Dr. Rose Kumar's Blog

The Ommani Center for Integrative Medicine was created as a protest against what health care has distorted into that this article elucidates. After 11 years of successful patient care that is cost and therapeutically effective, I am now ready to develop The Ommani Model into a prototype that can help our country. Both physicians and patients are deeply hurting. In Chapter 9 of Becoming Real entitled ‘Reframing Health Care’, I have detailed some of the toxicity and brokenness that our health care system has incorporated into its business model that is hurting both physicians and patients. The Ommani Center’s business model is an answer to this. Please read this article from Newsweek and respond to this posting. If you have any ideas about the next steps to reform health care in America based on what you have experienced at The Ommani Center, please feel free to share it. Please share this with anyone you think can aid in the formation of The Ommani Model’s prototype. ~Dr. K

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/15/why-your-doctor-has-no-time-to-see-you.html

The speed at which you can process negativity is a direct result of your ability to do your own shadow work.

This quote is so accurate. When I was younger, I was unable to understand how to view my shadow and would actually defend it. I did not have a framework to understand it. Defending my shadow rather than learning from it kept me stuck in the areas that I was being asked to release. Now after being processed by life, suffering and hardship, after being polished so hard that I am awake to my shadow to the degree that is humanly possible, I have learned that my shadow is a great teacher. If I am open to learning from my triggers and from the feelings that they cause I am much more able to look inside and make choices to release or keep certain aspects of my make-up. It feels empowering and freeing to be able to do this. It is a purification of sorts. Shadow work is critically important work. We have a collective shadow as well. Without personal shadow work, it is nearly impossible to clear a country or a culture’s shadow, let alone become aware of it. This is the situation we are in today. Our polarization, duality and bipartisan culture brings out our collective shadow. Violence is an expression of the shadow. Closed systems are manifestations of the shadow. Shadow work is difficult yet deeply freeing. It evokes a level of empathy and compassion that is necessary for us to work together. It uncovers common ground. It is continuous and sacred work. I invite you to explore this in whatever way you are able. ~Dr. K

A new study shows that weight loss surgery is another way to help diabetics who are obese. What is happening to our country and our medical system? Why don’t we have a health movement where eating healthy and clean and exercising is the norm, where reading ingredients and avoiding processed foods is supported? This is yet another reactive way that our society deals with illness – after the fact. The medical system makes big money with these surgeries. Recovery is painful and the surgery itself is risky. Is this what we have come to? Stapling our stomachs rather than eating and living with consciousness. Where are our minds, our hearts, our self-care? With all the information available today, the health coaches, nutritionists and health clubs, people are still unmotivated to change. We need a national movement to change thinking and living in a big way. The medical system won’t support it, but we as citizens of the community can and should. This is our time to change our unhealthy momentum and grow into conscious adults. Join me in my effort to create a healthier Wisconsin and a healthier America. Do your part for self-care to promote your health and vitality. Ommani means, ‘the answers lie within’. Ommani is in each one of us. Together we can change the health of our families, communities and our beloved country. ~Dr. K

There is a movement underfoot in our country that is provocative and exposing.  Our shadow is up and it is unraveling itself in all of our institutions.  When I left the medical system at age 36, I did so because the intent that I was expected to participate in  felt ‘unethical’ to me.  Sick care was not what I was trained to serve.  It was not what my heart and soul went into medicine for. But it was required of me by the medical system to generate money for it.  I was required to keep people sick in order to keep my job. I knew deep inside that I was a problem solver. This is what I loved about Internal Medicine.  I wanted to solve the problems of symptoms and suffering by working with people to figure out where their strength lay and how to tap into it to find solutions with them.  If our premise is that there is precision in life, then we should be able to figure out what is right about what feels bad, or what is right about why we suffer.  Our suffering can also help us become real.  It has an alchemical effect on our ego that strips it from being ‘all knowing’ to becoming a student of life.  I love medicine.  It excites me and it stimulates my thinking at many levels.  The correct use of this knowledge is what we need to reframe.  We need to use our knowledge of medicine responsibly and humanistically.  This is what we have lost and must regain. We must open the currently closed system of medicine while maintaining a high standard-of-care. We must create an open system to practice medicine within.  This open system will be cost effective and patient centered.  Its focus will be on what is wrong but also “what is right about what is wrong”.  When we explore illness and symptom to these depths, we can heal at root levels.  We can use the pathological model within a larger context of a healing model, seeing pathology as a symptom rather than an end.  This is transforming medicine and evoking health in Southeastern Wisconsin already at The Ommani Center.  This is what I created as a prototype of an ‘open system’.  It was my way to make medicine REAL and to restore and reclaim its SOUL.  Becoming Real is the calling of our time. This is our collective path in this lifetime.  This will transform our personal and collective life into one with more meaning and health.

