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What does Holistic mean?

Holism: the whole is more than the sum of its parts

(Treccani Dictionary)

Having a holistic conception of a person means always considering him as a complex unity-totality, which cannot be reduced to a simple assembly of his constituent parts. Unlike a machine, where the individual parts form and explain the whole in a deterministic sense, it is only starting from a higher principle that in the living organism it is possible to understand the development of its secondary aspects.

In reality, the world around us is already holistic in itself. We are the ones who, in the determinism of our rational needs, have often reduced it to merely mechanistic explanations in order to understand some of the phenomena that surround us. However, modern physics increasingly shows us how this conception is reductive and outdated, and how it is necessary to broaden our vision to better understand the world we live in. Trying to reduce some of these concepts to extremely concise metaphors, we can say that:

«The vision of classical physics is that of a world constituted by the sum of its parts. Each of these parts can in turn be broken down into smaller parts, according to the Russian matryoshka scheme. The motion of each of these pieces can be well determined, well defined, once its initial configuration has been given (...). That is, in classical physics, "movement" is "movement from outside".
20th century physics showed, however, that if this point of view were admitted, the entropy of a physical system would become infinite as the temperature tended to zero. This is a "catastrophe" that would make the world impossible (...). To avoid this "catastrophe" it is necessary to admit that every physical object fluctuates. A metaphor is that while the classical object is a sober person, the quantum object is a drunk person, and therefore dances, oscillates, is not still on its legs. And so, in calculating the energy of any physical object, it is also necessary to consider the energy associated with these fluctuations. (...) In the last decades of the 20th century it emerged that it is possible to couple the fluctuations of matter with those of the electromagnetic field. A metaphor could be that of a group of people who are moving, each one doing their own thing (matter); if I turn on some music (field), these people gradually begin to move no longer randomly, but following the rhythm of the music»

Free translation from: Roberto Germano, Aqua. L'acqua elettromagnetica e le sue mirabolanti avventure

According to the holistic view, mind, body and spirit are intertwined and working on the body means touching the whole individual.

A holistic conception of things can be applied to many disciplines or fields. In medicine or in wellness practices, health is not seen as the simple absence of disease, but as a global well-being where body, mind, society and environment interact in an extremely connected way, and also as a psychophysical evolution, just as - in the metaphor cited above - matter does in an electromagnetic field.

There is a modern, purely Western discipline that comes close to what is a holistic approach to the individual, and it is PNEI, which stands for Psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology. By studying the physiological phenomena attributable to stress, it is now known that there is a bidirectional relationship between the psyche and biological systems, even if in general the Eastern vision of the individual at a holistic level is much deeper. Traditional oriental medicines like the Traditional Chinese Medicine have always had a holistic approach to human disease and health. Even so-called "alternative" therapeutic approaches, such as homeopathy, have a typically holistic approach.

In this perspective, the masseur is a holistic operator who looks at the person as a whole: starting from the muscles, from the individual painful states, or from the emotional sensations, everything speaks of our person, of our history.