Focusing in Naturopathic Medicine

One of the fundamental philosophies of naturopathic medicine

Your body knows how to heal itself

Our task is to clear the path, to move what is stuck or blocking us from moving forward, so that we can restore balance.

The Search

  • Many of us want to get to the root of our health concerns, to address the underlying causes of symptoms.
  • In the quest for healing, we can look at gut and immune health, stress, hormones, neurotransmitters, microbes, allergens, mold or other toxic exposures, autoimmunity, inflammation, impaired detoxification and on and on and so forth.
  • In the quest for healing, there’s a lot of places to look and many ways to go about it.
  • When we don’t feel well, it can be incredibly motivating and ultimately empowering, or it can be alarming and downright scary.

The Cycle

  • Often, the worse we feel, the harder we are willing to work.  Getting healthy can become a full time job.
  • We might find ourselves working harder and harder in an effort to feel better, with diminishing returns.
  • Our diligence can turn in hyper-vigilance.  We might notice that our comfort zones become increasingly confining.  We might feel scared and overwhelmed.  Or we might find ourselves ready to give up, because it all just seems so hard.
  • This is when our approach to restoring health might actually be in the way  — and keeping us stuck.

A New Approach

  • When we’re stuck, it often helps to step back from the status quo and our usual ways of approaching problems.
  • We might notice that when we are trying to fix, manage and control our bodies, it can create more tension and distress.
  • Rather than focusing what went wrong and how to fix it, we might find that inviting ‘what would feel right’ opens up more possibilities and perhaps a forward movement.
  • Cultivating a spacious and responsive interaction with our bodies, we can experience healing as a dynamic process that carries us into deeper alignment with our vitality.