Dr. Marisa Marciano

Note to self: it might be unwise to start your blog by bringing attention to the date.

Though I am tempted to ask, “how goes your March friends?!”, this of course implies that once again it’s been well over a month since I’ve last blogged.

More than once I’ve been told that around the 1 year mark into Naturopathic Doctor-dom the pace starts to shift a bit. You start to find your stride. Your business and your confidence and your practice start to bloom, and I have definitely been indulging this delightful groove. I’ve found however that this shift hasn’t made life breezier as expected, but much busier. Don’t get me wrong, 2013 has been chock-full with the most wondrous of stuff, but chock-full, nevertheless.

And I have to say I was surprised when this scale tipped for me at pretty much one year precisely. My first day journeying on the job was January 1st, 2012; one of my most exciting life days thus far. Not because I was immersed up to my eyeballs in fascinating cases and healing patient after patient like a champ. But because I had little else to do besides sit alone in my beautiful office, basking in the fact that I had been given the opportunity to deliver to the world my dream job. I was then and remain now, wildly aware of how lucky I am for this.

Gray’s Anatomy (the book) & a Big Sweet Kitty.

Ever since, I’ve been slowly and steadily building my new life around this new profession. Living a life that essentially is my profession. Failing some days and nailing others. And it’s still everything I could have hoped it to be.

I get to teach others learn to heal. And to boot, I get to teach others, to teach others learn to heal. I’ve been dividing my time between seeing patients at Flow, giving lectures at BINM & IHN, grading papers, and attempting to limit my red wine consumption (apologies for any spills on those midterms folks).

And while it’s all been grand, it has left little time for me to write, which was decidedly “in my story” for 2013. So here we go. Some thoughts on health n’ life n’ stuff…

There have been two major things I’ve realized over my past year in practice, and they are these:

The first is that no matter what it is I might be doing, whether drinking red wine or a ginger beet smoothie, giving lectures or a B12 injection, my most fundamental role is to help others attune themselves to their unique & unlimited healing capabilities. 

The second is it that you don’t need a medical degree to do this (though having one is awfully nice and full of value and keeps you safer from lawsuits). You don’t need to own a stethoscope, or get prescription rights, or perform a full physical exam in under 30 minutes in order to help someone to heal. You mostly need to be a human being. Or a sweet kitty curled up on a warm lap. Or a cloudless 8 degree March day in Vancouver.

Kits woof park = healing

Kits woof = healing

The healing relationship is a special form of communication that restores our faith in the miraculous, and within it lies the potential for reacquainting ourselves with our own innate self-healing abilities.

This relationship exists whenever one person comes to another for healing. Whether it’s a broken ulna, or a broken heart, there is no official license for healers. Healers act through their caring for another. They communicate the ineffable and the irrational with quiet & truthful guidance.

Your greater omentum is a healer.

Gil Hedley’s dissection of the abdominal organs depicts the omentum like nothing you’ve ever seen before (If you’re feeling bold you can watch it here around the 17 minute mark). Before ever having actually performed a cadaver dissection myself, I had never even known the thing existed. And yet there it was, purposefully present in each abdomen we opened.

The omentum consists of four layers of peritoneum that descend like a folding veil over top of your stomach & intestines. It’s often considered in anatomy circles as an indicator that the patient was in poor health. That this fatty intelligent snuggle blanket spells disease for a person. Too many big macs, too much toxicity, etc. etc.

As Dr. Oz says, it’s ”an organ inside all of us that plays a key role in making us fat… and it holds the secrets to losing weight.” (doesn’t everything Dr. Oz? Doesn’t everything?)

Instead, Gil posits that the omentum acts as an internal poultice, with absorptive properties that can draw off toxins, and reduce inflammation in the tissues it contacts. It actually migrates around the abdomen like a mobile lymphoid organ, moving and supporting the areas that require it’s loving touch the most. He also notes that many of the cadavers he’s seen (and he’s seen a lot) with larger fattier omentums actually survived well into their 90′s, living very actives lives.

Personally I prefer to think of my omentum as friend instead of foe. My own internal abdominal healer. A DJ Roomba built by, and made just for me. Sensing whether it’s my stomach or my small intestine that’s most in need of some connection, and reaching forth a fatty immunological caress.

