Daily habits & Decolonization
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Kara Wada, MD:
Welcome back, everyone! I am so excited for the conversation you are in store for today.
One of my favorite people on the planet is joining us today, Dr. Siri Chand Khalsa. She is a wealth of knowledge and has been just a healing presence in my life the last several years.
We met of all places through the internet, but finally met in real life this past fall at the Physician Coach's Summit.
But Dr. Khalsa has had a lifelong interest in mindful living as the basis for long-term vitality of the mind, body, and spirit. She is trained in internal medicine. She trained at the Mayo Clinic and is board certified in internal medicine, integrative medicine, lifestyle medicine, and hospice palliative medicine.
Dr. Khalsa has a deepened her studies on health and healing by becoming a yoga instructor, a reiki master, and participating in a full-time program on Ayurveda at the Ayurveda Institute in Albuquerque and in India. She has served as an integrative medicine pcp, an instructor at the University of Arizona Integrative Medicine Fellowship for physicians, and consultant to other medical practices.
She has dedicated her career to promoting an increased understanding in clinical medicine and the link between long-term vitality and the daily choices we make.
She currently is focusing her energy to support physicians who want to expand their personal understanding of healing through experiential process, utilizing techniques in Ayurveda yoga, mindfulness, and plant-based nutrition.
If you are not following on her on social media, we will have all the links, but she has the beautiful hosts both visually and in spirit that are out there.
So thank you so much for joining me today, Dr. Khalsa.
I'm so excited to share a conversation with you.
How did you find this area of medicine and of healing?
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: I think what's fascinating, and I certainly think this might be applicable to a lot of your listeners, I've had my own healing journey. And I think it's so important to really normalize the full spectrum of life, right? None of us, the social media appearances, none of us have escaped the rigors of living, of being in a body and having influences that are beyond our control and within our control that impact our health.
Anyone who's been in medicine of any kind, PA, nurses, we all know that there's a trajectory of learning and experience that can deeply impact us. I just saw a very interesting video someone had shared a first responder who said, " Seven years I've been a firefighter, and I'm retiring because I've been diagnosed with PTSD."
So I think that we all recognize on some level that we are both healing and the healer in these roles, and I have no exception to that. I had a kind of catastrophic bike accident when I was 12, and that really created a lot of internal trauma created kind of a complex PTSD that drove a lot of, you could say, mental, emotional, spiritual imbalances.
So I was really young when that happened, and it wasn't even that experience that drew me into medicine. Initially, it was a dream. I had a dream when I was in about seventh grade and I don't share this too often, but since you asked, I'll share this story.
I woke up from this dream really just deeply inspired. So it speaks to this quality of what are the threads and crumbs that take us through our life. But in this dream we were traveling west pioneer times, and my family and one of my family members. This is a dream just for everybody listening. And one of my family members grew gravely ill. Probably going to die. Not uncommon when I grew up a child in the eighties, we learned a lot about early US history, all sorts of things...
Kara Wada, MD: Playing the Oregon Trail.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: Yeah, exactly. All kinds of, so probably I just one day read something, but I also grew up in Washington DC where we got to go to the Smithsonian Museums and they were very engaging.
And in the dream this family member, I think it was my brother or sister, don't recall, which had fallen ill and I thought, "Oh, this is really sad." I think I was maybe a young adult, 10, 11, 12, not teenager quite yet. Whatever the terminology for that is.
And I found myself really deeply sad at this impending loss and at one point I was guided by a wolf to follow this wolf.
In Native American teachings, the wolf repre represents teacher or lineages of knowledge. The wolf led me to a circle of Native Americans. Have always had a deep and profound respect for the indigenous healing systems, even when I was young.
So somehow this had resonated. And in the dream, the sort of elder medicine person took me to the local botanical healing resources and showed me how to make a tea or some sort of blend of botanicals to take back to this sick family member who then healed.
And I woke up from that dream just this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn these healing arts. This was really far before. Integrative medicine has this platform that it does now. There were certainly early leaders and bridging thoughts and systems of bringing the indigenous long-standing healing traditions to the modern era.
However, I wasn't exposed to that growing up in suburban Washington, DC on a sort of consistent basis. This is like pbs, some supporting cartoons. We didn't have the internet, we didn't have smartphones. We had libraries. So I think probably from that point forward, my, my learning was curiosity, and then I would pick up books on botanical medicine and then in the pre-med time, I went through a very significant healing crisis.
