Personal Transformation

Transformation refers to the process of changing behaviors, attitudes, beliefs and/or perceptions through self-inquiry in ways that are inclusive and integrative. The goal of all educational activities at HeartSong -- education and counseling offered during face-to-face appointments and community education programs -- is to offer perspectives and information that have the potential to transform the way you think and live your life. Because health is an ongoing developmental process, you can always benefit from experiencing the world, and your minds, body, emotions and spirit in new ways.

Self-directed Learning

Self-education refers to the process of teaching yourself a skill or learning about a subject on your own. Self-directed learning is a process that is both contemplative and absorptive. You use that which you have acquired through an active process of inquiry because it engages your attention fully. Personal investigation helps you absorb and integrate new awarenesses, information, and skills. Your questions are always welcome during your visits to Heartsong. Also, treatment plans often detail how to conduct personal therapeutic trials of treatments so you can discover for yourself how they affect you.

Self-Management

The term self-management means different things in different contexts. At Heartsong, it refers to your ability to (1) engage in activities that protect and promote health, (2) monitor and manage symptoms related to illness, (3) manage the effects of illness on your daily life activities, emotions, and relationships, and (4) co-create and follow treatment plans.

Experiential Learning

Educating yourself is an interactive process involving:

• problem-identification (figuring out what you want to know about),
• inquiry (asking what you want to know),
• resource identification (identifying where you can learn what you want to learn),
• direct experience (personal experience with what you want to learn about),

Multiple Perspectives

Western medicine embraces empiricism -- a philosophy of science that values evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. In fact, conventional medicine today prides itself on being evidence-based.  For the most part, modern Western medicine considers empirical evidence to be the only type of information that is scientifically valid for medical purposes.

Ancient healing traditions, by contrast, rely on multiple perspectives -- intuition, instinct, inspiration, divination, personal and anecdotal experience, in addition to externally verifiable observation and experimentation. For this reason, practitioners who have been trained in these traditions as well as in modern medicine can offer you a wider variety of treatment options for what ails you.