Healers do little else than call forth our own innate wisdom to heal. With a loving touch, comforting counsel, a positive expectancy, a sense of self-worth, our wounds can heal. Hold close the people, places, and things that offer you glimpses of this often forgotten understanding.

I hope this blog finds you well readers. Thanks for sticking with me Will be shaping more of this story again real soon!

And big BIG thanks to Gil Hedley’s gracious posting of all 4 volumes of his Integral Anatomy video series available for free on YouTube. If  you’re still feeling bold (and have already eaten dinner) you can watch them in their entirety here.

Happy New Year readers! It’s time for a fresh start! New beginnings! Etc. etc.

2013: Day 1

It’s pretty intimidating to write another New-Years-esque blog when so many great ones have so been-there-done-that already. And it’s especially intimidating to write about resolutions. As if I, or anyone one could possibly create a cogent list of betterment ‘to-dos’ that holds up against 365 days of destiny. But hey, ’tis the season of self-help, and top of my resolution list this year is to do more things that scare me. To push back against those things that can tend to push me around.

With each passing NYE my resolution list (ie. things I should probably be doing less/more of) gets slightly more aggressive, and much more focused on issues pertaining to health. Each item having a more palpable tone of urgency.

Resolution 1: Do more things that scare me (that lake is frozen right?)

2011 was quick. 2012 a blur. 2013 is here. 2014, could’ya just give me a minute?? Before barely removing the cap from my pen to cross off a betterment we’re yelling HAPPY NEW YEAR once again, and I rise on the 1^st reminded that time does speed up as you age, and that my liver is less keen on alcohol and my brain on staying up much after midnight.

This year I was lucky enough be in Ontario with my family for holidays, and being back home is always (and this year especially) an interesting combination of returning to the past, contemplating the future, and doing everything I can to fully enjoy the present.

Thankfully Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now was required reading in my first year of Naturopathic school, and if you’re familiar with this book you’ll know that when the idea that the past and the present don’t really exist hits you, it’s sorta life changing. An ancient idea made modern by Eckhart, and hilarious by Dana Carvey.

I really like living in the present, but am admittedly a hoarder of shoeboxes full of letters, diaries, keepsakes, and photos so that on occasion I can indulge in a good rake through the past. I also take guilty pleasure in dealing tarot, skimming horoscopes, and uncovering any cosmological occurrence that might offer up a glimpse of my future.

Without a doubt there are times when “living fully in the now” is hugely important…lying in shavasana, counselling a patient, or mincing garlic with my largest kitchen knife. But I feel like something is missed by asserting that always being present is best. Through the process of reflecting & prospecting each of us reads & writes our stories. Whether one large arc or many small ones, we are forever creating our beginnings, middles, and ends.

I love stories, and my favourites are those that can keep my curiosity engaged (and have happy endings). It’s the up & downs & the details that arrive while reading a book after watching the movie that make the meaning behind the words of each moment all the more richer. Sure you may know what happens next, but suddenly the motives make more sense, the characters have more depth, you see the story unfolding like a time lapsed flower to the sun. Each petal with providential purpose.

Cersei you’re the worst.

Story arcs take a variety of forms, but typically they wind up looking like the plot graph below. You pick a goal (slash NY resolution) and it goes okay for a while, then you have a crisis or challenge of some kind which in someway gets resolved. Depending on our hopes, dreams & destines we consider it either success or a failure, and “off-scale happiness” is usually the goal. The video below it is a fav of mine, showing master of fiction Kurt Vonnegut’s quick analysis of some other ways the the story can go…

Another story line is described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where Joseph Campbell uses ancient anthropology & world mythology to describe the archetypal journey of the human hero. His theory is of course based on myths, and is widely reflected in fiction by modern writers and artists. Nonetheless, myths are not necessarily make believe, and fiction is not just frivolity. These arcs describe how humans can (and have) historically become the hero. Reach their goals. Follow their bliss. It’s the play book for turning resolutions into revelations. And it’s not just a line. It’s a circle.

“The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which [our] radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.” – J. Campbell

So, do you dare?

What myths do you want to live by? What shape will your arc take this year? Are there characters that need introducing? Plots lines that need changing? Denouements that need developing?

