A Decision to Write

Today, I have decided to start writing. Not for any particular reason beyond the intuition that it might be beneficial to take my flurry of thoughts and offload them somewhere, in the hope it might help untie some knots and help me understand things better; it’s quite hard to form words from letters still in the Scrabble bag.

My journey has lead me to consistently contemplate the question:

What constitutes a healthy, happing, fulfilling life?

The question has stemmed from both professional experiences as a doctor and personal experiences as a human(/monkey).

As I grew up from an early age, a belief was instilled that ‘Science is Golden.’ This belief was strengthened during time at medical school. But a couple of years after graduation, the book Bad Pharma exposed the flaws of the pharmaceutical industry in a way that shook up my affinity with Western Medical practice. What I had not realised is that the practice of much Science is not Golden. It is prone to our immature but natural, egocentric human tendencies and thus fails to meet its fundamental need of true Objectivity. Not only in the rigour of its experiments, but also the interpretation of its results and dissemination of findings. For a period, I struggled to see the good in Western Medicine and was unable to recognise that these human tendencies are not confined to one area of the Globe. They are a part of life everywhere, and must not obscure what is good.

Meanwhile in my personal life, I have been blessed to have had a privileged, joyful life with no particularly jarring life experiences and few fears beyond what’s common. Common does necessarily correlate with complete ease, however. The customary modern-life moments of overwhelm, stress or anxiety, combined with consistent contemplation lead me to read books and regularly converse in this arena with close friends. A direction started to form and it eventually signposted me to take a step into the World of Yoga… not what the hedonistic medical student of my early 20s expected.

After completing a Yoga Teacher Training Course, remarkably, both my personal contemplations and my professional questions gained life-changing insights. Above all, it showed me that the answers lie not just in the mind but, perhaps even more, in the body. And since then I have been endeavouring to bridge my learnings and practices from the East with that from the West, and sharing them in an authentic, playful way. The process is early and will no doubt contain imperfections but it might hopefully add value to some of our lives.