Here’s what I mean: many naturopathic physicians focus on how different our daily lives are from our “more natural” ancestors. Hence, much of the focus of our medicine and training is on eliminating a lot of the fun things in life in order to make our bodies hum a little bit better. We ask patients to radically change their diets (no wheat, no dairy, cut down on alcohol and meat, etc.) and have them do basic remedies like fasting and castor oil packs.
My confession is that I’ve never been very good at these things. I don’t limit my own diet (”everything in moderation!”), I don’t like taking a bunch of pills, and I only succeed in staining our furniture with the castor oil packs.
Therefore, I’ve never felt comfortable asking my patients to make dramatic lifestyle changes, or fill their cupboards with lots of vitamins.
Instead, my focus has been on looking beyond surface solutions to find deeper causes of disease. I figured that if I kept asking and investigating, I’d eventually get to a level that, when healed with relatively small changes, could make very large changes in everything else.
After working with emotions, physical symptoms, and even the connection that many patients feel with their spiritual practice, I’ve come to some eye-opening conclusions.
I found that in order to truly heal all the levels of the body, the first thing that needs to be addressed is the mind- or more accurately, our two minds.
Did you know that you have two minds? Most people don’t, for the obvious reason that it doesn’t feel like we have two minds. We walk through this world with what feels like one mind- our own. It brings us our sensual perceptions and our many thoughts and feelings, and it is the part of us that can say, “I am!”
However, research is providing us with some concrete evidence that what we know, sense, and feel, isn’t always so. In fact, rather than a true reflection of the outside world, our perception may be a hybrid of two distinctly different views that are both housed within brains and bodies.
In the next few newsletters, I would like to tell the story of this dynamic tension between our two minds. It’s a story that starts when we are very young and can tell us everything we need to know about how we get sick and how we can start to heal.
The details of this story have helped me create, over the past couple of years, a powerful way of stimulating the healing process in a medical setting. I am excited to share it with you.
And if you can’t wait, please give me a call to make an appointment for your free first consult. I’ll tell you the rest of the story and help you see how it applies to your own health.