Check out the full series on Youtube - Roots of Care Series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVtaeaNoZCQ4) Overview: We continue our Roots of Care series by challenging the notion of clinicians as mere “fixers” and exploring what it truly means to provide healing in contexts where much of a patient's health lies outside the…
Check out the full series on Youtube - Roots of Care Series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVtaeaNoZCQ4) Overview: We explore the limitations of mechanistic models in medicine and emphasize the importance of seeing patients as whole beings shaped by history, context, land, and community. Through candid conversation among clinicians trained in somatic experiencing, compassionate…
The same physiological state — a racing heart — becomes "I'm excited" for one person and "I'm afraid" for another, and the story we catch in our consciousness is usually shaped by our history. This clip draws on polyvagal theory to open a window: what if you could notice the…
Clinicians are asked to bring a presence and calm that patients can co-regulate with — but we're nervous systems too, animals co-regulating with whoever's in front of us. When a patient walks in angry or frustrated, holding actual calm (not a facade) takes real skill. This clip connects that difficulty…
Medical training teaches you that you're the fixer — the solution provider, delivering healthcare to the masses. This clip names the trap in that: most of what determines a patient's health is entirely outside your control, yet you've been programmed to believe that not fixing someone means you've failed, that…
A core idea from polyvagal theory and somatic work: everything has meaning. You might not know the medical diagnosis for someone's pain, but it has meaning in their life — a reason it's showing up, something adaptive in it, even when it's causing harm. This clip offers a different way…
The stories we attach to bodily sensations are often formed in childhood, without the full picture — but with support and curiosity, following the body's story lets a new meaning emerge on its own. This clip contrasts that with how medicine works: we apply the meaning from the start. A…
The message many communities absorb is that carbs are the enemy. But this clip pushes back: carbs are how ancestors survived, working with the land to grow exactly what the body needed to stay strong. What changed wasn't the carbs — it was what got introduced later: white sugar, white…
An attempt to put words to something that resists them. Spirit, here, isn't the animating force exactly — it's the directional sense, the impetus that drives, a felt sense that sits behind and beneath thought and emotion, suffusing both. The clip closes on a quiet turn: asked when he last…
We live in a precarious society — a tangible sense of danger for some, a relentless pressure to perform and produce for nearly everyone. This clip asks what happens when someone arrives with high cholesterol and we hand over a diagnosis of hyperlipidemia without that larger conversation: we risk lodging…
If healing ultimately comes from within a patient, then the clinician's job shifts: not to force or fix, but to figure out what needs to get out of the way so healing can happen. This clip finds real ease in that reframe — there stop being "difficult patients." It doesn't…
For Indigenous peoples, land is far more than territory. This clip lays it out: land is identity, culture, and epistemology — the way knowledge is produced, held, and passed on. And where property sits at the center of capitalism, relationship is the currency of Indigenous societies and of custodianship. A…
Social determinants of health capture a lot — but this clip names what's still missing: connection to land. In conversations with Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and Native communities, that bond runs deep, extending to salmon, to creatures, to the living world. Traditionally, land was the lifeline — food, medicine, shelter —…
This clip reframes healing as inseparable from dignity — and dignity as inseparable from decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty. Dignity is relationships, knowing where you come from, understanding your responsibilities, knowing when to speak and when not to. Dignity is silence. Dignity is vanua. Dignity is health. A powerful closing articulation…
There's a rush in medicine to label before understanding the deeper pattern. This clip draws the distinction: not withholding appropriate care, but looking past the label to the person — their patterns, and the fact that even longstanding states can change. Against the societal expectation that you'll always be a…
Healthcare presents its choices as evidence-based — this is the best option, the data backs it. But this clip asks the question underneath: what were we asking when we gathered that evidence? Rarely was it "what helps a patient feel safe walking into this room?" Safety and a calm nervous…
A clear walkthrough of polyvagal theory: the nervous system organized as a survival hierarchy. There's the social engagement system — facial expression, vocal prosody, the muscles that tune our ears — run by the ventral vagal nerve. There's the sympathetic system physicians know well: adrenaline, fight-or-flight. And there's the dorsal…
Without pressuring anyone, there's value in a clinician quietly holding a different possibility: that a patient doesn't have to be in pain for the rest of their life, doesn't have to be their uncontrolled blood sugar or their discomfort. This clip returns to the idea of disease-as-identity and gently turns…
When an animal can't fight and can't flee, it freezes and shuts down. But the activation from those thwarted attempts to fight back doesn't vanish — it's still there, underneath the immobility. This clip makes a subtle, important point about the freeze response: being shut down doesn't mean nothing's happening.…
Seen through the nervous system, familiar diagnoses start to sort into patterns. Someone who tends toward sympathetic activation might present with hypertension, anxiety, insomnia; someone spending more time in dorsal vagal shutdown might present with fibromyalgia, IBS, chronic constipation, depression. This clip offers a lens for family physicians — a…
Trauma causes constriction — and part of the work is slowly learning to live in more space. This clip sits with the tender questions that surface along the way: Is it okay to feel good? Am I worthy of comfort? For many nervous systems, jumping straight to relaxation is too…
A story that lays bare a gulf in worldview: a doctor, ten years of training behind them, with little to offer an Indigenous Samoan child who lost his eye. This clip contrasts how healing is understood in Western medicine with how Samoans and Native Pacific Islanders understand it — as…
A searing account of how colonial systems dispossessed, marginalized, and dehumanized a people — and then imported a religion of forgiveness that placed the onus back on the harmed. This clip draws a stark analogy to survivors of violence being told to forgive their abuser, and names what happens next:…
A racing heart at the gym once triggered panic — the sensation was wired to fear. This clip traces the shift: recognizing in the here and now, I am safe, and watching the relationship to that heartbeat change. Excitement can feel a lot like fear, but it isn't the same.…