And leaned very heavily into botanical and mindfulness practices that I think allowed me to function and carry through all the training while always knowing that there were the other pathways, which at that point in time in the nineties was somewhat heretical, honestly.
If you brought a botanical into a attending rounds discussion, it was like, what the heck? Like that stuff's.
Were you in the right place?
It's like it's not potent or it's dangerous, and in many cases, neither of which would have been true.
Kara Wada, MD: So then as you're completing your traditional kind of internal medicine training route, at what point do you take the leap into exploring kind of some more formalized training?
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: It was very interesting because when I was applying to medical school, I actually also applied to naturopathic school and looked at acupuncture schools, and I had attended a very rigorous magnet school in Virginia that's internet ranked in the top five consistently.
So the blessing and curse of being at a high achieving academic environment at a young age was that I like scientific rigor when it's applied ethically.
And this is, I love it. I love scientific discourse, discovery, assessment, reassessment, revision. And in my perfect world, we have really developed the research models that support us understanding how these ancient healing systems work.
At that time, I couldn't find the rigor of science that I wanted in those programs. And because cause I see the value in understanding the neurohormonal cascades, the detoxification pathways. Turns out we don't use that in medicine. I mean we really just get stuck in our ruts of prescribing drugs because of the length of office visits.
We hardly have time to explore anything but that's, of course, a whole long tangent. But that was how I really just cemented for myself that I was probably gonna have to invent it myself. I was probably gonna have to incorporate and learn it myself. And in many ways, these older healing systems ignite our intuition.
I personally feel there's nothing more powerful than a healer whose intuition is awakened. Nothing is more powerful because the intuition is when we're in that sacred relationship that tells us, "Ask them about their grandma. Ask them about how they wake up in the morning. Ask them why they binge eat. What happened when they were five? Ask them about their childhood trauma. Ask them about what can they afford. Ask them about their abusive partner. "
We as clinicians vastly underestimate all the energy that surrounds a person that initiates their healing pathway. So from my perspective, of course, there are formulaic systems within traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurveda that are very important.
One cannot flippantly apply them. But for a modern sort of western trained, allopathic trained physician, waking up the integration of knowledge, compassion, and intuition creates a sacred relationship that allows the patient, the client, however you refer to them, to awaken something within themself because the client, the patient is the doer of the healing.
Again, this is another big misnomer. We believe the pharmaceutical is the doer, but ultimately the mediation of the pharmaceutical within the body is in the context of that individual. And so I think I just realized that my wish, my intuition had been awakened and that was like the Matrix or whatever pill colors, like the red pill.
There was no going back after, after that intuition had been awakened. There was no, there was just no undoing it. So I found that from that point forward, I would just learn wherever I could. I ultimately worked in hospice. I worked a bit in primary care. I wasn't well suited for the hospital. I'm just quite sensitive in the hospital.
The sounds, the smells, the intensity. From my particular constitution and the trauma that I had carried from this bike accident and then ensuing really ridiculously bad life decisions cumulatively led me to being like not really able to exist in a state of safety in hospital environments.
Pretty much when I finished my residency I said we're not doing that again and had a short stint where a medical error was ma made right after my residency. I made a medical error. I was just so devastated that those two pieces, it was a very understandable error. We just judge ourselves so harshly and so that was it.
That was the end of my inpatient career, and I really have only set foot back into hospitals to deal with family emergencies and such.
So that having been said, my career from that point forward was one third clinical time, two thirds art, creativity, and exploration. So I never really I never really had a lot of financial resource as a physician, but I consistently invested back into life experiences, learning and ultimately in 2011, I had been doing hospice.
Working in hospice, which gives you a lot of flexibility. It's about presence, et cetera.
I went to Ayurvedic school for three, two and a half, three years, basically came back and then I went into a full-time primary care job, which I had never actually done, and I did that.
With a lot of hope that there was gonna be innovation in that with a large national company and it all looks good on paper. In that interval completed a fellowship in integrative medicine. Though I had written some of the curriculum for the fellowship ultimately I circled back in and did the fellowship at, in Arizona.
It was gently encouraged that you might need this for your career if you were interested in academics. And I thought the knowledge base I have is a bit more in depth than what is delivered in the fellowship in many circumstances. But had a good experience with that as well.
