Being Human.

We live in a culture where we are more comfortable honouring individual achievement over the opportunities brought to us by our weakness; we want be heroes, not humans. We indulge the notion of success attained by conquering our problems, transcending our susceptibilities, eliminating disruptions, and possessing answers. Many of our health and wellness approaches are left trapped in this rubric. We talk of defeating illness without noticing sickness is a necessary signpost in health. We anxiously invest in the forestalling of ageing while neglecting to remember to take good care of ourselves along the way. Perhaps worst of all, we treat vulnerability like an affliction that needs curing; in this world, we don’t have time to be hurt and even less time for healing; we want it to be possible to be exceptional if not all, most of the time.

In the biomedical aqueducts built by western medicine, we are required to navigate systems with set numbers of options and believe it knows more about what is good for us than we ever could. We take our concerns to experts and specialists who take scans of our insides, determine what the options for interventions are and we can expect to be given some timelines for recovery when we pursue their advice. This process can be helpful, indeed, if your structure and symptoms fall in line with what they are looking for; if you have the right kind of problem, the kind that can be hid, cut out, or best, the kind we can get rid of.

Some of us, however, fall through the cracks of this aforementioned system; spilling from the crowded channels into basins with no labels, no diagnoses and therefore no fixes. Sometimes, we are in pain without a traumatic incident. Sometimes, our injury has long since healed, and yet, parts of us remain diminished, unusable, broken. Other times, the scan of a painless knee shows wear that looks decades in the making, another shoulder waking someone in the night revealing nothing abnormal at all when scanned. Often times, the best doctor in town, X-rays and MRIs, can’t find the thing that debilitates us and while it is precisely why we arrive to specialists in the first instance, our pain remains the thing least understood by the images and experts of parts.

Whether you are someone who has been told where the investigation ends for your pain or you are a clinician searching for a more holistic human framework for navigating health and the presence of pain, every one of us would benefit from allowing more than convention as we approach complexity, becoming better at listening than dictating, and choosing not to abandon all that works and is well with us in order to fix what isn’t. Join us on the journey of listening to bodies, reworking the framework, and finding the well within - As we touch on a few things that are regular challenges and common concerns of the person living the contemporary western life, if you have any questions or insights into any of these subjects, we would be so interested in hearing from you.