Transcription of Dr. Lisa Belisle for the show Intentions #16
Genevieve: Hi, Lisa. Happy New Year.
Dr. Lisa: Thank you. You too.
Genevieve: I’m looking forward to this year on the ‘Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast’. We’ve got a lot of exciting things coming up.
Dr. Lisa: I am too, and I thought a lot about the show and what the show looks like moving forward, but I thought it might be good to give a little background as to why we’re here in the first place. For those people who don’t know me as a doctor, they haven’t come to see me as a patient or not my sister, not one of my family members and not one of your family members …
Genevieve: I know that my family sometimes wants to. What do you do every week?
Dr. Lisa: Yes, right. What is it that … What’s really nice about being on the radio is that people really want to know they can actually listen.
Genevieve: That’d be great.
Dr. Lisa: Also, if you write like I do with the blog, then they can read the blog, but for those people who haven’t been tuning in as much but are interested, and what we’re trying to do is offer a talk radio program that offers meaningful mind, body and spirit connections that go beyond the individual to celebrate health with a global perspective.
Genevieve: I think that is something that we do that is very unique and new, the global perspective on people. We talk about this amongst ourselves a lot, but when people think about wellness, they immediately think about how they’re feeling individually. I think we should tell people what we mean by global perspective.
Dr. Lisa: There’s so many different ways to think about global. It’s interesting in this culture because you live in the United States and it’s all about the American dream and we’re all supposed to go out and do well as individuals, and we focused a lot on individual health in western medicine since ‘The Flexner Report’ came out in the early 1900s, but medicine and health and wellness are about connections. It’s about connecting to people around us. It’s the health of our children and our families and our communities, the environment in which we live, so there is that global element.
Genevieve: I know when I interviewed you a year ago, we discussed to great detail how that change came about for you where you moved from western medicine to a more integrated approach involving other eastern disciplines like acupuncture, and that that was really a mind-blowing moment for you in terms of setting an intention for how you wanted to practice in the world.
I think it’d be interesting if you’d tell everybody a little bit about what we talked about last year which is how did you set your intention for this practice and this show?
Dr. Lisa: For those people who haven’t read the article which was in the inaugural wellness issue of ‘Maine Magazine’ last spring, spring of 2011, I talked a lot about realizing that health and wellness are more about the story of the individual, and that we manifest dysfunctions in our lives in our bodies. That’s a different way of looking at it from a western perspective.
Genevieve: Certainly, that what’s happening outside is also happening inside.
Dr. Lisa: Right. Chinese medicine has been around for a few thousand years as has acupuncture, and just this whole different way of looking at things, the whole five element approach that you and I talked about, and I can go into it in a little bit more detail.
Western medicine is a lot more linear. It’s a lot more what they say is algorithmic. There’s a lot more sort of evidence-base to it. I think there’s a lot that western medicine does well, and then there’s a lot that eastern medicine and traditional Chinese medicine does well. My intention was to find what worked for people, was to try to …
Genevieve: I think we can talk a little bit … Specifically, just recently, I had a really terrible infection that was treated with antibiotics, but then, you and I worked together to treat the outerlying aspects of my infection through eastern medicine. They’re both useful. Both approaches are useful.
What I think you were saying was that our form of western medicine is very, very specialized and doesn’t see the connections as much as what you’re practicing. Would that be fair to say?
Dr. Lisa: I think that’s really fair to say. Anybody who seen a doctor recently or been in the hospital realizes that we’ve divided things up. We’ve divided the body up into parts, so you’d go and you see a periodontist, a gum, tooth specialist or you go and see a podiatrist, a foot specialist or just different body parts of different people in charge of them.
Genevieve: Some of them never even talked to each other.
Dr. Lisa; That is the issue. It’s not that we shouldn’t specialize in body parts, it’s that we have to create a network where specialists can converse. Chinese medicine is interesting because, especially if you look at what they call ‘The five element’ or ‘Five phase theory’, all of the parts of the self are connected. One …
Genevieve: Tell everybody out there what the five elements are.
Dr. Lisa: The five elements or five phases are actually related to the seasons of the year, and are also related to organ systems within the body and they each have … They have different things associated with them.
For example, if we’re talking about the winter in the winter, it is the season of water, and you think about that, that makes sense … snow, ice, but it’s also associated with the kidney. Now, the kidney that has an element, has the emotion of fear associated with it which actually also makes sense if you think about it, because if it’s always very icy out or if you’re out on the deep waters, there is the sense that you’re afraid that you could fall, or that you could fall in or something bad could happen to you.
