COMING HOME TO HEAL

The Real Power of Living Locally

Most often, healing from a chronic condition is a process of coming home. Home to our physical bodies and home to the spaces where we live. 

As lifestyle-based medicine teaches the how and why of chronic disease, as we learn about the cumulative impacts of poor diet, toxins, trauma, stress, and more, our awareness expands beyond the care we receive in clinics and hospitals . . . we come to realize the importance of the care we must give ourselves at home and in daily life.

Medical therapies for chronic disease have flourished in America’s current healthcare system. Although pharmaceuticals and surgeries are highly specialized and effective in the saving of lives, they have done less well with the chronic diseases that we now know are largely diet and lifestyle driven. But we now have another option: coming home with treatment protocols from lifestyle-based medicine means that even advanced conditions can be improved, if not fully healed. With guided lifestyle change we now have the tools to create healthier homes and give ourselves focused care.

Healing also becomes a process of returning to community – to the real people and physical places that contain our daily lives. Whether it be rural community, urban neighborhood, suburban street, place of work or worship, the college dorm, or any geographical place where we have - or can have - meaningful face-to-face interactions with others, with those who share the air we breathe and the need we all have as humans to live socially connected in clean, supportive places.

Despite doorstep deliveries of wellness goods from anywhere on the planet, there are some things big brown trucks cannot deliver: fields that clean the air around us, pastures that store carbon, hold rains and lessen flooding, local farmers with soils that put nutritious, freshest foods on our plates, woods that shelter songbirds and rabbits and turtles . . . and wellness-seeking humans grounding themselves in nature.  We cannot order up purpose or accountability or the encouraging words of friends who support us through healing journeys. These elements are ones we must create.

The power of living well-connected to ourselves, our families, and the communities where we live cannot be overstated. Our local communities are where we literally and physically turn harmful elements into healing ones. Beginning with food, air, and water and extending to products, policies, and relationships with those closest to us, coming home to heal changes many things in the environment where we live.

If coming home can make a difference to individuals and communities, it can also make a difference for society and the issues America faces as a nation and as a partner in the global community.

Social and economic problem-solving currently centers around politics and policies, programs and philanthropies, science and research, equity and inclusion, as well as the delivery mechanisms needed to put centralized (state/federal/global) solutions into play. We seem not to recognize how personal wellbeing, or lack thereof, ripples out to impact the many things we seek to solve at the level of society. Crime, cancer, climate, pollution, poverty, and failure to thrive in the family, classroom, and workplace - these are issues that, arguably, spring directly or indirectly from a lack of human wellness.

Yet, when has a political leader ever asked us as citizens to take more responsibility for our personal wellbeing? When has personal health ever been suggested as patriotic or as a cornerstone of policy? With public attention and problem-solving focused at the societal level, and away from the daily lives of Americans, we fail to calculate how much benefit personal wellness might contribute as a solution to social, economic, and environmental challenges.

If personal lifestyle is as effective in preventing chronic disease as is medical access or drug breakthroughs or healthcare policies, why do we not give this powerful player at least equal attention? Why do we not hear more success stories about personal healing from the news sources most Americans listen to daily? Why do we find them mostly through the internet and from researchers and clinicians who must garner private funding and work doubly hard to prove lifestyle concepts before major funding is granted?

Coming home to heal is not an easy fix for what ails us, but it can be the long-term solution for multiple problems facing humanity. Personal responsibility and self-care are not easy, they are difficult for most of us; creating supportive policies and incentives will be especially challenging politically; and, bringing medicine and agriculture into totally different paradigms will take vision and talented leadership.

But when have Americans ever turned away from difficulties? The proof that chronic disease can be healed is mounting and we are understanding why autoimmunity and cancer and heart disease are so rampant. Once this knowledge becomes more commonplace, once mainstream media shares more about the real successes of lifestyle medicine, once consumers understand what kind of farming harms and what kind heals, once ‘toxic and harmful’ become part of the conversation between physicians and patients, then we Americans will better understand the connections between our daily lives and the challenges that face us. We will know how to take good care of ourselves, our families, our homes and our communities. And we will help each other do the right thing.

Lifestyle medicine, regenerative farming, and coming home to heal offer us as individuals a powerful role to play in solving critical problems larger than ourselves; they also offer the invaluable gifts of purpose and connection and the opportunity to help strengthen our local economies, grow cultures of health, and make wellness, as Alison says, easier tomorrow than it is today.

COMING UP: Clinic, Home, and Field

UP AHEAD: The Beauty of Slow: The Healing Power of Long Term Solutions