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Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show. We’re a How does our story begin? Does it begin with you? Your parents? Your parents’ parents? Does it begin with this lifetime? What of time does it begin with? What is the actual arc of our story? What is the arc of humanity? I have asked myself if I even know my story. The answer is Maybe the entire point of this wild, crazy journey, this long, strange trip, is to figure out what the story is anyway.
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It’s so funny that in podcast world, apparently, it’s nice to have an episode about you and your story. That raises for me lots of questions. But for purposes, I will start my story at a certain point. At a certain point in my professional life, when I choose to study education, I choose to study education while I’m in college. It’s a very meta process of studying your education as you’re being educated. I thought that was incredibly valuable, and I highly, highly recommend it. It creates so many different sensitivities and awarenesses as a consumer, as you’re consuming a product called education. This is a time when being aware of information that’s being shared with you and about the purpose of that information and what that information might serve you or be used for the purposes of interacting with you in some way is an incredibly valuable training. I come to learn about education and interesting things like a What is the plan? What do we want to teach? What are we required to teach? Also the unspoken curriculum. What is the culture and what are the values that are unspoken and yet are built into any information system, education system.
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These were the awarenesses that came to me through my training as an educator. Also, training as an educator opened up the things practically for me. I was able to apply for a job while I was still in college, scheduled to graduate. The job that I applied for as a teacher, I did formally become a certified English school teacher secondary school. That was seventh through 12th grade. Then I also studied comparative literature and focused on Latin American literature. That was a way to study something I loved, which was language and Spanish English and Latin American literature, but also get credit for spending a year abroad, which I did. I lived in Ecuador, and that was really a magnificent experience. Then got my teaching certification while I was a senior in college, interviewed for a job to teach in a school in Tokyo, and was hired, and was able to literally, just upon graduation from college, because the company that hired me was going to front me my flight to Tokyo, I was able to immediately fly over to Tokyo and start working. Then the school deducted a portion of that light ticket each month from my salary so that I was really able to just get launched into the world into a new and wonderful experience, which was life in Japan.
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It was a tremendously intense and different time. I think it is said sometimes that the more you are with yourself, the more you meet yourself. It was a time where I was so far away from anyone and anything that was familiar. What I really discovered was more about myself. I discovered the feeling of just asking myself questions like, Why am I here? What am I doing? Also, I experienced loneliness. I also experienced this magical evolution. The more that I learned Japanese and Japanese culture, I learned that I could bring myself closer to someone through an understanding of language and of someone else’s culture. The more that I did that, the more open I found that my counterpart was in learning about me. I learned what it felt like for a bridge to grow between me and someone else, a bridge of understanding, and that so much of it could be catalyzed by my own excitement to know about someone else and to bridge myself and to understand. The more I put effort into that, the more I received. That was a beautiful, beautiful teaching that blossomed open for me in that time in Japan and continues to blossom and is truly the gift that keeps on giving.
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I also had some interesting physical experiences in Japan that I didn’t understand, namely, my hair started falling out quite a bit. Being a young woman with only a background in language and education, I had no sense of possible health implications there. I just switched around shampoos. I studied Japanese with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, really through what I had described to you as that bridge of just blossoming open that happened that just kept me so excited and enthusiastic and such a lover of language and language study in its application to meeting and bridging to other people in the worlds that open up as a consequence. It’s just one of my, I don’t know, if not my most favorite things is that that bridge, that light bridge that opens up between me and another being is just such a gift. Anyway, my hair started falling out. I had been studying Japanese. I was poised, possibly, this is about two years into the journey, to make a decision about a job offer that I had received. The sum total of it was that I wasn’t sure. I I wasn’t sure about the job. I wasn’t sure how I felt in my physical self.
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A friend suggested that I might take a break, go sit on a beach in Thailand. It was a hop, skip, and a jump away, and affordable on the shoestring salary that we made in Tokyo, but that would still be very workable in Thailand at the time. I wind up on a beach in Thailand ostensibly to learn how to scuba dive, which was something I had bucket list. Then I met a group of people. They were glowing. They really just appeared to be full of joy. I watched for three days as we stayed in the same place, how they ate papaya with lime juice for three days in a row. I dared myself just out of curiosity to approach them. I said to them, You guys are just really beautiful and you’re glowing and you only eat papaya. I’ve never really seen someone like you or seen someone only eat what you’re eating. I was just so curious, and I hope you don’t mind me asking what your deal is. That is how I learned that they were coming off a prolonged fast, something I’d never heard of or even dreamt was possible. Cleanse, again, had never heard of something like that.
