Health Is Not A Thing

I cannot fix my gaze on it, hold it in my hands, feel its weight and say: “Yes. This is it.”

Health isn’t an asset you can buy and sell. It’s not a commodity to indulge. It isn’t a long-term goal around which to orient, to use as a benchmark for success or failure.

Health is not the irreproachable moral conduct of your nation. Health is not an ethical attainment. Health is not the sword of Damocles hanging above your head. Health is not a series of protocols to follow, a formula to repeat, or a positive affirmation to memorize and stick on the bathroom mirror as a sticky note.

Health is not your market value. Health is not the supplements in your medicine cabinet. Health is not the vaccines that are either good or bad depending on who you ask. Health is not a series of codewords. Health is not the wealth of your family. Health is not an investment property.

Health is not a long-term savings plan. There’s no retirement project that doesn’t involve the presumption of health, and health is not in itself a project. Health is not a postcard destination to send your distant relatives: “Wish you were here”.

Health is not the food you eat, be it grown or bought. Health is not the dirt under your feet, nor the pavement. Health is not the topsoil. You cannot look at a vegetable garden and say, with confidence: “This is health.”

Health is not a guarantee, and it is not a blessing. Health is not to be trusted, and it is its own best advocate. Health is not the intravenous needle, not the blood, not the transfusion. Health is not the antibiotics. It is not the hospital bed, but it is also not the beachfront resort.

Health is not the result of some meandering spiritual quest. Health is not found in the jungles of Paraguay or the peaks of Patagonia. You cannot hold health in your hands on the temple steppe of Kathmandu nor in the Diwali celebrations of Chennai. There is no health to hold onto in the Red Sea or in the forests of Britain. Health is not a place.

Health is not a common good or private property. Health is not the public sector’s effort to reduce the spread of disease or control the population’s viral load. Health is not the herbal dispensary in Chinatown, nor the acupuncturist’s pulse-taking, nor the time spent under the needle. Health is not a deep tissue massage. Health is not the abhyanga and the panchakarma. Will health result from these things? Maybe. Only to slip away again, again, always.

Health is not a spatiotemporal orientation device. Health is not a way to look at the world. Health is not an ethical framework. Health is not the cosmogony passed down by oral tradition from ancestors to descendants over deep-time.

Health is not the stomach, the heart, the brain, and the lungs. Health is not the liver and the feet and the hands. Health is not the body in its totality. Health is not the tears shed in grief, upon hearing of yet another young friend dead too soon. Health is not the co-regulative response of the nervous system as described by polyvagal theory. Health is not the mere balance of the doshas.

I saw my grandmother today. She repeated her old refrain: “Health is the greatest good, the most important thing in life. You don’t think about it until it’s far too late, and you’re far too old—.” I interrupt: “Mamie, you know, I thought about it pretty early. I know what it is you’re talking about.”

Mamie: “Yes, well, you’re the exception. I grew up working the soil, threshing the wheat. We worked day in day out, and look at me now. [she gestures to her stooping ninety-six year old figure] People say all the time they wish they were like me. When I was taking care of my mother in law, she was 90 years old, and I had to wash her, wash her hair, she couldn’t do anything herself. Me, at least, I can still take my shower by myself, I can still put in my hair curlers.”

Health is not a home you buy. It is not the self-therapizing undertaken with the emergent empathy of large language models. Health is not the meds I’ve taken, the bone marrow I’ve given up, and it is not the prescriptions written in shorthand for the pharmacist. Health is not the hepatitis injection I received to prepare for tropical travel. Health is not the quality of life outcome of decisions made day in and day out. Health is not a series of good habits.

“Then what the fuck is it, Laure?”

I’m still trying to parse that out. I think health might be Being itself.

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This has been my last post of 2025.

Thank you so much for reading me this year, and for your thoughtful responses and engagement with my process. Over my upcoming travels in Thailand and India, I will be posting once per month, or maybe slightly more. The themes and content of this blog will remain largely the same. I do not intend to blog a travelogue, but I expect to find inspiration in a change of scenery. I am bringing my Sanskrit study materials and a small copy of the Bhagavad Gita with me, as well as my ayurvedic schoolwork. I am also packing a pocket edition of Swami Vivekananda’s Jñāna Yoga.

To close, here is a list of some of my impactful reads from 2025.

Novels:

• Chronique du Pays des Mères by ​​Élisabeth Vonarburg (absolutely incredible speculative fiction, I highly recommend)

Essays & Philosophy

• Petit éloge de l’errance - Akira Mizubayashi

• Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy

• Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta

• Money and The Souls’s Desire by Stephen Jenkinson

• The Dawn Of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow (still unfinished)

• The Palliative Society, Byung-Chul Han

• Non-Things, Byung-Chul Han

• Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Byung-Chul Han

Vedanta & Spiritual

• Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda

• The Bhagavad Gita, translated and commented by Paramahamsa Yogananda

• Path of the Heart, Beverly Lanzetta

• Awaken Children, many volumes, Mata Amritanandamayi, compiled by Swami Amritaswarupananda

• Karma Yoga, Swami Vivekananda

• Many other essays by Swami Vivekananda from his Complete Works.

Ayurveda

• The ayurvedic course texts from the Academie Quebecoise d’Ayurveda where I am studying.

• Noteworthy source text I’ve begun to peel a bit: Vagbhata’s Astanga Hrdayam (Heart of Medicine)

• The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (used in a course I took with Dr. Antonia Ruppel, the book’s author.) Unfinished, but an incredible resource. Also the Assimil Method’s Le Sanskrit.

It’s worth also noting the podcasts or people that I love to listen to, that have nourished me much in the last year

• Vedanta Talks by the Vedanta Society New York and specifically Swami Sarvapriyananda’s lectures on the Bhagavad Gita and the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and

• Acharya Dr. Sthaneshwar Timalsina’s many talks on Saivism in theory and practice.

• Accidental Gods with Manda Scott for incredible and nuanced dialogue about the possibility of cultural renewal in the wake of disaster.

• Many conversations with Joanna Macy, and especially the We Are The Great Turning mini-series.

• The Emerald Podcast

• The Green Dreamer Podcast

Many blessings to you and yours.