Just as I’m starting to type this story up, I’m sitting in one of my favourite cafes. It’s buzzing with life on an early Friday afternoon, the soothing tunes in the background fuse with the sounds of people chatting, typing, sipping on all kinds of warm, cosy drinks. The smooth wooden furniture and trays bring in a sense of nature into this busy place in the middle of the city. Colourful paintings are hanging from each wall, embracing this hub of all these textures, sounds, people, tastes…
I am feeling my senses coming alive.
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In kinder garden I used to draw day and night, I remember asking my dad to write down this story about horses that I was illustrating with my whole series of drawings.
In elementary school I have discovered my passion for reading, I started engulfing all kinds of books, getting lost in the worlds and the stories they described.
In my early high school years, after freshly moving to a new country, I have tried photography for the first time, guided by my dear art teacher. I started to pay attention to all the different angles, points of view one can take.
In high school I have also started to get accustomed to English, the language spoken at school, Serbian all around me in friend circles and weekly French classes - discovering the diverse, captivating logic behind ways of expressing ourselves in these ‘foreign’ languages.
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All in all, I have always been fascinated by how much magic the world can offer to all the different senses and how these impulses can be translated to a variety of forms, shared and move others - through music, photography, stories, paintings…
Sensitivity and creativity go hand in hand for me. The more you are opening up to, the more wants to move through and be expressed by you.
I believe we are all deeply sensitive beings by nature. I also believe we are meant to be creating, expressing ourselves constantly.
I feel my sensitivity emerging after years of shielding myself from the harsh reality of the world of health care.
After years of spending days in old hospitals, surgery rooms with all the led lights, stuffy meeting rooms filled with chairs and white coats and cheap coffee in plastic cups. Walking through patients rooms either too hot from the heat of summer or the uncontrollable heating during winter or even worse, too cold before the heating turns on (if it ever does due to the lack of finances).
After years of getting through exams every couple of weeks to then mark our level of knowledge based on that mere hour of talking by grades, seeing patients statuses reduced to reference values, shaming of students for not knowing enough at practices, doctors dismissing us in lack of time to teach, others keeping us in to work for those attendance signatures…
Exiting this world, I am slowly starting to feel like my sensitivity is not a burden. I can breathe again.
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I have always wanted to be a ‘healer’. I knew I wanted to work with people, listen to their stories, follow their journeys. Already in kinder garden I said I would follow my mum’s footsteps and become a doctor.
Even before entering medical school it was crystal clear to me that I didn’t necessarily want to work with people as a doctor. I was interested in everything related to medicine but not quite it - nutrition, physiotherapy, psychology… I thought I would learn a little of each of these topics if I chose medicine. (how naive of me :D ) Oh and I must say I was deeply fascinated by the complexity of the body and wanted to learn all about it.
This is how I started medschool and fell in love with learning the intrinsic mysteries of the body and the way it functions in a healthy setting in the first 2 years. I loved it.
Then in 3rd year we started learning all about the ways our body can ‘malfunction’. I started to hate it.
I was already dwelling deep in the yoga world, (finished my first yoga teacher training before medical school) but it was in 3rd year that I knew I was not at the right place to learn about the kind of healing I have been feeling called to do. I have started seeking teachers of all kinds - I took an elective course on Yoga at university, I was learning from Ayurvedic doctors, then a TCM doctor, I did another yoga teacher training, participated in a group coaching program, did a dance course, took classes from a herbalist…
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As I was discovering more of the traditional medicines it became apparent that this feels right. Looking at the bigger picture, actually listening to the patients whole story, considering his lifestyle, his individual characteristics, the environment he'/she lives in. These medicines clearly state that even if we are not consciously sensing our environment, we are constantly influenced by our surroundings - on a physical, emotional and subtle plain as well.
Healing can take countless different forms. We could approach it from so many perspectives. It can change over time even for the same person. But where I’m going with all these stories today (what feels true to me now) is - that healing is a form of art.
Art for me is opening up our senses to take in the magic the world offers to us - then alchemising it - and giving it back to the world via our personal expression, creation.
Healing for me is consuming our experiences whole, accepting them, digesting them - then coming back to our deep knowing, stepping out of the victim mindset, seeing the bigger picture - and eventually, taking steps towards shifting our life more in alignment with that inner knowing.
Obviously, ‘healing’ is a wide and vast topic and I’m definitely not trying to break it down to a definition of a few lines. I’d rather like to highlight the complexity of it with its countless layers and aspects. Which is also why I feel called to share and philosophise more about it.
My teacher says that in Traditional Chinese Medicine you’re using both the right and the left sides of your brain - the more artistic and the more pragmatic . The way TCM and Ayurveda approaches the body, the soul, the mind, drawing parallels between nature, the seasons and the whole individual, feels like poetry. It’s like a more subtle language is needed to convey the bodies whispers, only numbers wouldn’t do.
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I have been going through my own personal healing journey during medical school. (I won’t share it all now, probably another day I will) . It took place on all the plains - physical, emotional, mental. I trust that reviving my creativity and my senses over time played a huge role in it - along with the lifestyle changes I have made to support the natural rhythm and knowings of my body.
‘The highest form of medicine nourishes one’s destiny.’ - from a TCM book mentioned by Gye Bennetts in Something Adored Podcast.
In short, I wish for you to listen to those inner whispers, in whichever form they present to you. Keep opening up all of your senses - to all those precious feelings evoked by both your inner and your outer world. Then please share your gifts with the world, express yourself, don’t hold back, we need your magic + we need you to stay your healthy, vibrant self.
I’ll keep sharing more of these ‘medicine’ stories on here. Until then, I’ll keep spending my days writing as the sun comes up, discovering the stories contained in parfumes, allowing tea to take me on deeper inner journeys and embracing connecting with nature and people.
Feeling all of my senses coming alive.
Love,
Zsófi