Then the pandemic hit and. And I was really working on a lifestyle medicine clinic, and then I pivoted to coaching because I found that the issues around health healing and burnout and also people needing to decolonize some of what had been offered from the indigenous and older healing systems superimposing our Western beliefs and unfortunate cultural learning needed to happen.
So I've been educating and coaching physicians to in two areas really to learn and grow and understand these healing modalities and to feel confident and comfortable to launch their own practices and work on their social media. Not many people know I do that, but I help other coaches, physicians, integrative practices feel confident that what they believe in their intuitive space can exist in this world, in this time.
Then for the general public, I share a lot about food and just living, I'm gonna try to shift it up a bit to reflect more of my whole being. But as my husband says, the food and the creativity in the kitchen has really just been my art therapy.
Kara Wada, MD: Yeah, it brings people in too, I think, to learn more about what you're doing too.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: I've always just felt like food was the safest thing I could talk about because there's a lot of things I can talk about that are pretty confrontational for people and they'll be like, "Oh, she's weird. No thanks."
And food is let me bring you into the kitchen. Let's have a conversation and go from there.
Kara Wada, MD: Can you share a little bit? We have just started to just scratch the surface, ever so slightly like on the podcast, about this idea of colonialism and how that shows up in medicine.
So I wonder if you might be able to share just a little bit more about what that means or how that looks.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: I would say there are many people that are highly expertise in this, and I'll just share sort of my personal opinions. These are probably not academic opinions, but what I found is that we have internalized beliefs that are predicated on cis white male perspectives, and if we see it even just in a really basic sense, women's health, perimenopause, menopause is something that's " Oh, they'll get through it, they'll deal with it." And then we put out a big study that says hormones are terrible.
And so we haven't really bought everyone's perspective and experience to the table because the dominant narrative in medicine, the ones writing the textbooks, the ones thinking about the healing. I have a friend who's a very thoughtful African-American ob gyn who spoke about the early surgeries that happened to black women who were slaves.. The gynecologic procedures, they were done without anesthesia because the theory was again trigger warning for those that might pause here or skip forward. But these procedures were done in a way that was very harmful and very painful.
But we just skated through that historically. So that's sort of one lane, right? This institutionalized racism and aversion to that, which was not our perhaps the dominant narrative, and I think this has created a lot of trauma. The healthcare statistics around care for people of color have statistical variances in treatment of pain, disease outcomes.
We don't really understand the impact of generational trauma and systems that have been oppressed, people who've been oppressed or what that looks like. I think we're being asked in medicine to look at those biases and look at those belief systems.
From the standpoint of traditional healing systems, like traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurveda, I had experience not too long ago where someone I know had a, we'll digress here for a minute, who had loss of smell with COVID. The data seems to suggest that rigorous smelling and things that are high potency and smell, you probably could speak to this better than I cuz you have seen this in patients, it starts to restimulate those pathways.
There's a process in Ayurveda called nausea, which is a medicated oil that's done to line the inner portion of the nose, and I had mentioned that casually which I know better than to do on this other physician's post, and a very vehement, anti integrative medicine blanket person like as in all of it is bad, said, "Ayurveda is completely bunk." There's no evidence for it.
And I said, "Where are you drawing this conclusion from?"
And she said, "Oh, the anti-science website, or whatever, I forget the name, the Pure Science website."
So I went to the website and the clinician, the physician who runs this website made a assessment of Ayurveda based on one study, like the entire healing system of Ayurveda based on one study, and that is racism because there's no cultural humility in understanding that this was a healing system that has very advance surgical procedures. Outlined 2000 years far be before any DeBakey, any of the modern surgical procedures were spoken of.
And they say, "Oh, modern science invented surgical." No. There were other cultures exploring healing and so there's this kind of quality of arrogance that exists.
When we say decolonize, it means we really start peeling back who has had the dominant story?
Who's had the dominant narrative, and are they the ones telling us the full spectrum of the truth?
Ayurveda was millions and millions of clinical hours over thousands and thousands of years before we had any of our modern observational techniques, they were observing how does change in season affect us? How does yelling and screaming affect us? How does not sleeping affect us? What does this food do? What does this botanical do?
Certainly, we can see value in a system that has volumes of books larger than Harrison's, that there are grains of truth. Now, of course, I believe far more than that, but there's so much arrogance coming from a physician who says, "I don't even bother to understand what I'm talking about. I have blanketly dismissed an entire healing system based on one study I saw that was poorly designed and executed with modest results."
