Dr. Rose Kumar's Blog

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.

One of my patient’s yesterday shared with me that she felt like a ‘control freak’. She said she had to prove to herself that she could do it all and it didn’t matter if she paid a price for that. She was conditioned to prove herself that she was not a failure. Failure to her was seen as a need for balance, setting l…imits and attending to self care.

We can be good soldiers like this and many of us are ( I used to be), and we pay a huge price. The sooner we learn to honor our limits, the sooner we will find equanimity within our hearts towards ourselves and others.

I encourage you to do this for you and your health.

In good health!
Dr. K

In midlife, we experience loss and can sometimes feel lost. As we orient ourselves through the maze of discernment and decide who we authentically are, underneath the adaptive facade that we put up to quell society’s discomfort towards our authentic self, we become real and true. Truth draws others to it that live out… of it. If you are living your truth and it repels others around you, they are not living out of their truth. It is a sure sign that they are not. Don’t be discouraged. Have the courage to walk your true and real path alone and the world of truth will be with you.

 The Midlife woman is a Medial woman. She is the midwife between the world of expectation and Soul. Her role is to intuit the Truth underneath the surface and dispel the illusion that is created by the egoic mind that masquerades as the Soul -it is a wordsmith. She has the capacity in midlife to bridge the worlds of facade and truth and model and mentor a behaved life of Truth and Authenticity. It is only then that she can earn the sacred status of a Midwife. It takes great courage to live like this and it takes a community of Authentic women that can see their true reflection as well as their shadow in the mirror and reflect the Real back to each other. This is the Real sisterhood. When we live in this manner we are with all the world.