Renewal

By Lise Alschuler, ND, FABNO
AANP Past-President (2008-2009)

Photo by Katherine via Flickr, used under the Creative Commons License.

October is the month of my birthday. As such, I have long experienced October as a unique flow of emotions and reflections. As my birthday approaches, I find myself awash in the incoming tide of anticipation and the receding tide of closure. As my current year runs itself out, a peaceful sense of finality spreads its way into my consciousness. I reflect on my prior year with feelings of gratitude and deep appreciation for all of my experiences. I find myself letting go of unresolved issues and troublesome questions. It is as if I am at a door looking back into a room that holds all the experiences of my past year. I see the way the room has been arranged; I note the piles and the empty spots; I see the shafts of sunlight streaming in here and there; I notice dust in a few places. I see all this with quiet, peaceful eyes, and then, I gently close the door behind me.

Ahead of me is my next year – a year I don’t know yet. I have no sense of it yet, but feel its eagerness. I feel the pull the future reaching out for me – stretching its fingers towards me, excitedly drawing me forward. I find myself reaching back, perhaps a bit tentatively at first. I feel curious and then anxious, impatient and then hesitant. All the while, as my new year looms ever closer, l find myself leaning further forward. There comes a moment when I will lean too far to stay in place and I fall forward into the outstretched arms of my future.

As a fall, I experience another kind of letting-go. I have no ability to right myself or change the course of my fall, so I accept my fate – utterly and completely. I recognize in that instant of acceptance, that wherever I land is perfect. I have no need to resist, but instead celebrate with joy as l free fall towards my future. In that moment, my birth-day happens. I experience a feeling of renewal that reverberates all the way into my very bones. I am born again and as I emerge into my new year, I do so with a prayer of thankfulness on my lips.

Our Task: Loving Self-Expression

By Lise Alschuler, ND, FABNO
AANP Past-President

Photo by David 23 via Flickr, used under the Creative Commons License.

It continually amazes me how easy it is to become completely ensnared with daily challenges in our lives. As we strive to create perfection in our work, our relationships, even our creative outlets, things can get tough.

Last week, after several busy days of work, I was running late one morning. I was irritated that I was late and, as can happen, my irritation distracted my attention from how I was carrying my coffee. I spilled it all over my pants on my way to the car. I had to head back into the house, figure out a whole new outfit, change into it, and then get back into the car. By then I was really late, plus I was missing my coffee. As I drove to work, it seemed that every slow and nonplussed driver was in the fast lane. My frustration started to rise, my expletives escaping my clenched teeth.

Then, suddenly, grace interceded. In a moment of clarity, I saw all this for what it was – just silly superficial things that had nothing to do with the true purpose of my day. I was able to smile, relax my grip on the steering wheel, and relax into the truth and beauty of the moment.

Later, upon reflecting on this change of heart, I recalled some words that my father once shared with me. These words were received by him from his spirit guide:

What is a new adventure for you is for us a continuation of the same learning problem. It is new for you because it is a different situation, in a different place, with different opportunities and constraints. These are the surface manifestations, but natural focal points for people with bodies, connected so intimately with the Earth. We, on the other hand, are deprived of your distractions. We cannot see those things. Thus they are of little concern to us. What matters from our limited, in its own way, point of view is the degree to which heartfelt feelings are expressed in loving ways, the degree to which those feelings are translated into actions that improve the Earth, the home of our children, and how much closer you come to us in spirit.

I find these words to be both soothing and admonishing. With life so precious and so alarmingly short, our ability to express ourselves in loving ways for the good of all is exactly the task at hand.

