What is Deep Medicine?

I invite you to explore the topic of my recent book Deep Medicine: Harnessing the Source of Your Healing Power. Deep medicine connects your personal health with everything that surrounds and inhabits you. It integrates simple techniques with recognition of the need for lifelong learning and practice. This integration provides the greatest potential for healthy, meaningful, thoughtful, compassionate, service-oriented living.

Deep Medicine isn’t a surface paint job. It is a new foundation. It isn’t a perfumed cover-up. It is a thorough cleansing. The work of creating health and supporting healing is a conscious process that must examine the inner depths as well as refine the surface contours. It is the inner quest for your personal truth and authentic life dream that awakens the healer within and harnesses your unique sources of healing power.

The term “deep” means below the surface, not superficial; learned, wise, and within. It also means profound, heartfelt, sincere, intense, great in measure, and mysterious. The term “medicine” implies the varied and vast powers of healing – from potion to procedure to prayer. When applied specifically and individually it can become your own system for creating personal well being.

Deep medicine educates and empowers individuals to be active participants in their own health care while drawing on expert care for the broadest understanding of the nature of health, illness and healing. Deep medicine has a strong link to ancient and timeless medical knowledge and practices. Deep medicine honors each person’s individual story and understands that emotion can override reason. Deep medicine is based on a holistic approach to the mind, body and spirit in the context of the individual, the collective/community and the planet.

Every day we are inundated by images of popular ideas of health and beauty. Quick-fix workout programs, silver bullet pills, numerous diet plans, workshops and retreats claim to have the secrets to help consumers lose weight, get fit, and live healthier lives. But many of these remedies are superficial and inadequate. Health is not simply about how you look, how big your muscles are, how much you weigh or how old you are. Health is about balance and wholeness, healing is about making change and both require us to go deeper than our external body contours or readouts of our laboratory values.

In the words of Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy (“D. V” of the Aravind Eye Hospitals in India):

“When we grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify ourselves with all that is in the world. So there can be no exploitation. It is ourselves we are helping. It is ourselves we are healing.”