Walking the path you choose

Oustskirts of Rishikesh, India. 2014

“Don’t use shortcuts in life;
have the conviction to learn to
walk the path.”

A simple but powerful message scribbled in my journal while I travelled around India in 2014 discovering what is important to me and the future. The message continues to echo within me today and is the force that has willed me to create and be PharmAveda, a process that took over three years. I follow the belief that what you nurture slowly, grows well.

The same message willed me to return from my sabbatical travels early in order to understand if all those feelings and ideas were true and viable back in 'reality'. Countries as vibrantly spititual as India inspire and excite you enormously to dream and leap into new things, but the big test is returning home to see if the dreams fit into home.

I came back to make decisions about the path I would follow, how I would do this, and to understand and formulate a new way to develop my professional expertise in the provision of healthcare. In the process I knew I would continue to learn as I courageously jumped out of my career and way of life and started a fresh path. It felt like a bright spring morning as I happily set out on a very long walk - the sounds of which are still inspiring me in this moment.

I knew at the time that this was no quick change from one career to another, what I was setting out to do was change the way I lived, to remove all compartments and to no longer talk of a work life balance - since it is all life. So I let go of so much and started to introduce different things to get the process of change underway. Incidentally, I was fearless at this point, and the courage was coming in effortlessly. My heart and mind was wide open and trusting of a bigger picture. I had found a true belief.

I had that conviction to not take a shortcut.

Once ‘work’ left the equation, life started to balance itself out. Health took precedent as soon as everything was thrown out and it may have been a physical response to the internal ‘decluttering’ that had begun on my travels and continued on my return. The mind had conviction, the heart was in peace but the body that had suffered its abuse over some years was now responding to the change in a big way.

I knew I still had much to learn and the opportunity was given to me by a sudden decline in health that required me to use the new perspectives to guide me through. All events can be viewed as an opportunity to grow or a reason to fall. I can honestly say that without the shock of illness, I would not have invested the time and effort to understand how my body could heal itself simply through movement, mind and medicine (in my situation this was purely herbs and food). At first I was scared, but it was transient, and quickly I came to just accept the body and what it was experiencing. I wanted to look deeper into my physiology and biochemistry and find a new way to understand it. Not just the medical report or diagnosis with its short and long term implications. I did not want to use a lab test or a microscope, but I wanted to look even closer than that - using my heart and spirit. I wanted to find a way to delve into the cells of my body and decipher the errors and corrections. To see if I could in any way influence the changes occurring.

It was a macroscopic view of the microscopic.

I had been learning about the universe and all those billions of stars that constitute the macrocosm in relation to us here, within us, the microcosm. All of it is connected, sometimes referred to as the butterfly effect. What happens on the outside may well be a reflection of the inside and vice versa. What happens millions of miles away has an impact here. What happens to this earth happens within us too as we respond to the changes occurring around us. Just like my body responded to a big change in life and thinking, on an even bigger scale, yet subtler level, it responds to the alterations in nature.

For example, I see the world as the most beautiful natural wonder that there is, suspended in this universe, rotating and breathing, growing and nurturing. It's just pure magic. The earth and all the beauty it has is just phenomenal. We have been lucky to grow with our planet, as it has fed us and watered us and given us all the opportunities to develop our consciousness, brain, body and mind.

Through history we can read and learn from ancient civilisations, how they delved deeper into consciousness, and how the mind expanded and our intelligence moved from inwards to outwards as we started to face the challenges of living on this planet. Our success as a species is limiting our survival - or more correctly, limiting the survival of our planet.

How did we learn to develop our brains to function the way they do? Again, historically we can see what was important to humans as they evolved. Our brains developed because of this route we took. The ancients were fascinated with the macrocosm and dedicated themselves to understanding it and being one with it. Time was a different concept, and time was the movement of the sun and moon and tide. It was not the hands on a clock or the digits on our phone or the hours ticked off to pay us our due.

Time is the moving, unreal reflection of eternity, as Plato put it.

We did not try to control time; we worked and slept, ate and drank in conjunction with the diurnal rhythm. Our physiology developed with the movements of nature and we lived harmoniously with those waves of light and dark. We respected the bigger picture, we accepted the unknown as a challenge to understand but not to refute. We gave names like God, Brahma, Creator etc to what would become mythical figures but all along it was understood they were not real idols, they were simply human descriptions of the universal energy that forms and binds us and releases us. You cannot draw or write what it is, so we cleverly developed images for our minds to focus upon to help us understand. The images were for the lay people, not the wise. Still today, we might use an iconic figure to help us realise a peaceful smile or calming gaze, but we know its something undefinable that we worship. The reminders are necessary in the manic world we live in today.

First, we were consciousness as one, and then we became consciousness as “I”. The spirit has never changed from that first primeval consciousness, and we all still have that writhing within us. We have developed innumerable layers that obscure what is pure. Why else do we read of the ancient Hindus finding nirvana, and yogi’s sitting still for years. They understood this. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans continued to develop this consciousness and slowly the focus became fixated on the ‘I’. Centuries of living harmoniously with nature to the imbalance of living only within oneself has led to the distortion we see around us and experience in our bodies today.

It has been a natural progression of the human journey.

A journey which has led us to a world that is choking, to technology that is surpassing our humanness [to the credit of human intelligence], to medicine that is able to prolong life, to health that is dealing with rising numbers of incurable illnesses; our bodies are fighting but they are reflecting the world we live in. A world where we treat the disease but not necessarily care for the person.

