As I wrote in my post about The Healing Round Table, you shouldn’t have to choose between opposing sides when it comes to your health care. You shouldn’t feel tension or division between your doula and your OB/GYN, or your Chinese medicine doctor and your Western physician. Or your psychiatrist and your psychologist.
We all have tools in our healing toolbox and the more we put our tools together, the more we can collectively help you heal! Then, when you sprinkle love over the combo, it’s like pixie dust that blows beneath your mighty wings and lifts you up.
Where’s The Love?
Both patients and people in the healing professions all over the world are yearning to reclaim the love in medicine, and we’re doing it in our own little ways; bucking the system where we need to, joining forces where we can, remaining steadfast to our visions for a healing and healed world, and holding true to our authentic selves – the part I refer to as our “Inner Pilot Light” (that 100% radiant, always brilliant, never extinguished, truly authentic part of you, which burns within each of us as we pursue our callings to be healing forces in the world).
As I wrote about here, I practice love with a little bit of medicine on the side, and in doing so, I create a safe, sacred space for my patients to do the healing work they need to do in order to activate their own self-healing superpowers and become, not just well, but vital.
If you are an empowered patient, you may already know that, when it comes to health care, collaboration trumps competition every time, and we all – patients and providers alike – need to bring love back into our relationships. Many who seek healing services already know that the current hierarchical structure that prevails in much of our health care system is artificial and counter-productive.
Empowered patients self-prescribe, listen to their bodies, minds and spirits, and find the practitioners that offer what their intuition tells them they need. They don’t wait for a doctor to prescribe the treatments that resonate with them. They follow their hearts and find healing in their own way.
But some patients don’t know how to do this. They don’t want to heal themselves. They’d prefer to hand over their bodies to practitioners they trust and surrender to their wisdom and expertise. They long for health care leaders to help them navigate what can be the overwhelming, confusing, daunting task of helping them figure out what they need, especially when they’re very ill and feel weak or powerless.
This is where I believe teamwork must come into play. When an individual is very ill, yes – she must still do her personal healing work. But she also wants to be able to trust all of the practitioners on her team to consult with each other, offer mutual respect for the work we all do, and avoid the temptation to “one-up” each other. She wants to be able to say, “I feel confused and I need some help making this decision” and trust that you will help her without letting your own ego get in the way.
As practitioners, what if we could approach the art of healing as a team in which every player was equally valued? What if all healing practitioners merely have different tools in our toolbox, and when we combine all our tools, we can do more good? And what if the patient holds the most powerful tools of all?
If you have cancer, for example, what if you could have, not just your physician, nurse, and OR tech, but also your massage therapist, psychotherapist, shaman, and herbalist? Why not bring your life coach, homeopath, and yoga instructor on board to sit at the healing round table?
I believe we have more healing power in collaboration than in competition, and there’s room on this earth for all of us to express our gifts. And when we educate ourselves about other healing options and invite collaboration at the healing round table, magic can happen. Miracles can occur.
What about you? Will you play nice at the healing round table? Do you want your healing team to collaborate in this way? Tell me what you think!
All about collaboration,
