You are the most important member of your healthcare team.
An Introduction to the Body Wise Way:
A workshop about self-advocacy and healthcare system harm reduction
What would it feel like to leave a doctor’s visit feeling heard by your provider and clear about the next steps for your care? The truth is, you are the most important member of your healthcare team. Yet like many of us, you may feel disempowered by, frustrated at, and disconnected from the system meant to support you in your health and healing.
The Body Wise Collective is here to gently guide you through an introduction to self advocacy and health system harm-reduction during which you will:
BODY
Learn basic tools for your BODY to balance your nervous system before, during, and after healthcare encounters.
MIND
Enrich your MIND by understanding the way doctors are trained to gather information, so you can communicate efficiently and have more time for what really matters to you.
SPIRIT
Nourish your SPIRIT by clarifying what “health” means to you in order to be remain confident when providers approach your care with different priorities
NOTE: This workshop addresses the healthcare system as a whole while holding individual doctors with respect and compassion.
Who We Are
The Body Wise Collective (Beth, Julia, and Michal) are healing practitioners (an osteopathic physician, somatic practitioner, and naturopathic doctor respectively) with a shared passion for building a healthcare system that is empowering, interconnected, and deeply rooted in community.
In our own bodies and those of our patients and loved ones, we have felt the harm caused by the existing health-care system: dismissal, alienation, neglect. We each chose a path to provide effective and empowering care to our communities and have sought ways to share our skills to a wider audience and more accessibly/affordably than one-on-one office visits allow.
We acknowledge the ways that our shared identities (being white, thin, and non-disabled among others) leave gaps in our experience and knowledge. We are committed to ongoing learning and unlearning as we work to build systems of collective care that are rooted in racial, economic, gender, and disability justice.
If you want to learn more about our individual Philadelphia-based practices:
Beth: Philly Osteopathic
Julia: Body Voto
Michal: michalpearl.com
Future offerings
Our vision is to offer a curriculum that uproots the pervasive messages of brokenness and inadequacy that capitalism has imposed on our body-minds. We want to help people reimagine their individual health as part of a collective experience, and build skills to care for yourselves and each other.
We hope to offer this curriculum as a series of recordings to be available asynchronously (at your pace, from the comfort of wherever-you-like-learning!), as well as a workbook (think “The Artist’s Way” but for having a body.)
We are also in the process of creating and curating a collection of free resources, including scripts for talking to doctors, holistic pre and post-operative checklists, and more.
Questions, comments, thoughts? Want to stay in touch?
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