When Knowledge Becomes Part of You

This year, during my trip to India, I had the opportunity to visit the Atharva Ayurveda Center in Pune, an integrative cancer center in Wagholi where conventional medicine and Ayurveda are brought together according to the needs of each patient. I walked through the center with Dr. Bhagyashree Sardeshmukh and came away carrying many small but meaningful lessons. One of them came through Prabha Godbole, an experienced Ayurveda gynecologist, a field very close to my heart. I have long been interested in Ayurvedic gynecology and have studied parts of it alongside my formal training, but I have never had the opportunity to learn the subject deeply under a traditional mentor.

I asked her how she had learned to recognize so much through observation alone, especially in an era before ultrasound was routinely available. What she said shifted the way I thought about learning. She explained that the only way to learn was to keep seeing patient after patient, year after year. Then she said that after spending twelve years immersed in the same work, something changes. The knowledge no longer remains outside you as something you are trying to remember. It settles into you. You begin to know the subject from within.

I began to see my own years of study differently. Ayurvedic food, its science, traditions and relationship to the body, is something I have now studied for twelve or thirteen years. Yet I often still feel there is so much more to understand. Ayurveda seems to deepen the longer you stay with it. Perhaps that is part of what she was describing. Knowledge slowly moves from something studied into something lived.

As I walked through the different departments of the cancer center, I found myself thinking about a close friend who has been living through cancer. When I saw her last year, she was undergoing chemotherapy and was physically and emotionally exhausted. Food had lost its appeal, her energy had changed, and it was difficult to watch someone I loved move through such an intense period of treatment. Recently, when I saw her again, she was in a very different place. Her treatment journey had taken several turns, combining necessary medical intervention with time in a rehabilitation setting surrounded by nature and deeply supportive care. What she spoke about most was not one particular therapy, but the experience of being met as a whole person. She remembered the kindness of the physicians, the absence of promises, and the humility with which they approached her care. She also spoke about the other patients she met there. Friendships formed quickly, with a depth that can arise when people find themselves sharing experiences few others can fully understand. For her, that sense of connection became profoundly nourishing.

Her story brought me back to something I have encountered many times in Ayurveda: the understanding that healing involves more than attending to a disease alone. The body matters. So do the mind, our relationships, our surroundings, our sense of meaning and the way we experience ourselves while moving through illness. Perhaps this is also why traditional panchakarma settings were often closely connected with the natural world. There is something very different about healing while surrounded by trees, fresh air, changing light and the rhythms of the day. Nature gives the senses something to meet.

Ayurveda continually returns us to those rhythms. We encounter them through the foods we eat, the seasons we follow, the festivals we celebrate and the foods traditionally prepared at particular times of year. These practices bring the individual back into relationship with the larger world around them.

I have begun to think about joy in much the same way. Joy in the small moments that return us to life while we are moving through something hard. My friend and I have spoken many times over the years, through both difficult and hopeful periods. Recently, she said something that moved me deeply:

“I realized that I somehow learned as a child to see life as demanding suffering from me. And I offered it quietly for decades. And then almost dying and being in agony with so much pain made me realize that suffering as a currency does not work. That life thrives on joy and fulfillment and striving to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

She went on to say:

“I think healing is the longing answered. And for me it happened at that place in nature, and it continues to unfold as I learn to live with more joy.”

I keep returning to those words. Perhaps the invitation is not to wait for some extraordinary form of joy, but to notice the smaller ones already present. The ones that nourish us quietly, reconnect us with the world around us and, sometimes, give us enough steadiness to meet what comes next.