Healing as a process. Think of the White Rabbit as a metaphor. Like the White Rabbit, healing involves engaging with the surrounding environment, yielding patiently to the forces of nature while maintaining a steadfast and invisibly still presence. Combined, a rabbit and the color white are an emblem for starting fresh with renewed growth and the kind of radiance that recovery can bring over time. Like the White Rabbit, healing pushes deep and reaches up and out in a process that can seem invisible if you don’t know what to look for or static if you don’t have faith. Healing is an everyday miracle that mixes curiosity, gentleness, strength, listening, seeing, feeling, responding, waiting, faith, luck, and mystery and that guides a person back to a well-balanced, integrated body, mind, and spirit in support of a vibrant and healthy life. Like the ancient Taoist Yin Yang symbol, it is interactive, interconnected, and a sometimes opposing and resisting process that can move first one direction, then another. Sometimes it is simple. Sometimes complex. As patients and healers, we want alternatives to choose from. Some cures will work for many, but no one cure works for everyone. We are all too unique; too full of quirks and contradictions with our individual histories, DNA, lifestyles, and karmas. We at White Rabbit Institute of Healing™ aim to provide intelligent and informed alternatives. And our approach to healing is to support a balanced life with treatment protocols that encourage change and transition from an imbalanced, diseased state to a balanced and thriving state. This beautiful mission of ours is truly both an art and a science.

There is a magic and an alchemy of healing that takes place when the healer and patient are ready. Sometimes they take that step together, just the two, but often it is accomplished with the help of others: family, friends, knowledgeable colleagues and other helpful resources. Here at White Rabbit Institute of Healing™, we strive to be a place of gathering for those interested in being well. Our resources, courses, and membership are available to anyone interested in health, well-being, and balancing the body, mind, and spirit. Be Healthy. Be Happy. Be Whole. Be Free.

Our Structure, Symbols, and Colors:

We are an institute.

• An institute is an organization founded to promote a cause.
• An institute is for learning, especially for technical subjects.
• An institute has deep roots and is firmly established or fixed.
• An institute is an organization that begins or initiates and trains or instructs.
• An institute is a gathering place for a collection of principals.
• And finally, an institute is invested with the spiritual charge of benefice or the care of souls.

Our primary symbols are the circle, a leaf, and most especially, a white rabbit. Our primary colors are red, green and white.

The image of a White Rabbit merges the best of the meanings for the color white and the energies of a rabbit. Rabbits have long been a symbol of abundance, joy, health, shamanic journeys, longevity, rebirth, immortality, facing fears, science, the natural world, shape sifting, intuition, psyche abilities, spontaneity, stillness, fertility, the moon, and so much more. In light, the color white is the source color for all other colors. It is a symbol of cleanliness, transcendence, fresh beginnings, and radiance. The image of a White Rabbit becomes the embodiment of purity, light, health, goodness, safety and illumination. It becomes an icon of perfection, faith, healing, and the integration of all colors and healing modalities.

Rabbits are a symbol of hope, renewal, and new opportunities. They are vulnerable and closely associated with Mother Earth and the Moon.  In many cultures around the world, from Japan to Mexico to Britain, the rabbit is said to live on the moon; the dark shadowy features of the moon look like a rabbit, and within the moon’s full cycle of 28 days, young rabbits are ready to leave their nests and go out on their own.

The image of a rabbit is an emblem for shamanic journeys. These are the journeys that a person takes to enter the spirit world in search of healing, answers, and wisdom. Rabbits dive down into tunnels into the earth and pop up again in new, far-away places. They are able to move around in the dark and “unmarked” territory of the earth, the spirit world, and the unconscious. They are most often seen at dawn and dusk, the times between day and night. The image of a rabbit can be a sign to seers and to those with physic powers. Rabbits often become their guides to the spirit worlds, helping them to bring back healing knowledge and instruction.

