(Your) Two Medicines Are Better Than One
(Aquarius magazine, February, 2009)
(Your) Two Medicines Are Better Then One!
By Aumdoc (Richard J. Clofine, D.O.)
My premise for today is that we all practice two types of medicine, Health Medicine and Personal Medicine. I propose that consciously engaging these two medicines, with an open mind and a flexible attitude, helps us to navigate the modern world more sanely, and creates a healthier more joyful and fulfilled life that has deep stores of vitality.
“Health Medicine” refers to my medical degree as well as my alternative medical training. This training provides me a wide spectrum of tools to help people create and maintain healthier lives and relationships. To sanely live in a perpetually changing state (the modern world) we need to optimize function (our bodies birth right) through flexible attitudes (learning to go with the flow). A flexible style of creating health is most effective when built upon the stable and grounding foundation of a healthy lifestyle. Over a lifetime it is own lifestyle choices that are the most powerful tools we have to create health.
Healing Partnerships with good health practitioners is a great benefit. Whether it be your physician, reflexologist, cardiac surgeon or herbalist, developing professional relationships with those who can help us is very important. The vision and delivery of modern American medicine is broken. For many individuals engaging modern medicine does not meet their needs, especially concerning prevention and wellness. Holistic physicians are in an excellent position to help access the good in modern medicine and integrate it with alternative perspectives and tools.
Holistic health is the unlimited and unimpeded free flow of Life Force Energy through body, mind and spirit. Holistic physicians also consider Unconditional Love as life’s most powerful medicine (www.holisticmedicine.org). Healing Partnerships should honor your story and make you feel heard; are service not product oriented; they set proper expectations around care, explain options and avoid dogma; they encourage your empowerment as well as the development of many modalities of support.
“Personal Medicine” is about building personal power and living a life that is authentic. We develop Personal Medicine by more clearly understanding and manifesting the unique skills, talents and potentials that are the birthright of each one of us. This is my eclectic interpretation of the “medicine” that Native American, and other indigenous cultures, refer to. This Personal Medicine is yours alone, it is about whom you are as a person and how you carry yourself in the world. It is about your talk (your words) and whether you walk them.
Building our Personal Medicine means living all aspects of our life authentically, consistent with who we are and moving towards who we want to be. “Living in our medicine” fertilizes our lives with happiness, contentment and vitality which support the cultivation of a life worth living and its fruit, a delicious fruit that nourishes friends, family and the world at large.
The modern world disconnects us from, and disenchants us with, the natural rhythms and cycles of Mother Earth. One way of building personal power is fostering a reconnection to Mother Earth. While the destination is the same, an urban dweller will map out a somewhat different route to the goal than the jungle Indian would.
Our modern condition also disconnects us from our imagination, dreams, visions and the creative process. These are things we might have felt more connected to as children; or at a certain time or place in our life. These gifts are suppressed by our upbringing, peers and other cultural pressures to conform to the neurosis and limitations of the consensus society within which we live. When we lose these connections (to Mother Earth and to our internal creative juices) we leak passion and vitality, we lose medicine. This slow leak over time can have profound effects and can negatively impact our experience of life. As a physician I feel this loss of medicine is directly connected to the epidemic level of fatigue and depression experienced by Americans.
Personal Medicine reconnects us to, and re-enchants us with, the experience of living. In this medicine are the things in you love to do and the people you long to be with. It nurtures you to explore life, create new things, honor Mother Earth and love more. It is about following your hearts song which usually attracts others that sing in harmony. That is the start of a supportive community of friends. And YOUR tribe is a great crucible to contain the process of developing YOUR personal medicine and health.
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