It was Ayurveda that first took me to India. I had a certification in Ayurvedic healing, but wanted to learn more about pancha karma, a system of five therapies that help to cleanse and rejuvenate the body by removing impurities that cause disease.
After months of scouring the internet to find someone whom I could apprentice with, I enlisted the assistance of a doctor in Jaipur. Although he had not trained an apprentice before, he was eager to teach me what he knew. My plan was to study with him for three months, to work closely by his side in the clinic everyday.
Initially, I was excited to be a part of the staff. I counseled the English-speaking patients on dietary matters (my doctorate is in nutrition), helped make herbal tablets, and wrote articles for the doctor’s newsletter. I also advised the doctor on ways to improve his practice since I had experience in business management.
There were a couple of problems that thwarted my efforts, however. The first was that only a few of the doctor’s patients came to the clinic for pancha karma. It was a more expensive route, but also one that demanded more diligence on the part of the patient, so most requested medicine instead. Whenever one of the patients received pancha karma, I helped administer the treatment, but I knew I’d need a more comprehensive program to give me the experience to open my own clinic.
The other issue, though not as central, was the language barrier. If the patient and I did not speak one another’s language, I did not participate in their consultation, which meant missing out on learning about maladies and remedies. So, on some days there were several hours with nothing to do but sit in the lobby and study from books.
It was likely during my downtime at the clinic that I had the epiphany that working in the healthcare field no longer appealed to me. It came as a bit of a shock. I had devoted many years to my education towards work that I was passionate about.
It was a combination of things that led me to this awareness, most notably being in a country like India. It was not only the magnitude of suffering that I witnessed, it was the way that India messed with my mind. It forced open my eyes, magnified my myopia, pettified my personal drama. Of course, suffering is a global phenomena. I saw it firsthand in my work in the field of mental illness and addiction. Many of the patients, destitute and homeless, struggle and suffer on a near continual basis. And it wasn’t India, per se, that opened my eyes, but rather being away from home and in a country where I was devoid of my comforts. With nothing to insulate me from the outside world, which was both foreign and at times fragmenting to the point of exhaustion, it allowed an opening to occur.
Another realization I had was that malnourishment, the primary cause of disease, was deeper than the physical body, yet this was the level that I was primarily working with people on in trying to effect change. The realization came to me when counseling patients who were willing to follow the prescribed diet, but only until their symptoms abated. They saw no other reason to eat healthy than to alleviate a health condition. While this thinking was common in patients I had worked with in my practice, seeing it in a different country and culture taught me it is an endemic problem. I saw that the unwillingness or lack of desire to nourish ourselves was a symptom of something deeper.
I was also particularly disturbed by the unwarranted amount of power one of the patients attributed to the advice I had given her. It was the ‘doctors are god’ syndrome that too many patients have; a disempowering stance that keeps people dependent on the idea that the medical system can ‘fix’ them. That bothered me. As did the way the doctor looked – bored and dissatisfied – sitting behind his desk prescribing pills. While the pills were herbal, it was still an allopathic approach to healing that I did not practice, nor one that I was willing to adopt when patients insist on a magic bullet.
One morning I woke up and realized that I was in India! Yet day after day I was sitting in the clinic, not getting the benefit of what I had come to learn. I decided to discontinue my apprenticeship, cut my trip in half, but not before traveling north to the foothills of the Himalayas.