It even had results. It even had benefit the therapeutic intervention, but it wasn't robust enough. So from this clinic, who has a huge, social media following whose website gets millions of hits every month.
I frankly can't remember the name of it, but it's quite well known. I'm sure you've, you and I have probably both looked at it at different intervals, and I'm not actually trying to be controversial. I'm merely just drawing our awareness to the fact that he was arrogant, ignorant, and didn't have any cultural humility to India to a entire continent of people who had a healing system for millennia that was very robust and still continues to this day to evolve and contribute to our understanding of how we heal, how we get sick.
I think this was this was really eye-opening for me because this person who'd explored their me social media brought the narrative of this strong personality into the discussion with me and this other clinician.
This individual was not a clinician, did not have an ability or capacity to assess. They were looking at data that had been provided and a conclusion that had been drawn as absolute. We have another end of that spectrum that is the ridiculous by my supplement, heal yourself phenomena and neither of those are actually a good thing in my opinion.
We have to find the balance and find the middle road and have cultural humility and I think be curious and continue to explore an internal bias that we may have towards a healing system, towards an individual, towards a class of people, towards a race of people, towards a gender of people or a zone of differentiation in within that someone who may be transgender, someone who may be exploring gender.
There's so many different ways. That we can explore and accept the fact that this is someone's journey. This is, there are people for whom this is remarkably valid and we can't just arrogantly superimpose. We can be curious.
For me, that's what decolonization looks like and could speak pretty extensively around what I think is happening in the mindfulness community to this as well. And yoga for example, we have to call it stretching, and we have to say mindfulness is something else, but these are qualities that were brought from the east and they have very deep enriched traditions, which we're using in science, but we pick and choose what we want from them.
We don't actually come into them with some humility that there is a vast and expansive healing system within the context through which these systems work.
So then we say, "Oh, the data is good," but the data could be better if you holistically understood the context in which, and the lifestyle in which these practices are applied.
Kara Wada, MD: We need to chat more about that on, as I'm just thinking about, I have my nasal saline mist here. I don't have the rinse bottle, but neti pot and use of saline solutions to rinse out our sinuses. How often I am recommending that, cuz the data is good, but it is also very decontextualized from its traditional finding.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: And I think this is, I love that it's present because in its own way it's a thread. I just wish there was more curiosity. As opposed to a blanket dismissal. That's what gets me. We've, as you eloquently said, we've decontextualized the application but then we go one step further and we have internalized racism and xenophobia and bigotry towards people of color, Sikhs or Hindus, or Muslims who might be living in our country who have a context.
Again, religion isn't necessarily predicated to these healing systems, but we take what we want, very western, very imperialistic and we don't embrace and invite in the cultures that have given us the gift. And much of, again, I don't really consider myself an expert. I apologize if I've to the listeners, if I've offended someone in some way, reach out, educate me better, but I'm always wanting to learn more about this. I'm always wanting to be deeper in my understanding, and it's my responsibility, honestly, it's not the responsibility of a black leader or a person of color to tell me how to educate myself on this. It's on me to learn about anti-racism.
And I have had a very interesting journey because I converted to the Sikh faith and married a Sikh Indian man. So my relationship to these currents, if you will, of culture these ebbs and flows have been very educational. Being in a mixed race marriage and having come from a very sort of average Western white, upper middle class, suburban Washington, DC background.
Kara Wada, MD: Yeah. And I'm still a decade into interracial marriage, but I continue to try to learn and grow in that. And as a parent too. It's interesting, all these topics they came up in. I just completed this the Lodestar course on trauma which was phenomenal.
But this idea of anti-racism work, us as more of the majority, like needing to be the ones initiating the work. All came up in conversation just so recently. So this is all very timely. For me to be having this conversation with you as well.
I think the realization that we all just, there's so much sometimes that we, this idea that we don't know, sometimes that we don't know, and that's okay. But then when you do know better, hopefully there is that continued wanting to do better.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: Exactly, was there something from her course that like particularly...