Don’t be afraid to take on the challenge of your resolutions. There will always be moments that set into place a series of events that we could never have planned or ever would have chosen. But for those things that are very much inside our locus control, here are some of my favourites for 2013:

• Put yourself in situations that evoke your higher self.
• Foster your creative self.
• Make your mental & physical health a priority.
• Learn to be present (sometimes).
• Walk whenever you can.
• Listen to more music. Dance to it too.
• Turn off the news (sometimes).
• Sit down when you eat.
• Drink more water.
• Use more candlelight.
• Answer the call the adventure.

Thank you so much all for being with me this past year. My story for 2013 is going to include doing more of what inspires me the most, and writing for PWH is a huge part of that. Also, Big Love to the beautiful Lauren Burkitt for keeping me on task and ensuring that this post made it out quick enough to till be considered New Year’s-esque

It’s been an introspective couple of weeks. What with the rain, and the rain, and the rain n’ all.  I’ve been making good use of my bookshelf, which I’ve come to realize is about a 1/3 fiction, a 1/3 medical references, and 1/3 spiritual teachings & self help. (Warning: A combination of the weather and the latter may or may not have reflected the reflections of this post.)

Louise Hay on a Rainy Day.

In my life and in my practice I try to focus on the potential for and promotion of health vs. disease. But inevitably there are times when illness, like a dark cloud, surrounds us. And no matter how many vitamins you take or affirmations you make there is little, or perhaps nothing we can do to stop it.

For those with a belief in the Divine, it’s these times that prayer becomes commonplace, which according to the NIH is the most commonly used form of complementary & alternative medicine (step aside snake oil). Which has got me thinking about the role one’s “spirituality” plays in health care. I mean, more common than snake oil??

Of course the history of human-being-ness is ripe with examples of cultures and healers who saw themselves as spiritual beings made and sustained by a harmonious relationship with “God/The Universe”, and their health was profoundly dependent upon establishing kinship with the cosmos and uncovering the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything.

The cosmos takes control.

Cosmo tackling the big Questions.

When science stepped in to fill the gaps re: the unknowable, fantastically some questions became semi-knowable. But upon further dissection of the human form and finding no material evidence for “the spirit”, it was tossed out with our other anatomical annoyances like tonsils, the uterus, the gallbladder, and that pesky prefrontal cortex.

To have faith or believe in the power of prayer is to believe in the unbelievable, and if it can’t be measured objectively, science can’t allow it to be recognized as a legitimate determiner of health outcomes. And though I love science’s “pep” for discerning the orders & laws of the universe, there are undeniably huge gaps of wholly unpredictable chaos where uncertainty reigns, both in our lives and in our bodies.

So besides our vestigial organs, what else have we tossed out alongside spirituality?

Questionable guidance…

To a heavenly destination.

What I like about prayer (or insert meditation) is that when in sickness (or in health), or whether we get any answers or not, it helps to raise questions in our consciousness that challenge us to uncover deeper and more meaningful insights into our everyday (eat, work, poop, sleep) lives. Questions like:

“Why is this happening to me?”

How did I get here?”

“Why aren’t things working out the way I want?”

“Where am I going?

and a personal favourite, “Who is to blame!?”

Illness may be a spiritual test inherent in our lives to challenge our beliefs and discover what motivates us to make the choices that we do. Physical pain or mental & emotional suffering will draw our immediate attention as almost nothing else can, and when forced to confront our ailments we’re snapped into paying heed to that ultimate & unknowable dimension of our lives, even if we believe to believe in nothing.

I know this may sound fluffy, (I warned you) but following “a spiritual path” is in many ways just surrendering the need to have the answers for everything. Releasing fear and trusting that there is a greater plan at hand, of which you have only illusionary control. Think about it…looking back on your life, how much authority did you actually have over some of the best & worst things that have happened to you? Could you have prevented each tragedy? Predetermined each friendship? Devised true love?

In health, the best we can do is aim to organize & optimize our physical lives to maintain the most basic of our corporeal survival. We give the best of our energy to every situation with the understanding that we influence, but never control, what we might experience tomorrow. It may in fact be our fate to learn by suffering, and how we respond to this key reality can determine who we are and what we will become.

If prayer isn’t for you, maybe try out meditation?  Deepak Chopra’s 21 Day meditation challenge  just started up, or else develop a practice of introspection all your own.

The health of our physical lives and our spiritual path are more closely connected than we think. Both contain beliefs that are the consequence of following either divine or medical guidance, trusting in our irrational healing potential alongside our well-reasoned medical mechanics, then trying to understand that everything has it’s plan…either way.