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Holistic Health – a conversation with Alesha Cumpton co-Founder Bindu Institute
15 Plays26 days ago
Would combining every form of medicine make use healthier?
Alesha Cumpton was following her passion when she gave up her corporate career to co-found Bindu Institute, which delivers graduate-level, research-informed programs and professional training that integrates embodied practice, psychology, and whole-system approaches to health and wellbeing.
In this episode of the Abeceder health and wellbeing podcast Fit For My Age Alesha explains to host Michael Millward the ideas that are the foundation of Bindu Institute, and how the team are now delivering master’s level qualifications in holistic health.
Their conversation covers:
- An explanation of holistic health
- The importance of being able to access accurate health information
- Understanding how our lifestyle decisions impact our present and future health
- Recognising and understanding symptoms, but treating causes of ill health
- How different cultures view ageing and health as we age
- How many people take more care of their cars that they do of their health
- The educational role of Bindu Institute
Find out more about Alesha and Michael at Abeceder.co.uk.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fit for My Age
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. Because Zencastr makes every stage of the podcast production and distribution processes so easy. All the details are in the description.
00:00:17
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Hello and welcome to Fit for My Age, the health and wellbeing podcast from Abysida, on which we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
00:00:28
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I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abysida.
Meet Alicia Compton and Bindu Institute
00:00:32
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Today, i am learning about alternative health from Alicia Compton, the co-founder and CEO of Bindu Institute.
00:00:41
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Alicia is based in Barcelona in Spain. i have been, but it's been quite a while ago. If I ever get the chance to visit again, i will make use of my membership of the Ultimate Travel Club to arrange my travel.
00:00:54
Speaker
That is because as a member of the Ultimate Travel Club, I get to travel at trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays, all sorts of other travel-related purchases.
00:01:06
Speaker
You will find a link with a built-in membership discount in the description so that you, just like me, can travel at trade prices as well. Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of Fit For My Age that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:26
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One that will also, I hope, be worth telling your friends, family and work colleagues about as well. Good morning, Alicia. Good morning. How did you end up in Barcelona?
Alicia's Journey from Aerospace to Holistic Health
00:01:36
Speaker
So I'm originally from Phoenix, Arizona. I did my MBA in Switzerland and then landed here in Barcelona about 10 years later. Tell us a little bit about why you moved from a corporate world into setting up Bindu Institute. I started my career in corporate, as you said. i have an engineering degree and I was in aerospace before my MBA. After MBA, I was working in Europe, traveling around, working with country managers. And I always really drew upon my yoga practice while I was studying, while I was in my corporate globe trotting and traveling and working the long hours that you often do in corporate careers. My yoga practice and all the things that I had been learning was like a passion of mine for for many years. I was very much in health and wellness. Even as a teenager, I was leading aerobic classes at the YMCA and and very much subscribed to holistic, healthy lifestyle and always very curious and learning more. So after my MBA, I went to India to do my yoga teacher training.
00:02:48
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just to really deepen my knowledge and awareness more for a passion of mine. And then eventually that passion grew into something so much more that I came to the point when I realized it was either I leave corporate and really follow my heart and and my desire to help people and to share the practices that I had learned along my my path. or I would have needed to stay in corporate. And it just, for me, the choice was really clear. I decided to to go for it and started out with another venture and had a lot of really beautiful lessons learned along the way. And then when I was doing my advanced teacher training in yoga, my now partner, Suzanne, shared with me her vision for an institute of holistic health. And when she shared...
00:03:44
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with me that idea, it just landed so viscerally in my body. It was a full body, yes, like I wanna be part of this. So that's how, yeah, the the journey to Bindu came about for me.
00:03:57
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When you say holistic health, what is it that Bindu
Integrating Modern Science with Ancient Wisdom
00:04:01
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does? I see Bindu as very much a bridge between worlds. And for me, it's not just symbolic, it's very embodied because I'm bridging many worlds with Bindu. Bindu's bridging modern science and ancient wisdom practices like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, indigenous studies, um Eastern philosophy and meditation. at the same time, myself and my partner, Vinina, who's another co-founder with us, we're coming from corporate. So we're also bridging the organizations and the corporate world with wellness and well-being. so There are a few different bridges that are in play within Bindu, within the ecosystem of Bindu. It's really about connecting, connecting in a way that invites not just breadth, but also depth based on all of the faculty that we've chosen. they all really, truly embody this connection.
