One of my motivations for helping people use Ayurveda to find the *root* of their health problem is knowing that we all have the power to heal ourselves, deep inside us. Sometimes, we just need a supportive witness to our story; and then we are ready to make a change that will help us get well. Sometimes healing comes from simply coming to terms psychologically with our health situation, prior to, or instead of, the actual ending of a condition or disease.
Sometimes, surgery is the right 'next step' in a healing journey and Ayurvedic supports can be used to alleviate the side-effects of opening up the body. And sometimes, a well-tended death is the healing we've been looking for in our life story or the story of our family. Miracles abound in many settings.
"Re-organizational Healing" and "Narrative Medicine" are among the newer frameworks being used in 21st-century discussion of Western approaches to medicine that dovetail nicely with my experience of healing and health, personally and professionally, over the last twenty years. They bridge the gap between allopathy's emphasis on the physical substances involved in medicine, and traditional medicine's concern for tracking their actions, however invisible, and the movement of subtle but specific 'humours:' in the patient, their disease, and in their participation in the outcomes that can be called recovery or 'cure.'
How magnificent that we are at this historical juncture, holding the wisdom of all systems of knowledge at our disposal - both as patients and as healers!