Genevieve: As we talked about Marcelle Pick, the adrenal right on top of the kidney, so it’s your hypervigilance, your adrenalin is connected. Correct?
Dr. Lisa: Yes. That’s absolutely right. The other side of fear of course is wisdom. If you can get past this fear, you can learn a lot about yourself. If you could almost push yourself to go out on the ice, you can skate as opposed to fall.
Genevieve: I know.
Dr. Lisa: You could see how balanced you are. If instead of thinking you’re going to drown, you believe that you can swim, then there’s certain amount of again, physical wisdom that comes through.
What’s interesting to me again is that this is a metaphor. I mean, the body is a metaphor for a person’s life. When somebody comes in who has issues associated with their kidneys or actually the other thing about … I think it’s appropriate to talk about this given that it’s winter, and this is the season of the kidney, that it’s all about if you have thinning hair or if you can’t hear well or if you have knee pain or back pain, those are all kidney and those are also diseases of old age.
What happens when we get older is we can either get wiser or we can get more scared. There is an element associated with the body organs, so you have livers associated with the element of wood which is in the spring, you have the heart which is associated with fire in the summer, you have this interesting … because of course, most people would point out we only truly have four seasons, but in Chinese medicine, there’s five. The spleen and stomach are associated with the element of earth, which is the late summer, early autumn. In the autumn, we have the season of the lung, and the element is metal, and then it connects back again to the kidney.
Genevieve: Kidney is water …
Dr. Lisa: Kidney is water. Wood is liver.
Genevieve: Wood is liver and spring.
Dr. Lisa: Summer?
Genevieve: Summer is heart.
Dr. Lisa: Summer is heart, and then late summer is stomach and spleen. Autumn is lung, and then again …
Genevieve: … and air.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, and your back again. Each of these … Again, and it’s not just one organ system, it’s a couple of different organ systems, there’s a yin system and a yang system. This gets deep in the Chinese medicine, so we don’t have to do that too much.
Genevieve: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: The interesting thing is that as you can see, the kidney is attached to the organ system before it and after it, so the lung feeds into the kidney which is true even in western medicine.
Genevieve: It’s all connected.
Dr. Lisa: It is all connected.
Genevieve: This gets us back to the global perspective.
Dr. Lisa: Which is exactly what we’re talking about. It’s global from a … like as an individual globally connected, but also you can be an element within your own ecosystem of your family or the ecosystem of your community or of the world.
The thing that’s so important is that we start creating a dialogue so that we get on the ‘Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast’, and we are talking to people who aren’t … so we do talk to doctors, but we also talk to business people …
Genevieve: … and artists.
Dr. Lisa: … and we talk to artists, and we talk to people who create, because health and wellness aren’t solely the responsibility of doctors or nurses, or people who call themselves healthcare providers. It is a responsibility of all of us, the responsibility and the privilege honestly. This is why we bring so many different people in because we know that everybody is a stakeholder when it comes to health and wellness, and whether it’s individual wellness or whether it’s environmental wellness or whether it’s global wellness.
Genevieve: I think anyone who builds a team, whether it’s a sport team or a business team would totally agree with you and say that the health of the team is only as strong as each individual member’s health and participation, and so it makes total sense.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. For me, this is people ask me all the time, “You’re a doctor. Why are you doing radio?” I think one of the questions you asked earlier is “How did you come to this place where you’re doing radio?” It’s similar to how I came to the place where I was doing writing. It’s just doctoring at a different level.
When I write, whether it’s been … I’ve written for more than a decade for various publications, it’s doctoring to people who might not be able to come in and see me. Doctoring is teaching. It’s educating. I talk about health and wellness and they read it in a publication, they read it online, they read it weekly or daily in my blog, they read it in my newsletter or they listen to it now.
The reason it has to be a dialogue between you and I and the people who come on our show is because there is that important feedback loop that can only occur over the course of conversation, over the course of connecting with other people. This is why the radio show is so important because you can connect with people when they are listening to you in ways that you can’t connect with them when they are reading your words.
Genevieve: That is very true.
Genevieve: We learn a lot from our guests. It helps us with our pursuit of wellness and our connection to ourselves and our loved ones.
