Healing Requires Your Full Participation
Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash
There is a tacit agreement in Western medicine that goes something like this:
“We can solve your problem without your participation.”
In this culture, this is how we’re trained.
We’re trained that our bodies are mostly going to do what they’re going to do — they work or they don’t. And when something isn’t working, we take our body to the “body experts” who run diagnostics, consult their manuals, and give us something to fix it.
Ta da!
Except… we’re in an epidemic of chronic disease. So we know this approach doesn’t actually work.
It does beautifully for some things:
You have strep throat, take antibiotics, and within 48 hours it’s like nothing happened.
You have a UTI, take antibiotics, and by the next day you can pee without pain again.
In these kind of situations your participation isn’t required for the medicine to work beyond a visit to the doctor’s office. So it’s natural that we start believing that this is how medicine works.
Acute care can look like this in a Chinese medicine, too:
You sprained your back yesterday.
You can’t sleep since an emotional shock last week.
You’re constipated after overindulging at a birthday party.
These are similarly “one-and-done” scenarios. You come in, receive treatment, maybe take herbs for a few days, and you’re better.
But what about when the strep throat keeps returning?
When the UTIs becomes chronic?
When your sleep issues started months or years ago?
When constipation or back pain is a lifelong pattern?
That’s a different story.
At this level — the level of your day-to-day experience of being alive inside your body — healing requires your participation.
There might be a quick pill to suppress your symptoms, but it’s unlikely there’s one to resolve them.
So what does participation look like?
It’s different for everyone, but it always includes:
Cultivating awareness and attention.
Taking an interest in not just healing, but generating health.
Noticing cause and effect in your own body:
When I eat this, I feel that.
When I rest, when I move, when my cycle changes — I notice this pattern.
Participation also means that when you return to your practitioner, you come in the spirit of partnership. You’ve made some changes. You’ve taken the herbs or supplements. You’ve reflected. You have insights to share about what you have or haven’t noticed since your last meeting
As practitioners of Chinese medicine, we fall in the class of those aforementioned “body experts.”
But you are the expert on your own body.
My job is to use my expertise to help you listen, understand, and respond to your body more skillfully, and to match your symptoms with best tools to support real change.
You’re the one who knows how you feel.
You’re the one who wants to feel better.
I’m here to help you get there — to become a more skilled custodian of your own health so you can build the happy, healthy life you aspire to.
✅ Want to go deeper? Watch the full video version here.
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