7 Comments
Jun 27Liked by River Kenna

"as a labor you owe your ancestors, your descendants, your reincarnations" yeah they all asked me to, in my dreams. The whole gang was there

Expand full comment
Jan 17Liked by River Kenna

Something, SOMETHING about this is very Pluto-in-Aquarius. Like the energy of the first YC batch of founders (hopefully). Best of luck with realizing your vision.

Expand full comment
Jan 11Liked by River Kenna

Hey. Current medical student here. I deeply, deeply resonate with what you wrote here. Throughout medical school, I have had a sense of the knowledge I am learning having been robbed of its embodied juiciness/ essence. I have this vague sense of medicine/ the healing art as being something deep and archetypal within me, which has been bent out of shape and somewhat brutalized by the educational process. I may well not go on to residency, and even if I do, I will have to grapple with the issue of knowledge and healing as deeply disembodied. Thanks a lot for writing.

Expand full comment
author

Thanks for sharing this,, you’re definitely not alone there, you’re the third or fourth person I’ve heard say sth like this either after medical school or a medical career. Sth has to change over there.

Expand full comment
Jan 14Liked by River Kenna

Thanks. I also loved this piece because I have gone through the imaginal exercise many times of "what would a more psychospiritually integrated medical education look like?". One thing that I think is cool about your idea is that, unlike medical education, an embodied grad school doesn't need to have much overhead-- i.e., you could actually generate a minimal viable product with not that many resources.

Whereas, one of the major hurdles to reforming medical education is that you'd actually need an institution to be accredited, which takes a huge amount of resources, requires a relationship with a hospital, etc, and to even be accredited would require a med school to teach what the national licensing board considers standard western medical curricula. So, there's a ton of institutional, cultural, and legal hurdles that mean that even if you have a solid 5-10% of doctors who desire a more embodied curriculum (which is in my experience probably about the number that have such a desire), there's not really a way to just break off and sort of "do our own thing" as regards medical education.

/rant

Expand full comment

Hey River! I really enjoyed this. I just crossed the one year mark since I quit my job to take a sabbatical and frame it as paying for my own self-directed scholarship. Here's a reflection of the entire year: https://blog.mattyao.co/p/51-a-year-of-zero

Expand full comment

Love this and would love to connect and exchange ideas about it - I joined the luma list and the twitter group. I have been sitting with a very similar sentiment and began exploring options (in Germany). For me, Schumacher College in the UK was one of the very few great learning experiences.

Expand full comment