she confided when I mentioned that I was a health blogger, that she'd investigated kinesiology and other alternative therapies and knew how important her thoughts were to her wellbeing.
It's not surprising to learn that there's a growing use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in New Zealand (http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/alternative-health-therapies), and some of these practises recognise the interconnectedness of our thoughts with our health.
Suddenly results from thought-based treatments such as placebos, epigenetics, psychotherapy and meditation are big news.
A medical practitioner who turned from Western medical treatments when they failed to help her, took matters into her own hands. Through her research, Dr Lissa Rankin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tu9nJmr4Xs) discovered that traditional health care was missing a couple of crucial insights:
taking responsibility for your own wellbeing is essential; and that we need to care for the whole package – our mind, heart and soul.
Rankin's book Mind Over Medicine advances understanding of the great conundrum of the past 150 years - how our mind, bodies and spirit interconnect.
She found that thoughts, feelings and beliefs can alter the body's physiology, discerned that loneliness, pessimism, depression, fear and anxiety damage the body, while intimate relationships, gratitude, meditation and creativity turn on the body's self-healing processes.
Theologian, author, and founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy wrote and taught about the mental nature of disease way back in the 19th century.
She proved that a Mind-based (or God-based) view of health and life leads to cures in both mind and body.
Eddy described some of the states of thought that might generate disease in her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which endorses what many people like Rankin recognise as harmful to health today.
She wrote, "Hatred, envy, dishonesty, fear, and so forth, make a man sick, and neither material medicine nor Mind can help him permanently, even in body, unless it makes him better mentally, and so delivers him from his destroyers."
For me, it's imperative to recognise my spiritual identity, which Jesus exemplified and explained so well, and can be nurtured and discovered through daily prayer and meditation. I find that this also keeps the body healthy, as well as repairing and healing.
It looks like many are now 'on the same page', sharing the profound knowledge that happiness and health are dependent on a healthy mind, body and spirit.

Kay Stroud writes for APN media on the connection between consciousness and wellbeing. She's also the spokesperson for Christian Science in Northern Australia @ www.qldhealthblog.com