What If Healing Is About More Than Getting Better?
What if the purpose of medicine wasn’t simply to make us feel better, rather to help us become more fully ourselves? – This is the concept at the heart of Beyond Medicine.
Dr Adam Suzman describes the approach as ‘transformational medicine’: working not only with the physical body, but with the patterns, emotions and experiences that may influence how we move through the world.
“We are not working on the level of chemistry here. We are working on the level of mind and emotion that informs the chemistry and tells it what to do.” – Dr Adam Suzman
What is transformational medicine?
One of the simplest ways Adam explains the Beyond Medicine system comes from the naturopathic concept of weed, seed and feed.
First, we weed.
We begin to address old patterns, unfinished experiences and ways of responding that may no longer serve us. Remedies such as Closure and Liberation were created with this process in mind; making space for something different to emerge.
Then, we seed.
Once there is space, what do we want to put there?
This is where remedies such as Creation, Tara, Blue Lotus and Victory Over Thought come into the picture: supporting different archetypes and patterns of expression; creativity, calm, courage, presence, possibility.
Finally, we feed.
New patterns need to be supported and nourished. Presence, Regenesis, Universal Panacea, Cloud 9 and other remedies within the system were developed to provide that ongoing support.
Clear the ground. Plant something new. Nourish what begins to grow.
It is a remarkably simple metaphor for a much bigger idea.
“Nothing can really be accomplished if our nervous system is a mess.” – Dr Adam Suzman
This is why nervous-system regulation, nourishment and optimisation, runs through so much of the Beyond Medicine range.
Over a lifetime, we accumulate experiences, expectations, fears, habits and identities. Eventually, it can become difficult to distinguish between who we fundamentally are and everything we have picked up along the way.
Adam describes his own journey in developing Beyond Medicine as following his intuition until he realised it had become his own path out of the maze.
Everyone’s maze will be different.
And everyone’s way out will be different too.
That may be precisely the point.
Beyond Medicine isn’t ultimately about prescribing what a person should become. Its larger ambition is to help create the conditions in which we have greater freedom to decide that for ourselves.
To clear what needs clearing.
To nourish what needs strengthening.
To create what comes next.
And, ultimately, to have what Adam describes as the “agency, potency and confidence to inhabit the fullness of our own being without doubt or hesitation.”
Because perhaps the ultimate goal of transformational medicine isn’t simply healing.
It is moving beyond the patterns that have unconsciously shaped us.
To respond rather than react.
To choose what we want to carry forward and what we are ready to leave behind.
The freedom to participate more consciously in the creation of our own lives; with greater presence, confidence and intention.
In this sense, healing is not the destination. It creates the space from which something else becomes possible: the ability to inhabit more fully who we are, to decide what comes next, and to move towards it without being continually pulled backwards by the unfinished patterns of the past.
Perhaps that is what it truly means to go Beyond Medicine.
Recent Comments