Hello, dear friends. Full disclosure: I love to read, but I never read. Well, never is a strong word, but I have 6 books I can think of off the top of my head that I've either cracked open, read a couple pages, and had to put down, or are just sitting on my coffee table waiting for the stars to align, time to freeze, and me to turn off Netflix (all equally unlikely). Which brings me to my first question: why should you read this blog if I can't even get my act together long enough to read a book?
Well hopefully, it's at least 50% shorter than an entire book. So there's one barrier we've overcome.
Secondly, I use 3 guiding principles with every interaction I have with my patients, as well as when I write: humor, hunger, and healing.
It is my belief that humor and tragedy are not as diametrically opposed as we think, in fact, they need each other. No doubt, health concerns are frightening, stressful, frustrating, humiliating, and/or tragic. Which is all the more reason that we seek to find those pieces of our lives worth smiling over when we trudge through this mess. The brain thrives on optimism, because optimism requires some heavy-duty creativity in the face of a major poop storm (and yeah, I definitely just said poop. My blog, my rules.)
Hunger is a crucial factor because I am always asking patients what they hope being healthy will help them accomplish, put another way, what does their spirit hunger for that it is so starved due to poor health? When consulting on nutritional practices, cravings, comfort foods, and hunger excess or lack can paint a vivid picture for me, the practitioner.
And healing-- well that should be a fairly obvious principle to aspire to. However, when I was pondering these principles, my darling friend asked me, "why not just say 'health' instead of healing?" And he had a point. Grammatically, Humor, Hunger, and Health are all nouns, so why are we coming out of nowhere with health's weird gerund cousin? But health is so overused in this land of bloggery and social media humble-braggery.
My vision is to convey a formula of sorts: Humor + Hunger = Healing. If we keep our heart light and open before all else, identify our goals and what we need, we can finally begin to heal.
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