What Does It Really Mean to Be Holistic?

When I was 18, I went straight into nursing and then midwifery. I never thought to question what I was being taught. Doctors were the authority. The system was something to trust. If something was published or protocol, I believed it. I was deeply institutionalised but I didn’t know it at the time.

That began to change after the birth of my first son, Harry.

It was a complicated birth that shook me. Not just emotionally and physically, but ideologically. I began to see cracks in a system I had once believed to be flawless. Slowly, my trust began to unravel, not just in the institutions I had trained in, but in the entire model of care I had once devoted myself to.

So I swung the other way.

I became very alternative in my outlook. I distrusted mainstream medicine entirely. I saw pharmaceuticals as toxic. I avoided anything that came with a label or a logo. If it wasn’t “natural,” I didn’t want it.

And like many people who wake up to the limitations of the mainstream, I went through that phase of rejection, of mistrust, of anger. And maybe that was necessary for me to start finding my own way.

But it wasn’t the whole truth either.

Over time, through my own healing—physically, emotionally, spiritually, I came to realise that extremes rarely serve us. That black-and-white thinking keeps us stuck in the same patterns, just in different packaging. And more than anything, I began to understand what it truly means to be holistic.

It doesn’t mean being anti-pharma.
It doesn’t mean rejecting doctors or surgery or science.
And it certainly doesn’t mean choosing nature over medicine, or intuition over evidence.

Being holistic means seeing the whole picture.

It means asking deeper questions. Looking for root causes. Acknowledging the emotional and spiritual alongside the physical. It means understanding that the body doesn’t operate in isolated parts and neither does our health.

Yes, I often prefer to begin with more alternative routes when something feels off. I look at nutrition, nervous system state, relationships, stress, trauma, beliefs, ancestral patterns. I’ve seen profound transformation come from these gentle and sacred places.

But I also believe that pharmaceutical medication has a place. Sometimes it saves lives. Sometimes it buys time. Sometimes it stabilises enough for deeper healing to happen.

So to me, being holistic isn’t about being alternative, it’s about being inclusive.
It’s about honouring the full spectrum of support available to us, without shame or dogma.

This journey from blind trust, to total rejection, to finding my own middle path has shaped everything I do today. As a mother, a therapist, a guide, a space-holder.

And I offer this reflection because I know many of us are navigating similar journeys—trying to make sense of a world that wants us to pick sides. But maybe the truth lives somewhere in between.

Maybe wholeness lives in the middle.