- I had never anticipated
that I would go off
and become interested in
medicine in particular
or in practices of healing.
But I did.
And that's where my career has gone.
I think at a very personal
level, to be honest,
finding Nepal and finding my relationship
to a place and to a group of people
who are still part of my
life now 23 years later
was a process of healing
personally for me.
Finding family, finding
kinship that was very different
than the kind of loving
but also very tumultuous
part of my childhood
and young adulthood,
so the whole process in a sense
was of certain kind of medicine.
It was a way of understanding also
that there are different pathways
to feeling good about
yourself and in the world
and pathways to feeling ill.
I got interested in medicine in particular
by working with traditional doctors,
Tibetan doctors, who had many, many roles
in their lives and in their societies.
They were not just doctors.
And I found something really beautiful
and deeply curious about that,
that coming from a society and a culture
in which we so demarcate
and professionalize who has the capacity
or the expertise to be a healer
and coming in to a society
in which there were still
a huge amount of work
that went into being able
to call yourself an amchi,
the Tibetan word for doctor,
but that did not negate the fact
that these folks were also
wood carvers, and artists,
and priests, Buddhist priests.
And there was something about the wholism
contained in that view of medicine
that really made sense to me.
And that I wanted to continue to explore.
