Developing Relational Consciousness in Preventative Healthcare

Relational consciousness was proposed as an explanation of spirituality by British researchers Hay (2000) and Nye (1998). It refers to the conscious awareness of connections each person has with self, others, environment (nature), and divine. Interestingly, these same components map onto the indigenous Māori health model, Te whare tapa whā (Durie, 1985; Durie, 1994) frequently used in Aotearoa New Zealand. In addition to attending to the wellbeing of mind and emotions and the physical body, the other dimensions of this model include respect for spirituality, social connectedness, and relationship with the land. In this article, these indigenous Māori indicators of hauora/wellbeing are mapped onto the dimensions of relational consciousness to build a case for their universality. The third component of this argument is the inclusion of the theory of universal oneness of consciousness that is emerging within contemporary quantum theory. In relation to preventative healthcare, this article argues for a theoretical and pragmatic move away from historic polemic narratives that perpetuate perceptions of an artificial separation between mind and body, self and other. It also argues for the need to evolve from endemic narratives in healthcare that separate individuals from their social relationships, their physical environment, and their experiences of the spiritual. To embed the quantum scientific paradigm in our understanding of human health I argue that we need to move our practices and concepts away from working with ‘parts’ of people, and recognise the interconnectedness of human physiology, psychology, spirituality, relationally and the natural environment. This article offers an extension of the heuristic framework of relational consciousness by adding core components of mindfulness theory. These practices can facilitate development of intentional awareness of the interconnectedness between what we experience as the separate realities of self and everything else. This thesis is anchored to Bohm’s (1973) beautiful work on the implicate and explicate order of things, which points to the dismantling of the a priori subject/object premise, and instead contending for the relevance of these constructs only post-wave form collapse (Zaghi, 2024). The combination of this ontological premise together with an embodied mechanism for its outworking offers a new paradigm in preventative healthcare.