The Intention Behind the Ommani Center

How does one adapt to being uprooted and unearthed? The human spirit strives to survive, to continually move towards its destiny to carve out a course that reclaims one’s sense of meaning. My mother is a person who experienced this. At the age of 10, her parents were killed in the India-Pakistan partition, leaving her orphaned and terrified. As life presented her with gateways, she was able to walk through some, and not others, due to the fears resulting from the acts of violence she had experienced that had been imprinted upon her. She engaged her courage as she grew large at the wounded places and carved a course for her life that offered her meaning and purpose. Over the history of the human race, millions like her have been left with varying levels of paralysis in our world with little emotional context. The context with which the unknown was encountered for them was through the experience of terrifying loss.

We may think that our generation is protected from this level of loss, that it is from a more distant time, but this is far from the truth. Our world has been warring for decades, leaving casualties of violence and encounters with the terrifying unknown embedded in our collective psyches. We are living in virtual reality. We have learned to cover up our feeling function and learned to deny our deep emotions with creature comforts, with superficial solutions, none of which endure. Eventually, we must stand naked before ourselves, confront our gateways and step into our largeness, reclaiming what was taken from us and redirect our course consciously into the unknown. This is what midlife expects of us. In the areas my mother was unable to choose, due to her circumstances, I must. Where she could not reclaim, I must. We, the children of the last generation, now in midlife, must find the courage to engage our consciousness in the areas where we become stuck, and live from our superficial yet familiar cultural framework, and believe in the potential of our souls. To redefine health from this context is our sacred task. This is how REAL Health Care can be accessed.

The Ommani Center for Integrative Medicine was born from my strong intention to create a context for health that is deeper than just the physical level. Health is more than just symptom management through integrative methods. As important and vital as this is, it does not access true health or healing. Being conscious of how and where one lives and relates to life may be the more important and deeper context that determines one’s state of true health. This can and must be evoked.

If those that killed my grandparents and irrevocably changed the course of my mother’s life had this level of consciousness and asked the important and REAL questions, needless suffering could have been averted. We cannot go back in time and change history. We can however grow strong at the places where we have been wounded. We can use our wounds to acknowledge our humanness and engage our courage to grow in consciousness and health. We must engage our wounds in order to offer ourselves a larger context for empowerment, reclamation, and ultimately for healing. This will uncover a deeper sense of meaning in our lives.

A Health Care System that can hold this level of space from a context such as this, inclusive of modern technological advances with high-standard –of –care, is what we all deserve. It is a place where meaning is restored. Cultivating and supporting a system like this is sacred work. For me, it is a vocation. Where my vocation aligned with my mother’s biography is where I found meaning and an opportunity to create a larger context in the form of The Ommani Center where true health and meaning could be accessed that was inclusive of my love of medicine and my devotion to high-quality health care.

If we want a system that cares and offers us more than what our current system offers, this needs to be our collective work. Together, we must support and expect health care to be REAL for us so it can address our REAL needs and ask the REAL questions of us, questions that we can live out in our destinies from a place of health and meaning. I encourage all of you to expect this from our Health Care System. Our expectations of what is REAL will truly change our world for the better.