Dr. Lisa: Yes. I think that part of the reason why I keep doing what I’m doing is that I’ve never stopped learning, I never want to stop learning, and everything that I have ever done informs who I am now and probably who I will be in the future, and how I parent my children, and how I doctor my patients, and how I write and how I’m on the radio, and for me, my life is a global life. This is the reason why I come on this radio show every week and do something that I’m not “trained to do”, because I feel passionate that this is an important …
I want to be out there doing what I’m asking other people to do, which is to connect in with their true selves, with their authenticity and their true purpose in this world, whatever that looks like.
Genevieve: Would you say that’s your intention for yourself and your practice to connect to people with their own authentic selves?
Dr. Lisa: My intention is to be authentic, and then whatever people take from that is what they take from it. I don’t think t here’s any … I have never championed the idea of preaching to people. All I would like to be able to do is present people with stories and ideas and prompt connections. If those connections prompt them to connect back with themselves and what they’re meant to be doing in this world, then I’m happy.
Genevieve: There is a little bit of a leap of faith. For instance, a year ago, when I was interviewing you for the magazine, for ‘Maine Magazine’, we had no idea where it would go, but we had a great connection and we had similar interests, and we followed it down the path where it went, and here we are today.
Dr. Lisa: There is that important piece, is that openness, is that openness to if you show up and you attempt to be as authentic and connecting your life as possible, and you don’t know where it will go, but you’re open to whatever happens, then connections can be made. This is true even in early brain development.
Genevieve: Yes, beautiful things can happen.
Dr. Lisa: Beautiful, yes. Absolutely. There’s courage required. Again, we go back to the kidney and the idea of fear. There’s a lot of fear associated with the unknown, but if you can get past that fear, you learn about yourself and you learn that your body has wisdom, and your life has wisdom and the universe has wisdom, and you live more fully.
Genevieve: Let’s get back a little bit to the five elements because you and I have used that model in so many ways when we talk about wellness, but we’ve really talked a lot about shaping the show as a reflection of what it takes to be healthy as an individual, but what it takes to be healthy as a show. I know you have some ideas about that.
Dr. Lisa: You and I recently got together and talked about how we I guess translate some of these Chinese ideas into something that’s more readily accessible to those who maybe don’t … They don’t connect to Chinese medicine. What we decided was that our underlying aspects of well being include physical resilience, mental clarity, spiritual awareness, emotional freedom and connection to others. What we’re hoping, what we hoped that we have done in the past shows over the course of the fall was to bring all of those elements into the show.
What we continue to do as we try to make the show better and better is to really emphasize each of those elements, and that’s what we’re hoping. We also hope that we’re building community. We’re building a community of people who really believe in the importance of health and wellness.
Genevieve: Absolutely, so we’re sort of a model. We have our own individual entity, the ‘Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast’ that we’re trying to support in these five aspects of wellness, and hoping that out there on the airwaves as it spreads out, it’s going to help our community and eventually our nation, maybe even the world to get better.
Dr. Lisa: Why not? I think we laugh as we say this, but it’s always the microcosm representing the macrocosm, and the healthier you can make, the smaller or what you consider to be small say yourself, the healthier you could make your heart, the healthier your body will be, the healthier your self will be, your family will be, your community will be, and then if you just go out and be as healthy as you can be in each of these five ways, you can’t help but impact those around you. You can’t help but impact people, whether it’s the person sitting next to you or whether it’s the person who’s listening on the radio in Thailand.
Genevieve: I love that idea that fear can lead to wisdom. What a beautiful thing.
Dr. Lisa: Absolutely. I know that many people who are listening, as they’re thinking about setting their intentions for the New Year, they will be fearing that they can’t change. What I can absolutely say to you is that there is always room to overcome that fear, there’s always room to set a new intention for your life, and we think we can help you. We think that as you’re listening, you’re going to maybe be able to move beyond the fear.
Genevieve: In support of building community, we’d love to hear from our friends out there and our supporters, and maybe those of you who think we can be doing things a little differently. How can we get feedback from people, Lisa?
Dr. Lisa: We do have a Facebook presence. They can go to ‘Dr. Lisa’ and like our page and read along, and they can send comments to us. They can go to ‘doctorlisa.org’ where they can read our past podcast updates and they can send us emails through that. They can get our newsletters and send us feedback that way. They can read the blog and give us feedback that way.
Genevieve: They can pass on our podcast to their friends and family.