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That was meant for detoxification. This was all such wildly new and overwhelming information. And yet I was sitting with them, and they were so personable and so warm and really, really just so gorgeous in such a real and pure way. I decided that what they had told me about, the place where they had done this prolonged fasting and cleansing, was a place that I needed to check out. It was like a homies signal. It stayed with me and it stayed with me. Then I got up and I went. That was the beginning of the rest of my life, truly. I discovered fasting. I did not discover it by reading in a textbook. I did not discover the benefits of autophagy and mitophagy and the mitochondrial enhancement of switching off our insulin and going into gluconeogenesis. I can rattle off all the physiology now, but I knew nothing. Nothing. I was a young girl. I was open-hearted. I had an internal homies signal for something that felt vaguely, really worthwhile. I did not have the clarity I have now. I only thank God for the grace of that divine intervention, putting people in my path and that internal homies signal that drew me forward to this place that they had told me about and to the experience, the experience of fasting, the experience of cleansing, learning about it on my flesh, learning about the stages of it on my flesh, learning about the transformation that followed on me in my experience.
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It was an experiential learning that changed the reference point of what was possible to experience. I experienced a new possibility for experience by experiencing it. It was a self-contained experiential learning. Much, much later, I continued to explore and understand and even to this day, very much, continue to understand in hindsight what happened then. But what happened then was enough. It was enough to help me understand that my life had been saved. I understood that on the sixth day of that fast. I was also given a message. It woke me up from sleep on the sixth day of this fast, and I was told that I was a healer. I had no idea. I had no idea that’s who I was, but I was given the gift of being told who I was. It resonated. It resonated as truth. I pursued. I pursued the pathway to become who I was told I was. I didn’t know how, so I wound up staying put in Thailand. I wound up studying any bit of natural medicine that I could, which I thought was my path. I looked for ways to connect to teachers of natural medicine. I discovered that there was a renaissance, a rekindling of interest in Thai traditional healing that opened up in the upper north of Thailand.
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This had opened up in the wake of the Thai AIDS epidemic that followed suit to the North American AIDS epidemic that I knew as a teenager in New York City and was involved in, to the best of my ability, in fundraising and advocacy for people living with HIV in New York. As a high school student, it was just something that I was drawn to. Here it was, again, 10 years later in Northern Thailand, where I found myself working with a small non nonprofit non-government organization that had started really to teach sustainable agriculture and that it had used its same sustainable agriculture teaching network to then disseminate information on HIV/AIDS prevention attention, and then continued to develop itself and try to be the change that wanted to see a grassroots, Thai for Thai, response on the ground, and identified traditional healers and asked them, Hey, Is there anything within our lexicon of Thai traditional healing that would be available for people living with HIV/AIDS in Thailand because there was nothing else? Pharmaceutical solutions that were already available in North America were under a patent and not available in other places in the world. An HIV diagnosis in Northern Thailand in the mid ’90s was a death sentence, to be clear.
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From 1 Million to the next, I think this is earlier part of the ’90s or the very end of the ’80s. From one minute to the next, I remember that first population study, past the sentinel studies, which were in military recruits and commercial sex workers, we discovered that there were 1.5 million people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS overnight. Northern Thailand was reeling from that, and that’s where I entered. I entered the scene interested in studying natural medicine and wound up meeting so many people living with HIV/AIDS. Again, where were they on the continuum? We could only tell clinically. There were no CD4 accounts, there were no viral loads. Not that I knew what those really were at the time. But that is what I came to realize would be as part of the constellation of learning natural medicine and part of being introduced into the lives of people who are confronting their own mortality. In a time of vulnerability, I learned in the middle of an epidemic, in the middle of unbelievable amounts of fear in a society, in a community, that people could come together, they could put their heads together, that they could show up, and that they could look for tools that were given by nature, natural tools, God-given tools, and that we could create strength ourselves.
