White Rabbit Institute of Healing™ is dedicated to fusing Western Science, Eastern (Traditional Chinese Medicine/TCM), Ancient, Shamanic and Traditional and Herbal healing perspectives to provide you with the best healing experience possible. A well-balanced and integrated body, mind, and spirit are what supports a vibrant healthy life. As an institute, we see our role as one of introducing and integrating concepts and approaches from many differing perspectives. Here, you will discover new ideas and interesting people and specialists, as well as places, resources, and products that can help you be and stay healthy.

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.

The Rabbit: Scientifically, rabbits are a member of the Mammalia Clan, Order of Lagomorpha and of the Leporidae Family. There are eight different known genera. A male rabbit is called a “buck,” the female a “doe,” and a young rabbit a “kitten” or “kit.” The rabbit is rich in meaning and implications pertinent to any health journey, educational or otherwise.

In many ancient and contemporary cultures, rabbits are said to attract abundance, joy, love, and health. They support the intuition, are quick witted, spontaneous, fertile, and paradoxical.  Rabbits are closely associated with magic, mystery, and the worlds of faeries. They appear and disappear quickly. They are keen observers with strong reflexes. They run in fear, but are also cunning adversaries, leaping quickly in one direction and then another or sitting very still right in front of you, almost impossible to see unless they move again. Naturally, they are not easy to catch! They always seem to know where to go and when. Now you see them, now you don’t. This quality is why many Native American peoples think of rabbits as Shape Shifters.

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.

The Circle is a symbol for wholeness, emptiness and fullness, rabbit holes, gateways to new places, connections, radiance, and opportunities. In geometry, a circle is defined as a line with all its points on the same plane and in equal distance from a center point. Any point within the circle is not part of the circle, only the points on the border make up the circle. A circle is 360° degrees around. For the Chinese and many other cultures old and new, it is a symbol of eternity, completeness, movement, stillness, and possibilities. The circle can contain the symbol for Yin and Yang. This is an ancient symbol that describes opposites, inter-relatedness, interconnectedness, continuous movement and flow, and balance. A circle can be a cell or the sun or the moon or a star. The spirit of the circle is to include, create passage, and be open and available to whatever arises.

Leaves are our choice to represent life, new beginnings, herbs, natural healing processes, a healthy environment, rejuvenation, and the five senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Leaves are miracles of photosynthetic activity that changes light and energy into the carbohydrate molecules a plant uses to grow and stay healthy. The spirit of leaves is informed by the spirit of the particular plant that they belong to, but taken on their own, they also include the spirit of new growth, fulfillment, and release.

Red is the color of the heart, blood, and the “good red road” of Native American cultures. This is the road that one travels on through life. It reflects the actions you have taken and the places you have been and connects you with the Great Spirit. Red is the color of fire, happiness, transformation, and action. The color red symbolizes prosperity in many Asian cultures and the Chinese chose it as their national color. In the physics of light, the color red has the longest wavelength and on the color wheel, red is one of the three primary colors that all other colors can be made from (the other two primary colors being yellow and blue). In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), red is associated with the element of fire, which is associated with the Heart System. The spirit of red warms, moves, and brings joy.

Green is the color of life, plants, lush vegetation, and a thriving environment. It is a symbol for abundance, health, new life, and well-being. In the physics of light, green has a shorter wavelength than red. Green is created by blending the primary colors yellow and blue, the colors of the sun, water, and sky. Is it any surprise that photosynthesis, the process green leaves partake in to synthesize food, involves the absorption of light, water, and carbon dioxide through their green pigment called chlorophyll? In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), green is the color associated with the Liver System. The spirit of green is to thrive and live well.

White is the color of purity, light, goodness, safety and illumination. It represents cleanliness, faith, new beginnings, perfection, spirituality, and protection. In the physics of light, white is not considered to be a color, because it has no specific wavelength (neither does the color black). Instead, white light contains all wavelengths of visible light and is therefore, in terms of light, said to be made up of all the colors. White light shot through a prism will split into all the colors of the rainbow. (In terms of light, black is considered to be the absence of visible light.) In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), white corresponds to the element of metal and is associated with the Lung System. The Chinese also associate the color white with death. Birth arises from the dark emptiness, and death lifts us back up to the brightness or white purity of the heavens. It is a transcendent process from dark to light and ignorance to wisdom. The spirit of white is to expand, transcend, illuminate, and purify.

A picture is worth over two thousand words…