My mom is a nurse.
And when I was a kid,
She would do home care visits and she would go attend to people,
Sometimes late at night for emergencies.
And I was a young Canadian hockey playing boy.
So I would be waiting for her at the ice rink.
This was before the era of cell phones.
And then she would pick me up.
And so I ended up seeing quite a few of her patients.
And some of them,
You know,
Recovered almost miraculously.
They did amazing after surgery,
After an accident,
After getting sick.
And some others just would never recover.
And they would,
You know,
Get sick and then they would get another infection.
And then there were complications,
And then they would end up dying.
And I think around that time,
I started to ask myself,
Why is that?
How is it that some people have the inner force,
The inner capacity,
The energy to heal and to get better?
And some people even exhibit what we call post-traumatic growth.
So something happens to you,
It kind of breaks you,
But then you learn from it maybe,
You grow from it,
You heal,
You become whole again,
But you become a slightly different person.
This is true healing.
And some people were able to do this and some others not.
Other people just didn't seem to have that capacity.
And I think I started to ask myself,
Why is that?
As a hockey player,
Then later as a competitive cyclist,
I also had a bunch of injuries and the pain of not being able to do what you want in life because your body is not working the way you want it to work.
Human suffering I experienced,
And then I experienced the process of coming back to being whole again,
To being able to do and be the things that I valued the most.
So I got to experience this in different phases of my life.
And then I realized that I don't think there's anything more important to understand than this.
What is it that allows us to heal and to preserve health and to reach,
Achieve our optimal state health.
When you start to think about health from first principles,
You realize very quickly Health is not a thing,
Right?
Health is a state of being.
It's a state of It's not a state of doing,
Right?
We're human beings,
We're not human doings.
So health is a state of being,
But health is dynamic.
And when you think about what health is from first principles,
Very quickly you realize that the basis of health is healing.
The basis of health is your ability every day to repair your wounds and to become whole again.
Every night we go to sleep and there's something very special that happens.
The body heals itself,
The mind heals itself,
And then you wake up in the morning feeling refreshed physically.
And whatever difficult experience you had the day before feels a little less acute,
A little less raw,
That's healing.
That's psychological healing.
And when you're in a state of optimal health,
Then you can be your full self,
Right?
You can be the full expression of yourself.
And we don't have a science of this.
