Confronted with the complexities of lifestyle and stress-related degenerative diseases, addictive disorders, anxiety, depression and their physical counterparts, dissatisfaction with the over use of pharmacological and interventionist therapies, a rising antipathy with professional arrogance and authority along with a growing demand for high level health conventional medicine has finally reached its limitations. There is now a broad based consensus that change is necessary and desirable.

But the current pace of change has allowed both practitioners and the general public little opportunity for reflection and evaluation. As a result there has been a lack of significant discourse in regard to the extent and the direction of change. Motivated by very real concerns yet conditioned by old patterns of thought, fired up with enthusiasm and hope yet compelled by complex professional and financial interests, and carried along by a seemingly unstoppable momentum, we simply assume that our current initiatives are taking us in a beneficial and innovative direction. As a result, we have failed to ask the critical questions whose answers can either reassure us about our current efforts, or cause us to reconsider them. Consider these two simple but basic questions:

• What perspectives do we wish to see expressed in a reconfigured approach to health and healing?
• Do our current initiatives reflect and support the development of these perspectives?

Past and Future Gathered Together
The first question, one that deals with the articulation of a newly emerging world view, must be considered in the context of our unique historical moment. Today we find ourselves living in an extraordinary in-between time, a sort of gap in time that has been created by the decline of our previously unquestioned optimism and faith in the 500 year tenure of modernism, and the slow and as yet uncertain emergence of a new post modern viewpoint. As practitioners and individuals in search of a more meaningful approach to health and healing, we rarely concern ourselves with these larger cultural movements, issues we usually leave to historians, social scientists, and philosophers. Yet at times of great transformation we cannot afford to do so. Only to the extent that we can accurately comprehend the historical forces that are driving and shaping our times can we effectively embrace and empower these forces rather than oppose them with potentially misguided efforts. With this in mind it becomes incumbent on us to inform our efforts with an understanding of our extraordinary historical moment, an understanding the can enable us to best answer the two questions we have proposed.