Transformation is in the air. With spring on its way and the deep issues emerging in people’s lives, we are in a transformational gateway. I am reminded of the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. The caterpillar crawls on the earth and is vulnerable to pain and wounding. Like it, we are too. We get stepped on, wounded and betrayed. We make mistakes, hurt others and get hurt. When it is time to form a chrysalis, the caterpillar creates the cocoon for its transformational journey. It may feel like nothing is really happening, but a deep reconfiguration is taking place. The butterfly must be equipped with strong wings to take flight into the spiritual world, the world of air, sun and wind. In order for its wings to become strong, it must beat the tender one’s against the walls of the chrysalis till it is able to lift off and take its learned wisdom from its earth time up into its higher life experience. This is also how we transform. When suffering arises, we are made strong at the broken places so we can transform into our Higher selves and carry with us our Soul capacity into life with wisdom learned from our previous life. We must have the courage to do this and to know that our pain and suffering makes our wings stronger for flight into our Higher selves. ~Dr. K

‎”Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all mannerof unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no one could have dreamt would have come their way.” ~ Mary Oliver

I can say that Mary’s thoughts have been true for me and I have found great strength and fascination in what is set into motion when I commit myself to any path or relationship and mostly to my Highest good. I invite you all to take this step, to commit yourselves to your health and to only those relationships that are healthy and in your highest good. All of our actions and choices are a commitment to that one deeper commitment to care for ourselves first and then overflow onto others. This is the deeper work of becoming Healthy. This is where integrity lives. I find that as I let my adapted self go and connect to my authenticity, I am unable to compromise my Soul, my Truth and my Health for any excuse or justification. I am grateful for this ability to commit and to stay on the path.  ~Dr. K

How does one adapt to being uprooted and unearthed?  The human spirit strives to survive, to continually move towards its destiny to carve out a course that reclaims ones sense of meaning.  My mother is a person who experienced this.  At the age of 10, her parents were killed in the India-Pakistan partition, leaving her orphaned and terrified.  As life presented her with gateways, she was able to walk through some, and not others, due to the fears resulting from the acts of violence she had experienced that had been imprinted upon her.  She engaged her courage as she grew large at the wounded places and carved a course for her life that offered her meaning and purpose.  Over the history of the human race, millions like her have been left with varying levels of paralysis in our world with little emotional context. The context with which the unknown was encountered for them was through the experience of terrifying loss.

We may think that our generation is protected from this level of loss, that it is from a more distant time, but this is far from the truth. Our world has been warring for decades, leaving casualties of violence and encounters with the terrifying unknown embedded in our collective psyches.  We are living in a virtual reality.  We have learned to cover up our feeling function and learned to deny our deep emotions with creature comforts, with superficial solutions, none of which endure.  Eventually we must stand naked before ourselves, confront our gateways and step into our largeness, reclaiming what was taken from us and redirect our course consciously into the unknown.  This is what midlife expects of us.  In the areas my mother was unable to choose, due to her circumstances, I must.  Where she could not reclaim, I must.  We, the children of the last generation, now in midlife, must find the courage to engage our consciousness in the areas where we become stuck, and live  from our superficial yet familiar cultural framework and believe in the potential of our souls.  To redefine health from this context is our sacred task.  This is how REAL Health Care can be accessed.

The Ommani Center for Integrative Medicine was born from my strong intention to create a context for health that is deeper than just the physical level.  Health is more than just symptom management through integrative methods.  As important and vital as this is, it does not access true health or healing.  Being conscious of how and where one lives and relates to life from may be the more important and deeper context that determines one’s state of true health.  This can and must be evoked.

If those that killed my grandparents and irrevocably changed the course of my mother’s life had this level of consciousness and asked the important and REAL questions, needless suffering could have been averted.  We cannot go back in time and change history.  We can, however grow strong at the places where we have been wounded.  We can use our wounds to acknowledge our humanness and engage our courage to grow in consciousness and health.  We must engage our wounds in order to offer ourselves a larger context for empowerment, reclamation and ultimately for healing.  This will uncover a deeper sense of meaning in our lives.

A Health Care System that can hold this level of space from a context such as this, inclusive of modern technological advances with high-standard –of –care, is what we all deserve.  It is a place where meaning is restored.  Cultivating and supporting a system like this is sacred work.  For me, it is a vocation.  Where my vocation aligned with my mother’s biography is where I found meaning and an opportunity to create a larger context in the form of The Ommani Center where true health and meaning could be accessed that was inclusive of my love of medicine and my devotion to high quality health care.

If we want a system that cares and offers us more than what our current system offers, this needs to be our collective work.  Together, we must  support and expect health care to be REAL for us so it can  address our REAL needs and ask the REAL questions of us, questions that we can live out in our destinies from a place of health and meaning.  I encourage all of you to expect this from our Health Care System.  Our expectations of what is REAL will truly change our world for the better.

