My Lifelong Quest to Find My Voice Is at a Crossroads
In Search of a Heart-Centered Medicine and Society
Whenever we look back on our lives, we can often clearly see patterns and themes. One theme for me has to do with expression. During my first seven years of life, I had a horrible stutter and speech impediment and rarely spoke at all. In my teenage years, once the speech troubles had cleared, I had the feeling (and occasionally was told by a teacher) that it seemed as if I had something to say. I wasn’t at all clear about what to say or to whom to say it, but I knew that I had better figure some things out so I could speak and contribute.
As time went by, my interests narrowed to things concerned with health, food, medicine and justice. I found myself interested in far-flung ideas, ideas that most people never encounter. I experienced an almost inexorable draw to what some might call “alternative” views of reality. One such idea was Rudolf Steiner’s view of the heart.
By my late 20s I was fully trained in Western science and medicine, yet much of it made little, if any, sense to me. Steiner’s provocative ideas, especially those concerning childhood illnesses and the heart, drew me in and started me on a decades-long quest to figure out, for myself, whether he was correct. During this time, I began to find my voice, and I began to speak out to the world. At first, the audiences were tiny, and then they became small. In the past few years, the audience for how I see the heart has been larger, particularly since the release of my book Human Heart, Cosmic Heart last October. I have given countless interviews and talks and have answered many questions about the heart and heart disease.
Now, it seems, my life-long quest to find my voice and perhaps to connect to a really large audience is at a crossroads. My colleague Benedikt Just has been working tirelessly for years to put together a documentary in which I am featured that is based on a new view of the heart. This new understanding includes the seemingly heretical view that it is not possible that the heart functions as a pump. This view, while certainly not the mainstream opinion, has recently been endorsed by the head of cardiac anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, Dr. James A DiNardo, M.D. The heart and the circulation are complex, but as Steiner predicted, the outdated model of the heart serving as a pump to push the blood through the body does not serve the needs of humanity. As the Sufi master shown in the documentary states: In the moment in which the heart pauses, that is the moment when love enters the body.
We urgently need a truly heart-centered medicine and society. If we are unable to find our way to this way of seeing and being, I lose hope about humanity’s ability to find a way out of our current real and impending catastrophes.
Benedikt is asking for support to complete the documentary. I hope you can help, if it’s easy and joyful for you to do so. I see this film as a small step on the road to creating the world that our hearts long for.
All the best,
Tom