Finding Opportunities in Discrete Challenges

By Lise Alschuler, ND, FABNO

Photo by mdemon via Flickr, used under the Creative Commons License.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So while yesterday my partner and I spent a marvelous day on a coastal Maine beach and then enjoyed fish tacos, it makes sense that today I am holed up in my office whittling away at my to-do list. That does not mean that I am happy about it. In fact, I am rather grumpy about being in the office. I have tried to remind myself that, in reality, I should simply be grateful that I had the opportunity to spend time at a beach yesterday – so many cannot. I should also be happy that I have a to-do list and an office within which I can work on that list. Easier said than done. I am reminded of something that I read a while back. When one has a headache, instead of dwelling in the pain and discomfort, see it as an opportunity to be grateful for having a head in which to experience an ache, and to enlarge one’s focus to the entire head holding the ache.

Maybe then I too have an opportunity to focus on the day holding this grumpiness, not on the grumpiness itself. It does help actually. Suddenly my irritability becomes a small part of my big day, a day which is still mostly unwritten. As my grumpiness shrinks, I am reminded that the attitude with which I am approaching my tasks is simply that – an attitude. While it is true that by feeling grumpy, I can better understand and appreciate its opposite – happiness and gratitude – it is also true that I can change my attitude whenever I choose. While wallowing in negative emotions has a certain stickiness factor, it is not an insurmountable task to let these negative emotions go. Sometimes, to do this, I focus on the emotion (anger, irritability, etc.) and then take a deep breath, purse my lips and blow this anger/irritability/etc. out. Let it go, literally and figuratively. By now, after writing all of this, my grumpiness is truly a withered feeling in the past part of this day.

Funny how, now that I am feeling more contented, my day seems filled with many more possibilities. Maybe I can finish early and take a walk in the woods, spend some time on the back porch… Who knows? So in the end my grumpiness is held within my much bigger day, just as a headache happens in a much bigger head, and we are each so much bigger than our discrete challenges.

Gratitude and Naturopathic Medicine

By Sara Thyr, ND


Photo by controltheweb via Flickr, under the Creative Commons License.

I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “What are you grateful for?”

It is one of my favorite questions…. to others as well as myself. I use it often if I can’t sleep at night. It serves to put me in a positive state of mind, reminding me of all of the many blessings and abundance in my life.

Being a naturopathic doctor gives me more to be grateful for each day.

I get to practice cutting edge medicine in a calm and comforting environment. I have the training to diagnose and treat disease, working to uncover root causes of many illnesses like few other practitioners have the opportunity to do. I get to utilize safe and effective medicines, including herbs, nutrients and homeopathy, helping to find the perfect right thing for my patients that will not interfere with other medicines or cause unwanted side effects.

My colleagues are smart, kind and good-humored. Many of them I count among my best friends. I can always rely on them for an insightful opinion and words of wisdom. The years that I volunteered as president of the New Hampshire state association, and more recently on the board of directors of the AANP, have led me to be a part of a greater good. This has also afforded me the opportunity to interact with truly amazing, gifted people. I feel so lucky to be associated with this profession.

I am grateful that naturopathic medicine makes so much sense. That is what struck me when I first learned of it. Treat the whole person, remove obstacles to cure and find and treat the cause of disease…why don’t we do that in our lives more often.

Naturopathic medicine makes me more connected to nature. It brings my attention to making our planet a better and safer place. It creates awareness in me and then those I work with to avoid toxic chemicals in skin care products, cleaning products and in the food we put in our bodies. I am more grateful for pure water and organic food because of my acute awareness that everything we put in our bodies matters.

I am most grateful that my patients get better. That I can give them the tools to improve their health in a dramatic way, when no one else has been able to get to the bottom of their illness. One woman doesn’t need to get a hysterectomy; a young woman has a baby where she’d not been able to have one; another has resolution to very painful digestive problems; a man who came to me can breath without allergy medications, and another is able to wean off his asthma medications as his symptoms have resolved. There are many more stories just like these. It is rewarding to see that they are so happy, healthy, and yes, grateful.

One of my favorite things to do is to speak to prospective students of naturopathic medicine. I can’t imagine a more rewarding profession.

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events.

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow. "

-Melodie Beattie