Kara Wada, MD: It was more of conversation like, amongst it was a very diverse group of individuals within our course. Someone who looked like myself, asked one of the women of color in the group. What can I do? I feel bad. So there was this conversation, this open, wonderful conversation about how that could be reframed so that was not as an activating or triggering experience for the marginalized folks in our group. Yeah.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: The onus is on us. It really is for people who have had the dominant cultural narrative, and everyone has had struggles we're not, again, people could sometimes push back and say I haven't had it easy either.
That's not actually what we're talking about.
Every human being struggles, like I said, we all have the challenges that face us, but there are some groups of people where the challenges are so culturally based that it's very difficult for someone who's not experienced that to be sensitive to.
I think this is actually a very contextual story in healing and understanding. Healing better is that perhaps someone of color who's having trouble managing a disease state, there needs to be more sensitivity to a trauma that they may have from the context of their life story.
And trauma actually, I think that, not to dwell too much on this subject, but trauma actually has healing pathways. It is when we trained of being a little bit older than you, I had this sense there was no way to heal. You were gonna be permanently broken if you have PTSD or complex versions of this. And I've really come to appreciate that we people can re knit themselves and fill in the cracks with gold.
This kind of Japanese concept that when the pottery breaks, the potter can bring it back together and these flex of gold that are in the cracks can bring beauty and perspective. The cracks are always gonna be there, but the bowl, if you will, can be knit back together with intention and I.
The work and awareness of understanding the impact to trauma to autoimmune conditions is, I know this very deeply from my Ayurvedic training it would take me quite a while to explain it in a way that, but just trust me that the older healing systems appreciate that at ease of energy that are predicated in imbalance and stored emotions.
One of the most interesting things I ever learned was people that had functional MRIs, that had complex PTSD or PTSD, the brain lacked a temporal relationship to the event. It was, though, it was ongoing in their, in that moment, as though there had not, the brain and the spirit had not created a temporal relationship to this experience is over. There's this sense.
And the somatic treatments, Peter Levine's work, these scientists that are looking at moving the body and somatic ways in relationship to trauma combined with therapy, psychedelic assisted approaches to it.
More awareness from therapists on understanding that trauma has a physiologic basis as well as a mental, emotional, spiritual basis. These are things that I think begin to offer a different perspective to marginalized groups or people of color who have experienced trauma solely.
On their skin color or a cultural perspective that they lived within. And I think that from that sort of dominant cultural perspective that you and I kind of share is having an awareness that there are healing pathways for people within this. That makes sense for us then to do the work around it.
If there's a hopeless feeling in it, people are," I'm not really sure what I can do, and I'm not surely sure what needs to happen here." But there there can be an ideally will be hope and an understanding that by developing cultural humility, by becoming anti-racist, we began to awaken pathways of healing for people that create community and cold healing that actually takes us away from what I feel like is a slippery slope that we could find ourselves on where these things don't improve and we begin to see the more universality of the human experience and that we're in this together, that this ship sailing out to sea all by itself, it doesn't work anymore. The way the world is so intertwined, it's so important.
Kara Wada, MD: And what I'm hearing you say, like the real crux of it is leaning in, staying curious, and really fostering some of those human to human connections.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: Again, it's not really necessarily, I think, important for us to go to a person of color and say, "What did I do wrong? Or, how can I do better?"
It's really seeing it and saying, "How can I support you?" Taking it out of the context of ourself and saying, "What kind of support do you need? Do you need a career connection? Do you need some support?" Writing a letter for salary raise, mentoring, at least in the clinical world. Appreciating that there's a, there's another story that maybe we weren't sensitive to.
Kara Wada, MD: Yeah. Awesome. When when people are listening to this and they want to find you, where are the best places that they should be looking? And we will link to them, but..
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: Sure. I think I'm pretty active on Facebook and Instagram, and I have a website, drsirichand.com. Not spelled out doctor, but Dr.
Those are great places to find me. I'm on every media platform though wherever your preferred place is, you can just can't find the handle, doctor Siri. Spelled out, doctor because someone had taken Dr. I probably oughta change my website, but at this point I'm invested in.
Yeah, it all works out. But yeah, so spelled out doctorsirichand on all pretty much, I'm not on Snapchat, but pretty much I'm everywhere else.
I feel like I missed the boat on Snapchat. I'm definitely missed the boat.
Kara Wada, MD: We've been wrapping up our more recent episodes by asking our guests if they had advice to give someone on becoming more confident? What advice would you offer them?
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: I think that this is such a beautiful question and I think that I really appreciate. That I truly believe curiosity builds confidence. So foster curiosity in yourself.
