At a time when wellness is all about shortcuts, supplements and sweeping promises, natural health educator Barbara O’Neill’s approach feels almost old-fashioned. There are no quick fixes on offer or dramatic before-and-after claims; her ideas, instead, are rooted in a simple belief – that the human body already knows how to heal, if only we let it simply be.
Ahead of her Bengaluru session titled ‘Healing Blueprint’ which will be held today at the JN Tata Auditorium, IISc, the internationally-renowned health educator, naturopath, nutritionist and speaker, who prefers to be called a teacher rather than a healer, gets candid as she says, “Many believe the only option is drugs. But there are many more. The body alone has the power to heal, I just help people understand how to give it the right conditions.” Her approach is rooted in daily maintenance such as hydration, nourishment, rest, movement and sunlight – which she believes allow the body to do what it already knows how to do.
O’Neill traces this philosophy back to her early 20s, when she began questioning the default response to all illness. “As a child, I was taught that when you get sick, you go to the doctor who prescribes a drug. When my children were young, I didn’t want to keep doing that but neither did I know what else to do,” she shares. That uncertainty pushed her to seek answers elsewhere – from older generations, traditional practices and history itself.
Before drug medication became common – mostly in the last 100-150 years – people had ‘skills’. It’s this gap that O’Neill has spent more than four decades trying to share information that allows people to participate in their own care. At the Healing Blueprint session, she will focus on unpacking this ‘philosophy’ through three interconnected areas – gut health, skin and hormones. “When hormones are out of balance, something has caused it. I like to investigate why,” she says, adding that the skin often reflects hydration and nutrition, while gut health determines how well the body processes and absorbs what it’s given.
However, modern life works against these basics, having become all about survival through overwork, long hours, poor sleep, irregular meals and constant stimulation which leaves little room for recovery. “We all want a quick cure. But sometimes the answer is to stop. If we don’t listen to the body’s whispers, it starts screaming,” the 72-year-old advises, stressing that proper sleep and time away from work are among the most missing conditions today.
According to her, conflicting health information and misconceptions around urban lifestyles, have also added to the existing confusion. While easy access to information can be empowering, it can also overwhelm, she notes. “If something hasn’t hurt you and it’s a well-tried method, sometimes it just needs time,” emphasises O’Neill who only teaches what she has personally tested or seen work over years of practice.
Another widely-misunderstood concept when it comes to wellness is detox, as she states, “The body not only self-heals, it’s also self-cleans. At night it detoxes; if you eat late and heavy, the body can’t clean house. Short, regular fasts work better than extreme detoxes. The ‘morning breath’ as it’s called is not such a bad thing,” she says.
Amidst all this, O’Neill is careful to draw distinctions when it comes to modern medicine. While she credits life-saving drugs in emergencies, she questions their use as everyday solutions. “Drugs are invaluable in a crisis, however, the problem is when they spill into daily life,” she highlights.
With a vast ocean of information and much confusion around wellness and healing, she hopes audiences in Bengaluru leave with a simple reassuring thought. “I want them to trust their body again. And to ask ‘What can I do to give it the conditions it needs to heal?” she concludes.