In Native American cultures, rabbits are considered guides to help a person face their fears in order to bring about transformation, renewal, and the ability to move forward again—all of which are aspects of the healing process. These ancient cultures understood the rabbit to be a form of the “Trickster,” zig-zagging his way through danger to safety.

For the Ancient Egyptians, rabbits were a symbol of the concept of being. They were perceived as being androgynous, shifting back and forth between the sexes.

Carvings of rabbits eating grapes and figs appear in both Ancient Greek and Roman tombs where they are the symbol of life, death, and rebirth. In Greco-Roman myths, rabbits represented romantic love, lust, abundance, and fertility. The herbalist Pliny the Elder recommended rabbit meat as a cure for sterility and said eating the meat would enhance sexual attraction for up to nine days afterwards. Rabbits were sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility. Artemis, the goddess of wild places and the hunt, protected them; baby rabbits were not to be killed but left to her protection. Both cultures viewed the giving of a rabbit as a gift of love or a token to promote fertility.

The Celtic goddess Eostre, associated with the moon (and the source of our name for the Christian holiday Easter), was a symbol for winter turning to spring as well as the cycles of life, death, and rebirth. She was also a shape-shifter, turning the moon into a rabbit at each full moon. These attributes led to the use of the rabbit for divination and other shamanic practices.

Early Christians viewed rabbits as a symbol of a prayerful life, as a sitting rabbit often holds its two front paws together in a prayer-like gesture. How very still it sits, contemplating its next move. White rabbits were a symbol of virginity and purity and can often be seen in images with the Madonna or Virgin Mary.

An ancient symbol of three interlocking rabbits in a circle is found running through Europe and Asia (the centers of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), with the earliest known example being found in a Buddhist cave temple in China dating from 581-620 CE. They were associated with femininity, fertility, longevity, death, and rebirth.

The Chinese consider the rabbit an important symbol that is invoked each year during the Chinese New Year celebrations. As a symbol of abundance, fertility, sensitivity, and artistry, the rabbit is considered a portent of good fortune. The rabbit is associated with mixing the elixir of immortality, and female rabbits are said to become pregnant just by the touch of the light of the full moon or by crossing water by moonlight. People born in the year of the Rabbit in Chinese astrology are considered to be intelligent, intuitive, gracious, kind, loyal, sensitive to beauty, peace-loving, and possibly prone to moodiness. In an old Buddhist legend from India, the Lord Buddha was said to be a hare in an early incarnation, who was traveling with an ape and a fox. These three were visited by the god Indra, disguised as a hungry beggar who decided to test them. They each went in search of food, and only the hare returned empty handed, so he built a fire and jumped into it, sacrificing himself as food for the beggar. The beggar turned back into his real form as a god, and as a reward, turned the rabbit into the moon.

In Vietnam, rabbits are a symbol of innocence and youthfulness.

In early European traditions, carrying a rabbit’s foot was a well-known totem or talisman for good luck. An old English remedy for troubles dating back to 1875 suggested chanting the phrase, “Hare before, trouble behind.” And the well-known phrase, “mad as a March hare” comes from the leaping and boxing of hares during the mating season.

The author Lewis Carroll famously included a white rabbit in his tale Alice in Wonderland, as did Beatrix Potter in her story The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Likewise Richard Adam’s in his book Watership Down. These and many other stories take advantage of our love of rabbits, for their cunning, wit, and gentleness.

In Western science, rabbits are studied and used for dissection as they have similar anatomies to the human body. They are also prone to a number of ailments that are very similar to diseases affecting humans (including cystic fibrosis and cholera), making them prime candidates for testing the efficacy of new drugs aimed at curing these ailments.

From East to West and through the Ancient, Shamanic, and Traditional approaches to seeking well-being, the rabbit is a powerful icon of health, joy, transition, longevity, abundance, and mystery. Full of spirit and mischief, this creature can help guide you on your journey to a healthier lifestyle that fully integrates your body, mind, and spirit.

A picture is worth over two thousand words…