Two Healing Goddesses You Should Know About

When you’re not feeling well, chances are you want a quick fix, a magical pill, a cure-all. It’s easy to turn to a drug in times of distress and illness, and sometimes in life it’s necessary to reach for a drug which can provide you with immediate relief.

Drugs have their place and serve their purpose. However, there is a more sustainable way of achieving wellness. It’s about taking daily incremental steps towards your health and vitality. And sometimes, we may benefit from a little extra help from a classic source. Greek mythology introduces us to two particular goddesses who can show us the way when it comes to holistic health and healing.

In this fascinating new video from IPEtv, Marc David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, explores some timeless lessons from the ancient Greeks that can help us better understand and work with today’s most modern medical treatments.

Greetings, friends. I’m Marc David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Let’s have a brief chat about two very cool healing goddesses I think you should know about.

Now, there’s so much important wisdom from the past when it comes to health and healing. So I want to bounce back for a moment, get in our time machine, and go into Greek mythology.

And when we go back into Greek mythology, we find that the father of medicine was named Asclepius.

Now, Asclepius had a bunch of daughters. He had two favorite daughters. One was called Hygieia. And the other he named Panacea. Hygieia and Panacea. Now, Hygieia—where we get the word hygiene from—was indeed considered the ruler of daily hygiene, which indeed means diet, daily care, cooking, the kitchen, nourishment, movement, rest, and all the little lifestyle practices that create a healthy and vibrant life.

So whenever you say the word hygiene, it’s coming from the Greek, from that goddess Hygieia, because she was the one who had a beautiful flow with all the little practices in life that add up, the little things that add up to health.

Now, her sister Panacea, on the other hand, she was considered to be the goddess of the cure. And it said that she had the recipe. Panacea had the special recipe that was a combination of herbs that only she knew that can cure just about anything. So whenever you were super sick, you would go out into the woods and you would try to find this goddess. You’d try to find Panacea. You would try to find the cure-all.

But the challenge was that Panacea, she liked to spend her time alone in the woods. And she didn’t always want you to find her. She was a little bit of an introvert. And it said that in Greek mythology that Asclepius, he was a good dad. And he loved his daughter’s very dearly. But he had this tiny extra special affection for Higieia.

Now, the teaching here—there’s a deeper teaching here—the teaching here that’s relevant for our modern times is that, yes, sometimes you have to look for the panacea. Sometimes you have to look for that drug, the one thing, the one cure that’s going to help you heal your disease. That’s a beautiful exploration.

But more important, a little bit more important, love Higieia.

Love hygiene.

It’s the daily practices in our health that you do. It’s your commitment that helps you build up your bank account, helps you build up your life force, helps you increase the probability that you’re going to be the most vibrant, healthy person in this world. So, in other words, we have to value the little things because, indeed, they’re the biggest things over the course of a lifetime.

And that, my friends, is the magic of the world.

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