--- title: "Octopus Dreams and the Mysteries of Transformation" entity: "blog" canonical_url: "https://www.drsmithnd.com/blog/octopus-dreams-and-the-mysteries-of-transformation" markdown_url: "https://www.drsmithnd.com/llms/blog/octopus-dreams-and-the-mysteries-of-transformation" lastmod: "2026-08-18T16:12:53.000Z" --- On science, spirit, and the parts of healing that we cannot measure Photo credit: me! She climbed up into the hand and was very curious. Changed colours rapidly, was beautiful. I very nearly didn’t write this. It makes me feel kind of… queasy. I suppose because it feels so deeply personal. It belongs to one of the truest, most singularly me parts of me that I have never before really articulated. And then, rather inconveniently, my subconscious decided to weigh in. Last night my dreams were stalked by an octopus. She was everywhere in the odd, scattered vignettes that make up dreams, and at one point—the most vivid point—I was the octopus . I could feel three hearts beating. I was exploring with eight arms, experiencing so many sensations at once. It was incredible and bizarre and has stuck with me all day. (How many people, I wonder, had a similar dream after finishing Remarkably Bright Creatures late at night? If you haven’t picked it up yet, it’s a sweet read.) It left me with some unexpected introspection, including the realization that part of me does, in fact, feel a little like an octopus. Why? Because as each unique woman who is my patient sits in front of me and tells me her story, I change colour and shape. I am a deep empath, it’s true, but this is more than that. It’s an ability and perhaps a willingness to adapt to the kind of clinician the woman sitting in front of me actually needs. The truth of it is, I am both a woman of science and of spirit, and I will not amputate one side of myself. I will not choose. I can and do go from citing a study on a medication to talking about energy, subconscious belief patterns or prayer in under 60 seconds. I’m comfortable with, trained in, and regularly use old energetic systems of medicine when I believe they’re the right tool. I am also trained to interpret scientific evidence and work in the space we call evidence-based medicine, which is a constant foundational pillar supporting my work. And I do very much enjoy the golden star of evidence-based medicine: a proper, well-designed, randomized, double-blind study. Seriously, who in medicine doesn’t? It is so… comforting. I chose naturopathic medicine because it straddles this spectrum and, to me, feels like the right home for my work in this world. It has meant, well, many things. But certainly it has meant being comfortable in the grey. Comfortable with intuition. With really listening to the patient. With complexity and uncertainty. And with acknowledging the fact that, even with the extraordinary advances happening in medicine, we have barely scratched the surface of understanding the intelligence of our bodies and minds. Why do women’s bodies sometimes seem to break down after years of holding everything together? Why does inflammation sometimes appear alongside years of swallowed resentment? Why can exhaustion linger like a ghost in a woman who has spent decades shrinking herself to fit the needs of everyone around her? I don’t pretend to know. But I do know what I observe in practice. I know what I can measure, and I know what I cannot. I’ve been doing this long enough to believe that what we cannot yet measure should not automatically be dismissed from the picture. I know it in my cells. Buried feelings. Love lost. Grief. Unspoken longing. Loneliness. Swallowed anger. Carried fear. Dragging shame. Fragmenting ourselves in order to belong. There is always a cost, dear reader , and we cannot search it up on PubMed. Yet. My patients will tell you that I sometimes veer straight toward the unspoken elephant in the room. That heavy fog. The thing sitting on you that seems to make change almost impossible. The part of your story that tells you very convincingly, that staying exactly where you are is safer. I am, in the end, very much in the business of transformation. And sometimes the inability to follow an excellent health strategy is information in and of itself. Few things reveal our deeper patterns faster than being handed an excellent strategy for getting where we say we want to go and watching ourselves remain in essentially the same place. You just can’t …unsee it. We tend to label that stuckness as failure but my interpretation tells a different story. I think that something deeper in us, perhaps from the soul level, is trying to communicate with us and override our ego - the part of us committed life or death - to our old, stuck narrative. A part of us has reached a boundary, and we feel extremely uncomfortable going beyond it. Either we sit and metabolize it, (What is trying to move through me here?) or we deny and distract (How do I move past this?). We get to choose. And yes, one choice is more confronting. But it is also where the rubber meets the road ladies. Call it what you will, but if we want to reach for a higher elevation in our lives and in our health we have to cast out an intention, be awake at the switch when something floats by that might help us change, and then have the grit to act on it. Go! They say there is no luck, only opportunity met with preparation. I don’t know who “they” are, but I do think they’re right. Courage, my love. Dr. Kirsten ND, MSCP