There's a lot more I could say, but it's so individualized for each person.
If you feel curious about how moving more would help you, get in a Facebook group about people who wanna know how to move better, who have chronic debilitating illnesses.
If you wanna know how to eat better, get curious, and go on pinterest and look at 1, 2, 3 plant-based recipes easy peasy. Or search easy vegan recipes or easy plant-based recipe hashtags.
If you wanna learn about how stress reduction could impact your disease state, look at a mindfulness or yoga or tai chi class.
If you are interested in understanding better how trauma has impacted you, get curious and go to Yelp and read a bunch of therapist reviews and see if somebody's profile jumps out at you. Or Psychology Today has a listing of them.
If you believe that you think community and not feeling so isolated is important, start a meetup group around a topic of interest to you. You can do Zoom calls, you can meet in person.
If you feel that a relationship is really stagnant and holding you back, begin the difficult conversations with that person. Get curious about how you can undo a lock in a relationship.
So if you feel beneath it financially, follow some smart financial people on social media. Learn some new tips. Become financially literate.
If you feel an inkling that your current spiritual tradition isn't nourishing, you attend another space that offers spiritual nourishment.
I think we need all these areas of life to be aligned in a way that supports our growth and development as humans and our interconnectedness to each other.
So the most important variable in that, which I hadn't even thought about before this conversation is really just getting super curious, like sitting for a moment as you're listening now, closing your eyes gently and just taking a moment, what am I feeling?
Okay. Touching into the body and then saying, what do I want? What am I curious about? Often our unexperienced, undigested emotions keep us busy. So take a moment, experience an emotion, and beneath that is inevitably a wellspring of interest in life.
If it happens that you do that check-in and it feels blank or foreign or flat, get some support. Find a coach or therapist who helps you rediscover that terrain.
I don't believe, maybe save Antarctica or Serbia, that any terrain within us is permanent tundra. There's only, from my perspective, the possibility of growth and shift and change.
None of us is, none of us has unfertile ground. We just have to find the right people. Oftentimes, I always say, if you're doing it the way you've always done it, you're unlikely to get another result.
So we often need, programs like what you're offering, the podcasts, coaches teaching courses to help lift us out of the narratives that have been the dominant internalized stories and beliefs about ourself and that's important work we all have to do right now.
Kara Wada, MD: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That was amazing. Everyone go back, Hit the rewind button a couple times and listen to that a few times and get to work.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: I know, I always say, it the beauty of it is that when we do that work, then life begins to flower. We begin to feel empowered.
We begin to be informed by things beyond just everything we've been taught or internalized because I actually believe this, I'll close with this, I actually believe that there is innate goodness in nearly everyone and commingled with that is an innate intelligence about how to treat other people, how to treat ourselves.
I just feel like we get so much signal, about so much noise, I should say, so much noise about what that needs to be, should be, could. But inside us resides this ancient awareness that these older healing systems had relationships to that can guide us. Subtle things can actually change our trajectory dramatically.
Final analogy I'll leave you with is, if you have a ship that's leaving New York and it wants to go to London, and let's say it's a 30 day journey, but let's use the equivalent of our life, let's say it's a lifetime journey and you make a tiny course correction by just 0.0001 degree, but you're on a long term trajectory, you're gonna end up in somewhere in Norway and not England.
So tiny decisions can and do impact over time, but nothing is a quick fix when you look at things from these older healing systems. Nothing. Nothing is like that.
Kara Wada, MD: Yeah. It's the day in, day out. Keep showing up, keep getting back on the horse, even. When you haven't felt good, like after recover and then get back at it.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: Yeah and like you said, perhaps before we were on recording, letting the full spectrum of the human experience exist and say, I don't have to pretend to at least to myself that I'm not, that I'm having a good day when I'm not.
The full human experience includes really crappy days and feeling awful and not being at our best. And the less we judge that, and there are thoughts around that emotional experience of feeling angry, frustrated, desolate, despair, I think the the more ease we have to just let that emotion come through us, let that experience come through us and allow for something else to emerge after that.
Kara Wada, MD: It is what it is and it's part of all of it.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: It truly is.
Kara Wada, MD: Thank you. Thank you. This has been absolutely wonderful and I can't wait till we get to speak and hang out again.
Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS: Oh, me too. Very much looking forward to it.
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