A Note About the Present and Future
From Dr. David Meredith, D.Ac. on November 6, 2024
Almost two years ago, when I sat down to do the hard work of reinventing my business, I thought a great deal about the basic assumptions of my profession. What is health? What is wellness? What is healing? What kind of person will claim these concepts and benefits for themself? How can a well person affect the world around them differently?
I strongly believe in our interconnectedness. As my beloved mentor Dianne Connelly says, our health is “personal, but not private.” Our well-being affects that of others—our friends, our families, our coworkers and teammates, our community, complete strangers—in ways we might not know, and whether we try to influence them or not. And of course we’re all affected deeply by the world around us in the complicated times we live in.
My mission with Very Well became to try to expand my own influence, to bring healing to people who might never walk through my doors, through the people who do.
That might sound like a strange weight and significance to put upon a few whisker-thin acupuncture needles or a few minutes lying under red LED lights—but it’s true, in my mind, at least.
Working on this concept of “wellness in complicated times,” through the lens of Very Well, one of the most deeply moving and inspirational passages of the twenty-first century was never far from my mind. According to the information I could find about it, this prophecy was written by “Hopi Elders”* in June of 2000:
You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered…
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.
Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.”
And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word ’struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
How, I thought, can Very Well help prepare us to become “the ones we’re we’ve been waiting for,” in health and in celebration, if we feel tossed around far from the river’s shore?
I think one of the greatest barriers to wellness is a sense of helplessness and disempowerment, caught in the current of whatever’s happening within and around us. We don’t know what to do to feel better, or if we do know what works for us, we’re too busy and overwhelmed to implement it.
If Very Well can help bring healing to people with pain, symptoms, stress, worries, anxieties, sadness… and if they can see how simple it is to get some relief from their suffering… then that frees them up to do more and be more… to influence and inspire others to feel better, too. That’s empowerment across the board.
Friends, I write this to you on a day that personal and community empowerment feels further away than ever. As you might imagine, I have a lot of thoughts about this. But suffice it to say, we are going to need to be “the ones we’ve been waiting for” more than ever in the complicated times ahead.
I’d like to think people need Very Well, both as a quiet refuge from the world and as a place of healing and empowerment, more than ever.
However, if we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, we need help. We need more people to know about us and schedule treatments. We need some breathing room to figure out how to pivot to even more effectiveness as things around us change dramatically.
• Please keep an eye open for the announcement of (potentially free) new services and events in the near future.
• Please take care of yourself (and, through you, the people around you) by scheduling our health and wellness services for yourself.
• Please spread the word about us. To your friends, to social media, or if you have access to any media who might be interested in what we offer, or business partnerships.
We offer gift cards, we have new referral bonuses, and we have monthly subscriptions and new discounted packages of ten treatments.
To get the ball rolling, as a special introduced in this email, you can use discount code COMMUNITY15 at checkout to get an extra 15% off of all of our packages of 10 treatments, bringing the discount up to 25%. Feel free to tell your friends about this, too.
Please pardon (what feels to me like) the crassness of trying to promote our business on today of all days, but I’d like us to be around for a long time as a refuge of healing and empowerment for our entire community.
And lastly—
I included this in an email last week, but in case you missed it, please have a look at this essay I wrote about autumn, elections, self-care, and community care in the Very Well Blog. While more impressionistic than detailed, it’s a few thoughts on ways we can reorient our lives to take care of ourselves so we can be strong and powerful enough to create change in the world around us.
If, as I said, we affect the people around us whether we know it or not, whether try to or not… imagine what would happen if we did try.
With love,
David
*I did send a generous donation to the Hopi tribe when I resonated so strongly with this work and thought I might someday quote it in my materials, citing my interest, and they did not disabuse me of the notion that it was a genuine quotation.