The Seeds of Vitality Medicine Part One- My Mom and Dad

Vitality Medicine is the natural result of my life’s experiences. I was fortunate to have been born to parents with strong convictions and a consciousness centered around health and wholeness. Do you know that John Prine song about throwing out the TV, moving to the country, and eating a lot of peaches? That was basically our lives. Except they have to be organic, in season, and locally grown, preferably home-grown peaches. My parents created an environment based in connection and wholeness, always with the intention that our family was a microcosm of what could be true in the macrocosm.

My parents met in their early twenties at a yoga class, each already practicing transcendental meditation daily. Once together, they made conscious choices on what reality they wanted to create and what beliefs would be the foundation of our family culture. Our “family as a catalyst for change” was the mission that shaped every part of our upbringing—being born at home, eating organic and whole foods, living close to nature, attending Waldorf schools, buying 20 acres that would become a community hub with everything from barn square dances and yoga classes to hosting traveling Tibetan monks yearly since the late 1980s.

I was born three months before my dad graduated from chiropractic college. My mom was trained as a speech and language therapist. As the eldest of four, my parents taught us that our lives were a gift, our bodies were our temples, wise beyond measure. The message was basically, don’t crap in your temple. Why would you pollute your body with bad food and substances, as our bodies have an innate intelligence to know how to be healthy, but when you pollute them, they can lose that homeostasis (balance). To this day, my dad will still not even take an Advil! He wants to give his body’s natural homeostasis a chance. 

This ‘body as temple’ was the pedagogy of my family, and it still imbues every cell of my being. I never really drank alcohol, partied, pulled all-nighters, did any drugs, ate fast food, drank soda, ate much refined sugars/packaged foods, drank coffee, etc. I didn’t even want to. Once I knew my body in a vital way, I realized I didn’t feel good engaging with any of these substances/ways of living, so I veered clear. 

Another foundation in our family is the focus on the balance of energy and rest, basically vitality. If there was discord in our family, the explanation was simple: “Oh, don’t take it personally, so-and-so is just tired.” In other words, we were never at fault, others were never at fault—if we were off it was not a deficiency in self, we just needed to rest and re-balance. My dad always told us, “When you are rested, you can move mountains.” The message was also clear, “you are good, you are worthy, you are whole. Even when we acted out or made bad choices or were rude, it was passed off as, “you must be tired. Why don’t you go and get some good rest”. It created a safe and trusting environment where we did not take things too personally, we did not feel blamed, and we did not hold grudges. This messaging fostered deep trust and love.

My mom is a rare breed in herself. Born in the caul (which is traditionally considered auspicious), she always trusted her own version of reality more so than any imposed upon her. In her childhood Catholic school, where she was taught by nuns in habit who hit kids with rulers, she always sat on only one half of her chair so her guardian angel could sit on the other half. Also, when they started teaching her about hell and the devil, she thought, “God wouldn’t allow that,” and she completely disregarded all the negative teachings. 

Her dominant mantra was, and remains, “everything always works out for the best!” Even when she was lying on the recovery table after the colonoscopy showed a huge colon cancer tumor in 2011, she leaned over to me and said, “Don’t worry, everything will be ok. It is ok.” Inside my head, I was screaming, “How could it be OK? The doctor just told us that you have cancer?!!!!” But my mom kept her calm, kept her positivity. And indeed she was right. Not only did everything work out ok, but more miracles happened because she had to go through cancer than any of us could have imagined.

The high intentions of my parents and the resulting cohesion within my family and myself is likely the most incredible gift of my life, as it strongly determined where I am today. It allowed me the sense of wholeness to end up with an incredible husband and life partner of my own, and to develop my own cohesive, loving, intentional family with him and our three sons.

Thanks mom and dad.