The macrocosm is suffering at our hands. Pollution threatens our environment, plants and wildlife become extinct, natural grasslands are tarmaced over and the rain water has nowhere to go. The ground is suffocating, thirsty, sweating profusely, heating and drying up.

Industrialism and population growth, due to the success of the human race, has flourished and should continue to flourish if we can somehow grasp the importance of what we are and what is around us. Technology has provided us with unimaginable benefits and joy, as well as countless miseries and growing isolation. The impact of all of this to the planet and our cells is as unimaginable as technology was 50 years ago.

The earth is suffering from a malignancy that we try desperately to control, but our selfishness continues to inflict more pain to nature. We have big rock concerts to raise awareness, in the process adding millions of units to the so-called carbon footprint; we raise money to plant more forests as we kill off more grassland. We supply recycle bins to be more environmentally aware, but commercialism requires packaging that pleases and promotes businesses to fill these bins. Supermarkets teach us to eat badly and poison ourselves with 3 for 2 offers on processed and dead food that incidentally has three layers of non-degradable packaging. Pharmaceutical companies publish data on diseases that may or may not exist, and develop expensive supplements and medicines that we may or may not need. While in the process, the industry continues to pump pollutants into our atmosphere. The box of Vitamin C you buy, may well be the death of an orange tree, because convenience is better for our busy and very important lives. Yet within that orange tree, is nature's own pharmaceutical company, lovingly making you the supplement that keeps your immunity strong and your skin bright. But we are boycotting natures companies for large conglomerates that can advertise and influence our weakening minds and spirits.

The list goes on and on. The examples are innumerable and we all know them. Just that knowledge, is enough to make us realise how the ‘I’ has superseded everything and it is this ego that has become the cancer that destroys the world we live in. A slow and excruciatingly painful death, no matter what palliative care we try to perform.

If from a distance, a few million light years away, we observed the earth with our ‘microscope/telescope’ and looked into the biochemistry of earth we would find elevated blood counts, abnormal liver function tests, renal and cardiac insufficiency, neurodegeneration, major depression, tumour growth……. Cancer spreading and the body failing. Apoptosis is switched off and the problem expands.

That is a bleak picture. But therein lies the opportunity to affect change.

However, most of us do not wish to take such a long view, instead we choose to take a very short view that misses all the important signs around us. In short, the earth is suffering an incurable cancer. Like I have indicated before, the macro and micro are reflections of each other. The sad reality is that our bodies are failing in the same way and cancer is spreading and more prevalent than ever before. Yes, diagnostics are more finely tuned, cancer is better understood and treated, therefore we see and hear about it much more. Did it manifest so viciously all through history but was unclassified, or is it the evolution of the epigenetics of human behaviour catching up with us?

History is our genome.

Our grandparents and before them their grandparents are our genetics. The stars in the sky are the genetics of this universe. Our earth is our history. Our bodies and minds are reflecting the current state of our environment. It's a morbid destruction of being alive.

If the earth is suffering its own cancer, the question is can we slow down its progress?

I believe that there are huge numbers of people who understand the desperate need to love nature all around us and within us. Why else, have we returned to ancient ways? Yoga has never gone away, but is exponentially appearing everywhere in some form or another? Awareness of our breath and life around us has become the biggest buzz word of the 21st century - mindfulness is helping us to heal ourselves.

Why did I take the path of understanding Ayurveda [Science of Life] when my career was flourishing and my knowledge of pharmacology and physiology was at its peak?

I realised it was the wrong path on its own. I needed to incorporate more knowledge into what I already knew to enable a new approach for balance and harmony to body and mind through medicine and movement. I was not going to take a shortcut. I was not doing a 6 weeks course and certifying myself to know more or begin a new business. I wanted to invest my time and what money I had earned in educating and balancing myself.

I decided on first hand experience of the ancient system of Indian medicine and then I was inspired to learn more. At the time, I found a book by Birgit Heyn, a Viennese pharmacist who became disenchanted with conventional medicine and the over-dependency of patients upon synthetic drugs. This book was one of those inspirational finds on a very dusty shelf in a rundown corner book store in Cochin, Kerala. I found it by chance having just finished a stint in an ayurveda clinic being purged and rebalanced.

Thus began my journey, with conviction, to modernise an ancient approach and merge with what is available today, never losing the insight that one is no better than the other, but both are relevant and together become a more powerful way to treat and live. With the education has come happiness which is why the journey is what matters, not the destination.

From my own experience with health and introspection, to falling in love and becoming a father, from a career in the world of pharmaceutics to nothing, I found that I gained everything.

Beginning the lengthy studies in Ayurveda and Yoga has been, and continues to be a remarkable education and I have learned that they are a harmonising system of development for wellbeing.  In 2014 I had an expectation to quickly set up a practice, and as I started to develop my insight my expectations dropped and the bigger dream took seed. Now at the beginning of 2018, the old busy self is less busy and more focused and enjoying nurturing the new knowledge into something I can share with everyone and make a difference to the life of people and nature. What you nurture slowly grows well.

It's not about reliving the old, but about building upon the new with all the tools history has to offer us.

“Knowledge is knowing how to, wisdom is doing it.”
- The Peaceful Warrior

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