My intent in writing this book was to offer a framework and to women (and men) as they transition through menopause and midlife. This time in life has been minimized by our society as one that is marked by symptoms and crisis and resolved only with medications and materialism. On the contrary, this time marks an initiation into our Real Selves. For women, this is marked by a transition in their hormones that awakens their feeling function at profound levels. This often manifests in physical and emotional symptoms during the menopausal process and evokes the crucial questions that bring meaning to the second half of their lives. The physiological and emotional changes that women go through during this time are powerful and not well understood in our society. They are frequently medicated and dismissed, labelled with diagnoses that leave them feeling sick and broken without orientation through this gateway whose deeper purpose is to reconnect them with their Real Selves. These symptoms are signs of imbalance and can be healed naturally and safely with Integrative Medicine. It is important for us to use science as our guide to heal our symptoms safely in addition to working with our inner process with framework and understanding of its precision and transformational potential.

My own process of connecting to my Real Self was marked by betrayal and the loss of what I held sacred. I had to reconstruct my sense of self and every aspect of my identity from an intrinsic and authentic place and only keep the parts of me that felt Real and healthy. Many of us long for a connection to our Real Selves and have no guidance or direction during this midlife, menopausal time. In Becoming Real I have shared what I learned from my own midlife process as well as the process of thousands of patients over two decades whose process I have had the honor to witness and guide, as they journeyed through this powerful transition and connected with their Real Selves.

My intent in writing this book both as a physician and as a midlife woman was to offer other midlife women going through the menopausal transition, a framework to understand and honor their process at many levels  that can  awaken them to their power and purpose and ultimately to health.

I invite you to dialogue with me on this blog about your own midlife and menopausal process. I invite you to share your stories and your experiences so that we can all continue to learn from one another about the power and wisdom evoked by our transitions and validate our feeling function. We need to create a powerful community of support, safety and understanding of this sacred time in midlife that many of us are journeying through alone. With 1.5 billion women in the world transitioning through menopause, we have a wealth of wisdom to offer, that when shared, can transform our world for the better. ~Dr. K

As we celebrate our 10th anniversary on February 19, 2011, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who are a part of our community at The Ommani Center for your dedicated support. It is your courage and commitment to health and your belief in the Vision of the Ommani Center that has made this possible.

The Ommani Center was borne out of my deep commitment to serving health at every level possible. After experiencing the limitations of the traditional medical model, I was passionate about creating a Center that represented a movement and commitment towards health and wholeness, without compromising my expertise as a traditionally trained internist. The Vision of Ommani is based on a trust in the integrity of life, wholeness and health, which our society is in deep need of today.

We are the small grass roots community of people that are changing the face of healthcare today through our expectation of its transformation into one that serves life and health through empowerment, education and expertise. We will not compromise standard of care for healing. We will not compromise healing for standard of care.

In the past ten years, much has transformed, grown and evolved at the Center. We have established ourselves as a model of healthcare that is cost effective, and health and healing centered. We are not considered holistic, alternative or complementary. We are an Integrative Healthcare Center that has established a new norm for healthcare and incorporates all of the above. We are also now poised to create Ommani Centers nationally and in the world at large.

Despite all the challenges that we have faced in the past ten years through our own transformational journeys and the limitations from the infrastructure of traditional healthcare, and despite the fact that we are not a part of the mainstream medical model, we have stood in our Truth and Integrity as a new and expanded paradigm of medicine, and have lived our definitions of the true meaning of health and healing. We are a living extension of the Soul of the sacred vocation of Medicine.

We may be the tipping point ourselves for the transformation of our world, for the healing of the broken places in our lives and our health and also for the ailing healthcare system. Through our intentions, our beliefs, our behavior, our prayers and our fierce commitment to changing our world into what is real and true, we continue to move forward with Love, Vision and Commitment to our community. As we continue to work together towards this common goal, we are the change that we wish to see in the world.

Thank you all for your support, your confidence and your commitment to what is real. Thank you for your courage to seek, to transform, to heal and to stay open. It is a deep and blessed honor to serve you in this capacity.

Namaste,

Kalpana (Rose) M. Kumar M.D.
Founder, CEO and Medical Director of
The Ommani Center for Integrative Medicine

When listening skills take a back seat in the doctors office, the vocation of medicine suffers along with the patient AND the physician. I see so many women who are not listened to by their physicians and are dismissed in exchange for the protocol of medicine. The art of medicine is to be fully present with your patie…nt, their biology AND biography and to experience them with reverence. They bring their knowing to you as a physician. Their knowledge in combination with your expertise, is a powerful combination to bring enlightenment to the cause of their symptoms as as well as the healing process. I am so grateful to my patients who come for empowerment and education. I am healed along with them and their stories and wisdom bring so much abundance to my own life and my process. The meaning of my work grows richer and deeper with every encounter. It is honorable and sacred work…and love in action.