The True Meaning of ‘It Takes a Village’
Symptoms are like a smoke alarm alerting you to an underlying fire that must be identified and extinguished. We must ask ourselves: “Why is the smoke alarm going off?”
Author, educator, mentor and speaker, Dr Michelle Gamble, is co-founder and director of It Takes a Village Ministry – a World Council for Health (WCH) coalition partner – and Sankofa Healing and Enrichment. On Better Way Today on 29 April 2024, Zoe Stricklandfrom WCH spoke with Dr Gamble about what inspired her to help people with chronic illness to transform their health.
The divine healer within
Dr Gamble’s mission is to create and sustain natural healing communities across the globe. She believes that there is a divine healer within each of us that enables us to break free from physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pain and suffering to lead happy, healthy, and purpose-driven lives.
Dr Gamble’s work grew out of her own personal health journey, when she recognised that she needed community in order to heal. After the birth of her fourth child she experienced postpartum depression, which a psychiatrist misdiagnosed as bipolar, sending her away with a prescription. She knew immediately that this would not be her journey but that she needed to do three things:
To learn how to heal herself and not accept what she calls ‘medical hexing’.
To learn how to help others heal – beyond the limitations of the current medical paradigm that sees everything that is natural for us as an opportunity to intervene medically.
To find community and sisterhood.
Her work has evolved into two offerings: the for-profit company Sankofa Healing and Enrichment, and the not-for-profit organisation It Takes a Village Ministry.
It takes a village to raise a child
In this clip, Dr Gamble explains how the African concept that ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ actually applies to each and every one of us. It is not possible to live a healthy life as an isolated individual. We are not meant to be alone!
Wisdom of the ancestors
The word ‘Sankofa’ means ‘Go back and fetch it’ – in other words, we need to retrieve the wisdom of our ancestors. Although we like to think that technology makes us more involved and more intelligent, in reality we are worse off health-wise today than we were even a couple decades ago. In the UK, for instance, the position of ‘Minister of Loneliness’ was created even before the Covid event to address what had become the priority health issue.
The feeling of loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking several packs of cigarettes a day; it depresses the immune system and creates imbalances in all the other systems of the body. And despite the internet facilitating communication, people are lonelier today than ever before because nothing can replace face-to-face connection.
In our society, we often feel that we have to get everything done ourselves without relying on others. But as Dr Gamble says:
… it becomes overwhelming trying to figure everything out, … having to have these conversations in your head, as opposed to having someone there who can put an arm around you, to just look into your eyes, to just put a gentle hand on your hand, to give you that message that you are not alone. The power of community is immense.
Covid: Disempowered by isolation
All the efforts to separate people during the Covid event – the masking, the (anti)social distancing, the stay-at-home orders, the isolation – could do little to prevent the inevitable spread of the virus. But what the separation did achieve was to restrict people’s ability to choose to come together as community, which is the first step toward empowerment.
Covid highlighted that we are living within a ‘paradigm of permission’. But government was not created to grant permission; it was created to enshrine and protect our rights, which are divinely designed, and not given to us by man. Knowing that the divine design of the Creator is that we should be healthy, we can choose to claim this inheritance. There is power in shifting out of this paradigm of waiting for permission and allowing others to control us.
Will fear stop you or motivate you?
Dr Gamble asked the viewers:
Why are you here? What is it that God has put on your heart to do? Can you do it alone? And because the answer to that is “No”, what are you going to do about that? Are you going to sabotage your divine purpose? Or are you going to just do it?
Fear stops many people from doing what they really want to do. Years ago, Dr Gamble recognised that her children needed her to be healthy and supported rather than depressed and isolated. In her case, fear of the consequences for herself and her children of not making the change was actually greater than the fear of making a start. She is also strongly motivated by the fear of not fulfilling the purpose that God has placed in her heart.
We can make phenomenal shifts in our lives when we realise that we need to change, and then choose to change because we want something different and better. So, if you want to create community, or take decisions about your health, just do it!
The Seven Deadly B’s!
Dr Gamble notes that the real pandemic is the pandemic of chronic illness, which started long before 2020. It Takes a Village Ministry has been undertaking five-day ‘Hope and Healing Tours’ to raise awareness about the drivers of chronic illness and to empower communities to improve their metabolic health.
She refers to the most common chronic conditions as ‘The Seven Deadly Bs’: Blood pressure, Blood glucose, Bloating (indicative of digestive distress), Burnout (indicative of various systemic breakdowns), Belly fat (a significant indicator of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome), Blues, and Brain fog.
Usually, our first response is to seek a pharmaceutical or surgical solution, such as Ozempic or liposuction for belly fat, and Metformin for blood sugar. But these symptoms are like a smoke alarm alerting you to an underlying fire that must be identified and extinguished. We need to ask: “Why is the smoke alarm going off?”
The answer is within!
The Hope and Healing Tour helps people become aware of what's going on in their bodies, and encourages them to change everyday lifestyle habits, like sleep, diet, movement, and responses to stress, which contribute to chronic illnesses.
An important aspect of the programme is letting go of having to ‘trust the experts’ and learning instead to trust our own instincts. Every culture on earth has traditions of prayer and meditation, going within, and asking for guidance and understanding. We will never hear our inner voice tell us that we need a drug; instead it will invite us to shift something in our life that not only alleviates the symptom, but also leaves us with greater clarity, drive, power, passion, and purpose.
The message to ‘go within’ is what first inspired Dr Gamble many years ago. In this short clip, she describes the gifts of going within, knowing that you have the support of a community.
Opportunities to connect
To learn more about the work of It Takes A Village Ministry, please explore their website.
Log in to the free virtual health clinic, The Doctors Are In, every third Thursday of the month at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time. If you can't join at that time, send in your health-related question and the panel of natural health practitioners will respond. You will hear various perspectives that will stimulate you to do further research, so that you can engage your health practitioner and give informed consent.
If you live in the USA, contact Dr Gamble to request a Hope and Healing Tour in your area.
It begins with you! Seize the power!
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