How to Have Enlightened Healthcare

If you’re American (and probably even if you’re not), you’re aware how our health care system may not serve our evolving exploration of wellness.

From my perspective two of the biggest shifts from conventional medicine and conventional holistic medicine into enlightened health care are:

Taking a family-based approach as opposed to an individual-based approach
Education as opposed to treatment

You have probably shifted this in your life to some degree already. I’m inviting you to incorporate the shift your beliefs into actions.

As an inquiry, I ask:

Why do we treat individuals instead of families?

If the household isn’t eating seasonally, no individual family member will experience peak vitality and wellness. One member may develop allergies, another depression, a third have a tough PMS/menstrual cycle, a fourth comes home with an asthma diagnosis.

Can we find an underlying pattern within the family’s diet and lifestyle that is out of sync with natural rhythms and seasonal cycles?

What is out of balance—a a bunch of individuals, or a family, or a culture?

If the family food and lifestyle choices are out of balance, we should treat that as the root of the imbalance primarily, and address the individual needs secondarily.

Understanding the different needs of the family members is what Ayurveda calls prakruti, or individual constitution. If you know your constitution, and teach your children about their constitution, you understand your unique needs and aggravations. You can make better choices accordingly. When we know the constitution of each of our family members we can help each other make better choices, or at least not aggravate each other as much!

On the second shift—educating primarily and treating secondarily—we find what is largely happening in yoga communities worldwide: people are taking their health into their own hands, supporting great teachers who present meaningful knowledge in a way that you can incorporate into your life.

(Doctor doesn’t always know best, especially when Doctor’s tools are primarily a prescription pad, a laser, and a knife).

Through exposing yourself to world-class yoga teachers you have found a whole other world of tools to know yourself and your Self intimately, and have awakened to a world of holistic healing modalities. This has happened through putting yourself in a classroom.

Simply on a cost breakdown, educating individuals in a collective setting cannot compare to having a one-on-one session with a health care provider. It’s simply unaffordable. Furthermore, it isolates your problems into just your experience, and not a common experience that is happening throughout a common culture.

The classroom approach has the benefit of (1) learning in community, and (2) a lower cost per person educated.