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Insight understanding supports ourselves. We could become educated ourselves. That was the milieu in which I came into being in my realization that my pathway was set for me as a healer. Then I realized there were so much more I needed to know, and that those same friends who all too often invited me to be with them in a time of transition from this lifetime to the beyond, and that I would heat that call because I could not think of anything more intimate, more sacred. I could not think of being bestowed a greater honor, and so I heeded that call and realized it was on purpose. I was being called to people’s bedside as they transitioned from this lifetime, that I was being shown my purpose, not only in that, but in the sum totality of the sacredness of life and being invited to look at it from the most intimate vantage point possible. I said to the group of people I had become just so, so in love with, grateful to, in awe of ostensibly simple Thai farmers, but humans confronting mortality with courage. I said to them, I think I should study medicine. You can imagine what an incredible eye roll I got when people said, Finally, finally she understands.
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Finally, she’s locked into, I guess, their understanding already of what was meant for me, my purpose, or a continuing and ongoing evolution of my purpose. I went to medical school. There was just a little glitch, which medical school? I What were the requirements to go to medical school? Because I was an English teacher. I discovered that there was this incredible school that started in 1998, meaning several years after I had graduated from college. Meaning, if I wanted to go to medical school as a straight shot out of college, the school that I went to did not even exist. And yet, as I was connecting to my purpose, the school that I was meant to go to opened, and I wound up going from Thailand to Israel to check out this school in its first year of existence, the Medical School for International Health that had started as a joint collaborative program between Columbia University and Ben Gurion University in the the south of Israel. I met the dean of the medical school at the time, a brilliant professor, Daphka Rivka Kharmi, who is a geneticist and later became president of the university. I met the first cohort in their first year.
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I realized that going there would be on purpose. I completed my work in Thailand. I was also granted the tremendous gift and privilege of being a Fulbright scholar in public health in Thailand, finished that Fulbright and proceeded to complete my pre-medical studies at Columbia University in New York City and apply directly and only to that one medical school. It was the only one I would have considered going to. Became a medical doctor, went back to New York City, and completed a residency in internal medicine with the thought that I might go on to be a gastroenterologist since all healing systems, traditional healing systems, start healing at the level of the gut. Wouldn’t that be gastroenterology? Then realizing as I was going through the training that Gastroenterology training was not really what I meant when I was thinking about gut health. I continued in Thailand, in premedicine, in medical studies, in my residency, and later in my fellowship in Hospice and palliative care at NYU, always to study integrative medicine. I managed to get to an integrative health conference in New York City in my second year of residency and heard the grandfather of functional medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, speak at that conference and used my book stipend money that year to buy the textbook on Functional Medicine, read it cover to cover, and realized that really none of it was going to be implementable during my formal medical training, but that I would bide my time.
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I did my fellowship in Functional, sorry, in Hospice and Palliative Care, and went on an interview for Home Hospice and Connected with a mentor of mine who, by a series of events, connected me to my first job in the functional medicine space, and that was it. So straight out of training into functional medicine, and then another functional medicine practice, and ultimately to fulfill my vision of what medicine can be, patient-centered, human-centered. Heart medicine can be more multi-dimensional medicine with all of the incorporating all of the other wonderful trainings that I have been just privileged to find and inhabit and implement and discover, along with my unbelievably wonderful, brilliant community of health seekers, brave humans who, like me, just put one foot in front of the other, hoping, willing to connect to their purpose, to put in the work, to be students of their own body, of their own health, who believe better as possible, and who want to do all of the diligence, live to their fullest, discover, and be the best that they can possibly be and fulfill their own purpose. We are joined on this endless, blossoming, learning, discovering, uncovering, unveiling, deepening journey, all to the end of really learning again and again in an iterative way how to tell the story of who we are.
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That is the story of each of us to a degree, and Hopefully, we can deepen and grow those degrees together. So thank you so much for joining me on this blessed journey to learning about me, to learning about you, and to the ongoing sacred task of healing on purpose. Blessings to you, and I hope to see you in future episodes. Thanks for listening to the Healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to conversation. I’ll see you there.