Health advise at Sacred Circle is more like catching a ping-pong ball in mid-air—sometimes you hear it in line for a flu vaccination or over a cup of coffee. It is never a lecture. Education is provided in compassionate, folksy, and delightfully contagious PowerPoint slides, not in dry ones. You will always find someone carrying a new recipe to cut down on salt while preserving flavor or a tip to help relax anxiety.
Classes are everything from stiff and boring. You might go to a diabetes presentation, but there’s also a potluck where you can sample the better substitutes under discussion. One even has a syllabus on laughing! Imagine a volunteer advising teenagers how to eat “properly”—that is, that greens are not only for rabbits—or a nurse sketching fat cells on a napkin to explain cholesterol. This kind of education is the kind that stays as it is ingrained in stories. “My aunt traces her food with smiley faces,” or “My uncle quit smoking by doing this.”
Support here is not like a hot potato—passed from one visit to the next just. Over cocoa, new parents congregate in the break room to share real-life tales of teething, late-night fevers, and their fears. Now a pro, one father said he never knew how to change a diaper until someone in the group showed him how.
For one-on- one assistance, staff members go above and above. A pharmacist will dissect your pills using sticky notes and high-fives if you are unsure about them. Trying to eat better? Meeting you at the grocery store, nutritionists will examine labels like detectives working through a mystery.
Not hidden in a corner either is mental health. Stress and anxiety sessions are conducted in public view under a whiteboard loaded with useful tools. You might find yourself using a breathing exercise taught by a psychotherapist to relax during bumper-to–bumper Main Street traffic.
Support and education at Sacred Circle flow naturally, like driving down the road with the windows down and singing along to your favorite song. The lessons are experienced, laughed about, and discussed like the newest local rumors at a summer barbecue; they are not delivered to you. You leave the clinic with fresh confidence, important talks, and, if lucky, a crockpot meal to try at home, not only medical advice.