What is Insight Medicine?
in·sight - /ˈinˌsīt/ - (noun)
the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing; the power or act of seeing into a situation; new understanding by an ill person of the causes of their disorder.
Insight Medicine is a healing-oriented philosophy and practice focused on developing knowledge and experience of our body’s inherent capacity for self-regulation and health maintenance. It is holistic in that it views symptoms and emotions as natural “alarms” that must be recognized and understood, not merely irritations to be suppressed.
The following are the typical stages on this journey of Insight:
- Establish accuracy and clarity in a diagnosis for what is happening.
- Build a deep, personal understanding for how and why your symptoms are persisting and recognize the symptom – fear – symptom cycle.
- Begin to recognize the inputs of danger and threat in life that sensitize your system and start to change your relationship to fear.
- Shift focus from externalized worry, pressure, and doubt to creating an internal sense of curiosity, compassion, compassion.
- Understand that, like physical feelings, emotional feelings are produced by the brain to protect us, and all emotions are information needing awareness and expression. Feeling feelings simply means paying attention to our tension.
- Make necessary life changes and build supportive skills.
- Rinse and Repeat – Practice makes permanent (and confident) these new neural pathways of safety and resiliency
Insight Medicine is built upon the biopsychosocial paradigm, considering all aspects of one’s life in an effort to bring more awareness to the body’s conscious and unconscious processes. Importantly, it draws upon the practitioner-patient alliance to move us toward understanding and action, not only information and symptom reduction. Rooted in neuroscience, it is trauma-informed and asserts that our neural networks will produce increasingly unpleasant reactions and impelling behaviors if our needs are, or have been, threatened or unmet.
Mission, Values, and Vision
The mission of the Center for Insight Medicine is to facilitate understanding and agency, through our pain, so that together we can experience our innate capacity to be healthy.
We value taking time with patients to foster a sense of safety, connection, empowerment, meaning, rest, and pleasure – factors necessary for healing from the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wounds we have experienced.
The Center for Insight Medicine envisions a world in which understanding why we hurt reduces suffering, teaches us what we do and do not need in our lives, and equips and catalyzes our journey to recovery.