Whether in the Board Room or the Studio, people who build from imagination see the big picture. Unfortunately, our healthcare system doesn't.

It’s 9PM, you glance at your calendar for tomorrow, and it’s a wall of multi-colored cells. All big names, big pitches, and big expectations. You know your auto-pilot is as good as many people’s best day, you’ll pull it off. But, if you had a little more time to prepare, you’d take it even higher. With that thought, there’s a pinch in your right hand gut, something that’s been bothering since last year, on and off. The doctor says you’re fine but it seems to heat up when you’re stressed, and lights up before a headache. Another day, another Tylenol, keep going…

I know a lot of people for whom this is a familiar story. It was for me. When you’re creative, persuasive, and in a leadership position, you feel like you can roll with whatever life throws your way and it will usually work out. In my case, that was true until it wasn’t, and that nagging pain became something I couldn’t keep avoiding but needed to sacrifice some time to think about. 

The thing that a lot of people in creative/leadership positions struggle with is actually knowing when they should hit pause, even if just for a few hours out of your day. The approach that got you here won’t get you out. For me, working with a homeopath also meant acknowledging that I didn’t know the best way forward. Ultimately, that also meant telling myself that my own value wasn’t just in what I presented outwardly, but I needed to do some holistic work internally, and acknowledge the complexity of being human, not just work through the patterns of complexity in my field. I needed to wrestle with my own patterns. Kicking off that process began a long healing journey, which I continue to this day. 

There’s so much confusion about what a human being is. The healthcare system sees us as a complicated system with deterministic inputs and outputs. And that all of our ills are treatable by a chemical intervention. If a number is too high, then a chemical should bring it down. If another number gets too low, then another chemical. All based on broad public efficacy, never individualized to our own qualitative state.

That is a framework of complication, not complexity. Complexity is acknowledging that the full picture may not be known in a living system, and that there will be outcomes that are indeterminate. By any sane measure, humans are complex. You might even describe as nested complexities, interacting in both complicated and complex ways. I believe creative people understand complexity intuitively, we begin with some degree of indeterminacy baked into our mental models, we go through all sorts of contortions to make sure we have protected space for unexpected ideas to arise. We acknowledge complicated systems, but see those as a facade before the actual complexity of the world as it is: some of it is known, a lot of it isn’t. 

This to me is a grounding principle of being an imaginal being, holding a complex mental space that allows for unexpected outputs, exponential fluctuations, sometimes due to minuscule inputs. Doctors know this too, I believe: they see in their clinics evidence of health turn-arounds, sudden healing, or other changes outside of a mechanistic regime. Sadly, much of this clinical evidence has been tarnished by the slur of “anecdotal”.

We need conventional medicine, that goes without saying. But we need to see it as part of the larger picture, a holistic vision of the complexity of human-ness. Homeopathy is a modality which achieves this elegantly, sitting at the exact crossroads of observational evidence, holistic engagement, and mystery. And, if you try it, the worst outcome might be that you just wasted a little time. And maybe that was a good investment in itself.