Vis medicatrix naturae, the defining principle of naturopathic medicine, translates from Latin as “the healing power of nature.” Implicit in this guiding precept of natural healthcare are two assumptions: that human beings are part of nature, and that each of you holds within you the ability to heal. In this age of heroic medicine and an increasingly complex “disease-care” system, these are radical and provocative notions. They ask you to recall your place in the natural world and place you front and center in your own healing journey. The healer within invites and empowers you to align with the wisdom of nature for your good and to each become the author of your unique healing story. It enables you to choose to partner with healing professionals as guides and facilitators to help activate and strengthen your connection with this powerful healing energy – the “inner healer” inside us all. 

How can you best answer this invitation? Healing traditions through time have recognized paths to access this power and strengthen your connection to it.

Cultivate Trust

Media and advertising can foster a state of existential alarm for health risks large and small. Yet anxieties about bodily decline, suffering and death become real and immediate in the face of serious illness. Your default setting for both free-floating threats and those close to home is fear; acknowledging fear and learning how to respond to it can be important elements of healing. But you can also choose to strengthen your capacity for trust in an inner healing power that is intelligent and, working in its own orderly fashion, knows just what it’s doing to make you whole.

In his book Quantum Healing, Deepak Chopra, M.D., writes: “When a blood cell rushes to a wound site and begins to form a clot, it has not traveled there at random. It actually knows where to go and what to do when it gets there…Even if we break down its knowledge into finer and finer bits, looking for the secret in some minute hormone or messenger enzyme, we will not find a protein strand labeled ‘intelligence’, and yet there is no doubt that intelligence is at work.” When you move into a place of trust in the process of your healing, you open up a dialogue with this intelligence that, with practice, grows and deepens. One that you can rely on for clarity in the midst of confusion, for greater peace in the face of discomfort or pain, and which becomes a source of healing in itself.

Support Health

It is commonly accepted that a primary role of medicine is to “fight disease.” This perspective has contributed to the emergence of pharmaceutical and medical technology industries to provide weapons for this fight (although natural medicine can use agents from nature in this adversarial way as well). If instead you shift the primary emphasis to strengthening and supporting health, the force for healing flows more freely. The body has its own very effective means to defend itself, whether from attack by harmful microorganisms or from
silent invasion by cancer cells. It only loses its ability to
defend itself when its strength and balance have been significantly disrupted. If that were not the case, none of us would be here, as we are all descendants of survivors of health crises predating the advances of modern medicine. In fact, the assists of modern medicine, when they are necessary, are made more effective when the body’s response to them is bolstered in natural ways. You build a solid foundation for healing and supporting health by clearing obstacles to
normal function (such as inflammation and toxicity) and moving into alignment with nature’s own precepts for creating balance and wellness.

Honor the Heart

Healing is a holistic and evolutionary process of discovery – what begins as a physical ailment may cause us to investigate our thoughts and beliefs. This may, in turn, lead you to acknowledge the bleak landscape of the heart’s wounds and seek resolution for them. Conversely, as the heart finds peace, so may the body and mind become whole. Central to authentic healing is the opening of the heart to compassion for self and others. In the movement towards wholeness that is at the core of the mystery of healing, the most profound transformation of body, mind and spirit often lies in the mending and blossoming of the heart’s connections to self, to loved ones, to the world and to life.

Debra Gibson, ND, provides strategies for lifestyle change as a naturopathic physician in Ridgefield. She can be reached at 203-431-4443 or at [email protected]. See ad, page 12.