The human body is remarkably powerful and intuitive. The manifestations of physical symptoms in our bodies such as symptoms, pain, cravings, and feelings in our gut, all serve as indicators that something may be off balance. Since our bodies can communicate in that way, and have the extraordinary ability to heal themselves, it is our job to listen. I want to teach my clients to how heal themselves and be a part of the change in the way food is viewed.
Learning to listen to our bodies takes time, practice, and patience. By doing this, we are able to reduce the need for conventional medicine, and, in turn, begin to benefit from viewing food as preventative medicine. Food can also act as information, like when we experience allergic reactions or bloating, or when we finally begin to have steady energy and a clear mind. Treating symptoms as a separate entity is a means of delaying that reversal and therefore, we stay sick, and are at a much higher risk for permanent damage.
Beyond assessing and suppressing symptoms for our comfort in daily function, the disease process must be reversed. In western medicine, little thought is given to the cause of a diagnosis (which in reality, is just a bunch of symptoms, best categorized), and therefore things like allergies to food, pollution, and emotional environmental changes are not deeply considered. The education of conventional medicine seems to replace many autonomous minds with the concept of treatment vs. cure.
I became engrossed in the simple concept of bioindividuality– a tailored approach to healing. Beyond physical health, integrative medicine is the avenue for the idea of healing the interdependent parts of the whole person; fundamentally, the physical and emotional, the yin and yang. Yin and Yang cannot exist independently. These are the balanced forces within ones’ own body. Yin represents femininity, passivity, darkness, shadow, cold, and negativity. Yang represents masculinity, activeness, light, growth, hot, and positivity. The swirl represents movement, to view things in relation to their whole.
We have to focus on treating the whole person, not just the disease. With the dramatic increase in autoimmune disease, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and even developing allergies, it is important to look at the changes in our society – the process in which we grow and manufacture our food, the heavy use of pesticides and herbicides, the perpetual rise of industrial and automotive pollution, and genetic modification which is causing the contamination of other crops, killing bees and harming biodiversity, and no longer allowing farmers to harvest the seeds from those plants.
What being a Health Counselor means to me is engaging myself in a continuous learning practice with an open mind; having an enthusiastic approach to the exposure of new information and developing theories for the benefit of my work, and my clients, and my personal growth.