Innate Health: What it is and how to pro/cure it (Part 1)
When all else fails
“You’re the last chance saloon Dr. Tran. None of the other doctors can find out what’s wrong with me.”
These were the words of a patient who was referred to me when I was a GP in South West London. All of her tests had come back ‘inconclusive’ and the various different specialists she’d seen couldn't figure out what was the cause of her debilitating symptoms.
At that time I was also trained in the classical Daoist healing arts, with a passion for acupuncture in particular. Having listened to her presenting condition and read through her medical records, I turned to her and said:
“I can see that my colleagues have done all they can in terms of tests and referrals - and a clear explanation for your symptoms still hasn't been found. So instead of talking further about illness, I’d like to have a conversation about health instead.”
Disrupting the framework of illness
Over the past 25 years of clinical practice, I’ve seen time and again how - despite good medical care and treatment - some people get better while others do not.
From the side of the practitioner, I’ve often wondered why the same techniques, pills, potions, and protocols appear to work for some clinicians but not others. Why would practitioners who are trained to an equally high standard in the same modality and approach, produce markedly different healing results?
And from the side of the patient, there are many people who get sick and heal without any intervention - allopathic or otherwise. And there are even those who experience a spontaneous remission of all their sickness after being given a very grave diagnosis.
What is the reason for these paradoxes?
As I’ve written elsewhere, all medical systems are belief systems first. A modality or approach develops on the basis of an (often unacknowledged) paradigm or worldview.
As a given culture’s general understanding advances, and fundamental universal principles are discovered, that paradigm may be updated, allowing further innovation. Or it may remain somewhat stagnant and therefore limited.
The current framework of medical thinking regards the human body as a machine, and illness as that machine breaking down and needing to be ‘fixed’. And that underlying philosophy of materialism has also seeped into mainstream alternative medicines and therapies as well.
What is the basic thrust of materialism? Well, it's an outlook that privileges matter, and arbitrarily disregards the more ineffable aspects of our nature such as consciousness and Being.
Practically speaking, that privileged dichotomy between matter and mind is an unhelpful and inaccurate abstraction. It’s really little more than a belief - and one that is not representative of how the way things really exist.
With that framework in place, no serious breakthrough is possible at a personal and organisational level. It creates a framework of illness or pathology that is incomplete and which therefore cannot account for the numerous paradoxes outlined above.
The ‘you need fixing’ paradigm
The current medical paradigm equates illness with being broken. Procedures, pills, potions, lotions, and protocols, are therefore administered in an attempt to fix you.
But a significant problem with this approach is that it is both reductive and limiting. The patient’s rich and varied experience is reduced to the boxes and categories of the doctor’s training.
As I see it, we as clinicians must not be satisfied with fitting the patient’s experience into our limited framework. But rather to strive to become as open as possible to the genuinely profound underlying principles that govern all health and healing.
The truth is, you do not need to be fixed. And this is connected to the deeper truth that nothing is fixed or permanent in general. It’s precisely because nothing is fixed that transformation is possible.
Because of this deeper truth - we need to stop focusing exclusively on what’s wrong with the patient, and look at what’s right with them instead.
The miracle of the human body
Physiology - the miraculous way in which the body works so well day to day - is the missing piece of the puzzle hidden in plain sight.
The over-focus on sickness and what’s wrong with the body misses out on the miraculous way in which the human body not only survives but thrives.
We are the progeny of a long lineage of survivors and innovators. Just observing and marveling at how a baby grows and develops will tell you all you need about this innate capacity for development.
In fact, it’s curious that so many of us lose sight of this inbuilt capacity altogether and end up feeling stuck and limited as a consequence.
It’s also curious how we know a great deal about what the body is made of and how it works, but remarkably little about why it works at all.
For instance, surgeons know that bones will naturally reset themselves. All the practitioner has to do is assist in that natural process. Similarly, cuts and wounds will naturally heal - all we have to do is provide the necessary conditions for that to occur.
Also, consider how what you ate last night has already broken down into elementary components and used to make every part of all the cells. What is it that enables the body to orchestrate itself in such a staggeringly complex and highly orchestrated way?
In reality the body is a pulsating galaxy of activity, working for the most part without your input. We don't know why this works but we know that it works.
And this gives rise to a brand new way of relating to health and wellness: all you need to do is recognise and respond to the mysterious mechanism underpinning the body’s complex processes, and that profound mechanism will do all the heavy lifting by itself.
A natural universal intelligence
Einstein once famously said, “There are two ways we can live life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
‘Seeing’ that your life as a miracle will astound you, whereas truly ‘knowing’ that you are a miracle will transform you.
In reality there is an ineffable, numinous quality underpinning and orchestrating the complex processes of the body - a natural universal intelligence at work within each of us. And this is not at all as far out as it might initially sound.
Many of the natural laws that govern the function of our physical reality - such as gravity, electromagnetic waves, strong and weak nuclear forces - are invisible and not detectable by our ordinary senses.
This miraculous universal intelligence is also called the vital force, qi, or prana. And it is what I call innate health.
Health is not about sickness being ‘fixed’, but being radically recontextualised within a new paradigm of our innate self-healing capacity.
According to this new paradigm, practitioners and their various modalities do not create healing, but rather facilitate the inner and outer conditions for our innate capacity for healing to occur.
This requires the physician and their patient to become attuned to that innate self-healing capacity. And it is precisely that attunement which gives any treatment or techniques the genuine power to heal.
So perhaps you’ll agree that now is the time to have conversations that disrupt the framework of illness and pro/cure innate health instead.
NEW! LIVE EVENT IN LONDON
Sovereign Tea Time Live
On Sunday 11th September, join me in creating a new narrative of health and healing in the resplendent setting of Mariage Freres Tea Emporium in London's iconic Covent. This in-person half day workshop includes powerful talks, insightful tips and tools, and Q&A - over fine tea and patisserie. For further information and to book your place, click on the link below: