My loss of faith in the mainstream medical system began when I was in labour with my first child 20 years ago.
I've always been very in tune with my physicality, but at that point I'd also trained in a conscious dance practice, that accentuated my embodied awareness.
I knew what was happening for me in my labour, but the medical staff - nurses and doctors alike - didn't listen.
And my husband, chose to listen to them, rather than to me.
As a result, I felt utterly alone and unsupported during the most vulnerable experience of my entire life.
The birth was traumatic. It left me with both physical (literally, by way of a torn vagina) and emotional scars.
When I sought help for the physical discomfort that I subsequently experienced during sex, the gynecologist - a woman - gave me anti-depressants and told me to "use it or lose it."
Once again, I felt utterly misunderstood and failed by the system. This doctor simply did not understand the depth of my grief at the loss of my sexuality, which had always felt central to my being, identity and relationship. She did not take seriously the physical pain I reported feeling during sex because she couldn't "see" anything too badly wrong upon examination.
And she brushed me off with some powerful drugs for depression, when I was still breast-feeding and NOT depressed !!!
I tried the tablets for a few days, but felt so spaced out and ungrounded, that I threw them in the bin. I knew that wasn't the solution. But it took me a further 4.5 sexless years and a broken marriage before I did.
It never occurred to anyone, including me at the time, that there might be something my husband could do to address this situation. I only see clearly now the blindingly phallo-centric cultural assumption, that my pain during sex was because I was "faulty" and needed to do something about it, so that he could have his pleasure again.
As a result of my further training in conscious dance, I studied both eastern energy systems and western anatomy and physiology, deepening my relationship with my body as one whole; intimately connected to emotions, mind and spirit.
And I began to be surrounded by like-minded souls, who took a similar holistic approach to health and well-being, supporting their healing and vitality wiith alternative and natural methods including acupuncture, aromatherapy, homeopathy, herbs and tinctures, bodywork, nutrition, yoga, Reiki, crystals, EFT and so on.
I became a Reiki Master, Kundalini Yoga teacher, tantrika and massage therapist, once again deepening my study of both western anatomy and eastern theories of meridians and the energy body.
I saw and felt with my own hands and eyes, how touch in the right places could unleash a torrent of emotion, release blocked energy, alleviate pain and activate profound healing.
The more I became consciously embodied, factually educated and empowered to listen to my own experience, the less I trusted and felt understood or supported by the mainstream medical system on the rare occasions I came into contact with it.
I felt patronised by medical practitioners' false assumptions, that I was less intelligent than them, did not understand the workings of my body and could not follow scientific language.
I felt alienated, cancelled and misunderstood by an essentially patriarchal medical model, that both lacked a true understanding of the feminine body and arrogantly dismissed the holistic and energy-based nature of reality.
Along the way, I've come across so many souls, who feel the same and have been forced by similar experiences of being failed, ignored or gas-lighted by the mainstream medical system - especially women - that they have had to discover alternative ways to support their healing, health and self-empowerment.
Pretty much every one in my current reality is a therapist or healing practitioner of some kind or other, who regards illness as an imbalance or reset, that is always directly connected with every other facet of one's life, that can be healed by a sovereign, self-aware choice of alternative and allopathic treatments.
Pain and illness are regarded as an expression of physical/mental/emotional/spiritual dis-ease to be met with awareness. Bringing gifts of healing and personal growth.
But even when there isn't any physical discomfort, the body is always speaking. Giving us all kinds of signals about safety, trust, truth, frequency, desire and alignment.
Living in awareness with these signals is, imho, the only way an individual can ever be grounded in a sovereign and unified state of consciousness. Or achieve the radiant health and well-being, that is their birthright.
I share all of this to explain why I trust my intuition, discernment, research and own inner experience above the accepted way of doing things, the opinions of doctors, nurses, professors, pharmaceutical companies and billiionaire philanthropists or the guidelines of government officials.
It's my belief, that the mainstream medical model, just like pretty much every major social structure and institution, is well overdue an upgrade towards the kind of empowered, quantum and holistic approach to health and well-being that the past 20 years have been preparing me for.
The current crisis is a wonderful opportunity to see the glaring flaws not just in how we do medicine, but how we approach education, government and politics, commerce, nutrition, relationships and agriculture.
Just like our health and well-being, it's all connected. And one very obvious way to figure out where an upgrade is needed is by tuning in to the body and our feeling state. What's inside is outside. And there's no escape.
I envisage a future in which each of us is empowered through the gift of conscious embodiment, free to make the choices we are inner guided to and abundantly resourced to access all the healing techniques and treatments we need in a way that is nourishing and sustainable for all peoples and the planet.