A sunny day here in Dharamasala. Teachings are to begin in two days and there is a festive mood as people from around the world, Tibet, and local residents gather together, put their cushions in place, and study the books that will be taught. This year it is the 8th century Buddhist scholar Shantideva's "The Way of the Bodhisattva" (for the last word we can substitute the word "Healer," and the third Dalai Lama's "Essence of Refined Gold." Here again we can substitute the words "Self and Life" for Refined Gold."

This is my eighth year attending these annual New Year teachings given by the current Dalai Lama. On my first visit I was deeply moved by the description of these teachings that were offered to me by a local Lama. I was told they  were about wisdom and compassion. Wasn't that about what medicine was about? I thought it was, but my conventional medical education had reduced medicine to technical knowledge and the associated techniques. So here, I realized, I was given the opportunity  to enter my second education in which I would learn the true essence of health and healing. 

Much has transpired in what I now know will be a life long educational process - some of which has been recounted in my new book "Integral Health: The Path to Human Flourishing." Since writing this book my understanding of the role of wisdom and compassion in health and healing has continued to evolve.

Wisdom and compassion can be seen as the more expansive and transcendent counterparts of diagnosis and therapy. The former charaterizes an integral health and healing and the latter a conventional health and healing.

Diagnosis is the practice of identifying the causes of illness (usually biological) whereas wisdom is the practice of discerning, at a more comprehensive diagnostic level, the multiple and root sources of illness as well as the factors that move us towards human flourishing. Therapy conventionally consists of  the variety of remedies and therapies that correspond to the diagnosis. Compassion has two aspects, First, the desire to see others free of suffering and on the path to human flourishing and second, compassion is acting on this motivation with the full range of "skillful means" that are available. Skillful means range from the diversity of available conventional and alternative therapies to the more subtle qualities of patience, presence, listening, encouraging, protecting , teaching, and inspiring individuals to move toward a life and health of human flourishing.

Acquiring the capacities for the more developed and transcendent approach to health and healing that arises from wisdom and compassion (an approach that embraces all other approaches in its skillful means) allows practitioners and individuals to unfold the largest potential for health - an integral health of happiness, wholeness, peace,and love. This level of health and healing is not available through conventional or alternative approaches to diagnosis and therapy.

So that is what I wish to study here - wisdom and compassion - which have always been at the heart of a larger health and healing. I now know that this requires a more expansive understanding of the skills of diagnosis and therapy.  And thus, this second medical education is essential.