Àforítì: Reflections on resilience: Basking in the vision
To bask in a vision that you’ve had for yourself. That sweet spot when the transition feels easeful, and you feel that you are embodying the change you hoped to see. What’s that like? How do keep showing up to expand the vision and resist complacency? I explored these questions in conversation with Dr Oluwatumininu Johnson, a raw-vegan medical doctor, dancer and poet.
In making the decision to go raw vegan what vision did you have for yourself and the life you wanted to live?
When I was 23 I had severe depression which resulted in me attempting to take my life whilst in medical school. Recovering from this experience led to doing more things to improve my wellbeing, such as meditation, yoga, improving my diet - but I had the sense that it could be better. My vision was to really live my best life, nothing less than that. Fast forward to a couple of years later when I was living in New York, I had just come back from Niger, where I was working for Medicines Sans Frontier (MSF) as a field doctor. I dove into nutritional research, an area which not a lot of doctors are educated about in medical school. In this process I realised that my diet was not as good as it could be and the implications of this had effects on my mental and emotional wellbeing. The vision was all about how I could live into the person I would love to be – no less than that.
Can you speak about the holistic impact of making that decision to level-up?
In terms of physical impact, within 2 weeks my asthma, which I struggled with since a child, was gone and within a couple of months my eczema completely cleared up and has never returned. I’m also a dancer so performance-wise, I experienced an increase in flexibility, endurance and strength. In terms of relationships, I could no longer pretend to be in relationships that were unhealthy and toxic - raw food doesn’t allow for that. With raw food you cannot numb your emotions, so I was feeling everything, this helped me create healthier boundaries to the point that my relationships levelled up also. A few years into the journey I met the love of my life. Before that I had relationships with men that were not right for me and I kept repeating patterns of self-sabotage, choosing people who were not well in many ways. When I levelled up in terms of treating myself with such love through the food I was eating I attracted an incredible human being into my life. Making the decision to go raw has provided mental clarity, emotional centredness and spirit-centredness - I stepped into the life I was truly meant to live.
There’s something interesting about your decision to go raw with food, which actually led to you going raw with yourself – facing truth with love to let more love in
For me raw is about returning back to who we really, which is nature itself. Nature is all about being raw and authentic. I find emotions to be so interesting, if we can get away from trying to over attach to them, but rather feel them and listen to them as possible teachers of what needs to be healed. If you don’t allow yourself to feel the raw emotions you are never whole. Healing and whole are the same etymology, healing comes from a sense of wholeness. That has been a beautiful part for me on this journey.
When did this journey begin to feel easeful? Before this happened, in the earlier months of transitioning to a raw vegan diet, how did you go about convincing the parts of yourself to fully invest in this decision? Did you take it day-by-day, or did it help you have a timeframe of sorts to work towards to help?
It was not an overnight success for me, my emotional resilience was not there from the beginning. I had to work on this idea of being ok with my emotions. Every time I would fall off, I would reflect on what happened and think about how I could tweak the strategy to get back on course – its addiction 101. As a primary care doctor, I studied psycho-social medicine with people who struggle with all kinds of addictions; from heroin, cigarettes to sex, you understand that relapse is part of recovery. Rather than saying ‘I relapsed, I’ve failed’ more so ‘how I do learn from that? to make the shift’. I remember soon after making the decision to go raw I moved to Paris, and it was winter. I was having relationship problems with my boyfriend at the time, and I would have days where I’d just go to the boulangerie and order baguettes. The next day I would wake-up and ask myself how I could stick to the journey. It was about coming back to myself and not giving up on the vision. It was about having the intention and self-kindness to make those tweaks so that I could stay on course. For the past 7/8 years this journey has felt so easeful, and it gets easier.
Every day I make the choice because it continues to feel good. At the same time, I allow myself the choice that, if at any point this decision does not feel good anymore then I’m out. This is not about labelling myself as anything but about being authentic in my life. Practicing embodiment also helped me a lot. I noticed how good I felt after eating a salad, peaches, watermelon etc vs if I had a big baguette which led to feeling dull, heavy, and sick afterwards. It’s important to be aware of the aftertaste of food, how it sits in your mind and consciousness after eating.
Did you have in place external support structures? Like other people in your life who were also on this journey?
In my physical life, not at all. There’s not one raw vegan in my family. I remember my boyfriend at the time used to smoke weed every single morning as well as cigarettes. I went to a festival called Woodstock fruit festival, an all-raw festival in New York State, where I first found a tribe of people who were doing this. I was there for a week and felt amazing. When I came back, he said that I looked too healthy and that my eyes were way too bright!
What’s beautiful about now is that there is the internet, which helped me interact with people from all over the world who are also on this journey. This led me to different retreats/ festivals and meet-ups. One meet-up in particular led to me being invited to a retreat in Thailand to participate and teach yoga, I went on an intuition and met my husband. I have a tribe because of the age we live in.
What piece of advice would you give to yourself of 10 years ago that was about to embark on this journey of raw veganism?
I would say be even kinder to yourself in these first moments of change. Sometimes it felt easy to do this in moments where I was struggling with the decision to go raw and other times it didn’t. I had so much frustration with myself at the start. I knew the science and how good I felt being raw vegan, yet I kept returning to the thing that didn’t make me feel good. We are creatures of habit and some of these foods are absolutely chemically addictive, bearing this in mind its important to be kind to yourself. More kindness spills over to everything else in your life.
I really resonate with the quote you have as a banner for your YouTube channel, “Art as medicine, medicine as an art” – Can you talk about your experiences navigating through projections of what it means to be a medical doctor as well as the ways you’ve created space to ground yourself in your own interpretation?
Navigating through those spaces with a confidence and compassion, with the results to show has helped me a great deal. Compassion for the patients and for medical staff who do not understand what I am doing and the way I practice medicine. I navigate with confidence, as in faith and belief in what I do, because I see the results from what I do. I am blessed to have patients where I have guided them to get off medication to treat illnesses, reverse PCOS, lose weight etc through the practices of dietary changes, lifestyle medicine and yoga. Once I brought a yoga mat into a clinic and people were giving me the side-eye, yet people with chronic pain were getting better and getting off their medication. If you have the results to show, that’s a language that is understood by everybody. In terms of spirit-centredness, before I walk into a clinic room there’s a prayer or dance that I do which gets me in that space of sacredness to then go and be of service and be a vessel for healing for others.
Going back to your time in medical school, did you always have this openness to alternative ways of viewing medicine and health?
I’ve always been attracted to alternative complementary medicine. One of the first books my mother gave me as a teenager was called Alternative Medicine, I’ve also been practicing yoga since I was 12. However, I had a societal judgement around alternative medicine. I’m Nigerian-American, being a healer meant going to medical school and doing the ‘straight and narrow path’. I loved the science and diagnostic elements but also the herbs, the dancing and libations, for a long time I thought these aspects could not come together. I wasn’t open to it, which meant being not open to a part of myself. This also led me down the road to severe depression because it was a lack of self-acceptance. It wasn’t until I started to allow myself to bring my dance, my yoga, my poetry and herbs as medicine to the table, that’s when I started enabling myself to be the best physician I could be.
Final question, what does resilience mean to you?
When looking at the Latin etymology of this word, the ‘sillience’ part comes from the idea of taking leaps. I’m not so interested in the past, more so leaping when it feels right. For me, resilience means being committed to consistently taking the leap. Soaring with the understanding that sometimes the ground doesn’t feel like it is coming to meet you, this is still blessed, because you’re still flying.
Connect with Tumi
All images published with permission from the Interviewee.