The Water Ceremony: A New Kind of Healing in My DPC Practice
One of the gifts I offer my patients and clients is spiritual support. I sit back and witness their lives. Every story is remarkable, worthy of being beheld. Each person carries a tale, and listening to it feels like opening a mysterious box full of hidden compartments — some gems rough and ragged, others polished and resplendent.
As I sit with these beautiful souls, I often wrestle with my own sense of capacity. How am I going to help them? is a thought that plagues me more than I’d like to admit. I doubt whether I know enough, whether I’ve taken enough courses, whether I measure up to my brilliant DPC colleagues who’ve built and grown their practices with such sophistication. Ah yes — there’s my inner saboteur, judge and jury both. My self-criticism has always been creative, and learning to release it has felt like peeling a sunburn: tender work. I remind myself to breathe, to return to the person in front of me with curiosity.
The day I stop learning from a patient is the day I’ve stopped being reflective. Even between visits, I keep learning — meditating, reviewing each encounter, discovering more about myself and my role in this work. I’ve come to understand that everyone carries pain. Gently naming it, acknowledging it, has become the most important part of my job. To do that well, I’ve had to learn to honor my own emotions and my own pain first. I can only guide someone as far as I’ve gone myself.
When I hear the desperation, the struggle, the psychological and physical horrors people have lived through, I make room for my own sadness and anger. I’m learning to regulate my own nervous system so my patients can learn to co-regulate alongside me — holding myself the way I hope they’ll learn to hold themselves, with a loving embrace.
I’ve brought a new practice into my visits: a vase of water on the floor, quietly listening. The story shared in that room settles into the water and rests there. Research suggests water carries a kind of memory — that it can read our energy. Professor Masaru Emoto of Japan explored this idea, showing that water reflects what we send into it. I’ve chosen to bring this phenomenon into my practice. At the close of the visit, we pour the water into the garden outside my office — a small ritual of letting go, releasing what no longer serves us. I release my own weight; my patient releases theirs. “I feel lighter,” they often say afterward.
Could I have done this in corporate medicine? Not a chance. I barely had time to empty the water in my own bladder! But now, at LALIM Health, I get to offer spiritual support — water and all its hidden messages included.