00:05:05
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in so many ways each of them can probably teach in handful of our study areas you know because they've also on their journeys have been looking at different disciplines across the landscape of health so in many ways Bindu is taking all of the ideas and then seeing which works best for any particular individual but before you can do that you've got to understand them all and you've got able to put them all into the different stages of someone's life someone's health and work out what is going to be best for an individual. Absolutely. a lot of people that I come across, they think it's either Western medicine or the, let's say, quote unquote, complementary or alternative practices. And our philosophy, it's both ends. It's not one or the other. It's really using the best of both worlds at any given point. And like you said, in people's lives, what
00:06:02
Speaker
worked for them 10 years ago may not be working now because people are changing. We're this beautiful, changing human. building Yeah, it's evolving. It's changing, especially for women. yeah i mean, there's a lot of conversation now around perimenopause and menopause and the gap that is there in the Western science is really being revealed.
00:06:28
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We refer to indigenous medicine, Chinese medicine as an alternative. And yet what we call modern medicine is probably a hundred, 150 years old. And what we call alternative medicine goes back thousands of years. Absolutely.
Reevaluating Modern Medicine and Ancient Practices
00:06:45
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It's the modern medicine that in many ways is the alternative, but it's the one that governments fund and industry funds hospitals and doctors and all sorts things.
00:06:57
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And it's also when we talk about the evolution and you say, yeah, well, there's lots is changing around menopause. It's only recently that men have started talking about andropause and how the aging process affects them.
00:07:13
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And part of this, I think, is that we are, and the caveat is, although people are still dying of ignorance, still dying of embarrassment because they're too embarrassed, to seek help. But we are, I think, starting to see a little bit of a trend towards people being more open and more willing to discuss health in general. Absolutely. As we bring these gaps in the system to light, people are more encouraged to share their experiences.
00:07:45
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And then as people share, it invites more sharing and more openness around it, which is really important. It's essential. This is the first step is always awareness, right?
Cultural Perspectives on Aging
00:07:56
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Yeah.
00:07:57
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Awareness is something that we still get from, I think, conversations in bars and hubs and from comedians or something that a celebrity has said.
00:08:07
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And then you sort of think, oh, yes, I know. In the yeah UK, when His Majesty the King Charles III made his announcement that he had got enlarged prostate, the number of men who were going to the doctor to be examined rose.
00:08:22
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It became okay to then say, yeah, I can do this as well. I can get this checked. And you need more people in in prominent positions to talk about their health as well, I suppose. The issues of but aging in general and what happens as we age, we don't get an awful lot of education about it until it hits us. Absolutely. Especially in our society, we tend to glorify the youth. Yes. You know, the maiden archetype and strapping men. i think for men, it's
00:08:56
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It's a little bit less so. I mean, you brought up some very relevant points that are still very much hiding underneath the surface, you know, that people are afraid to talk about.
00:09:08
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But I think when we think of beauty and energy levels and sustainability, like everything is our entire society is really built around youthful ideals. When you look at the indigenous cultures,
00:09:24
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It's really the elders who are revered and respected and honored for their experience and their wisdom and what they offer to the table as well. And I think in our Western society, we we haven't yet really shined a light on on that.
00:09:44
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And all of the things that come with aging as well are i looked on as something to to be embarrassed of or to not talk about because nobody is talking about it, but actually it's happening to everyone, you know? And if we can be more open and vulnerable and transparent, I think it'll serve us in many ways.
00:10:06
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agree with you. The alternative to not aging isn't that attractive really. As you age, you do build confidence and you are less worried about the things that people in their youth worry about. What will people think about me?
00:10:23
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When you get older, it's like, I can do what I want. I don't have to worry about what you think because you work out who is important to you and the people who matter. you Whatever you do, it doesn't matter to the people who matter.
00:10:36
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It's an interesting philosophy that in some cultures, age is revered. I suppose part of that might be because fewer people reached great age than now do because of the advances in medicine. But the big issue, i think, as we get old is staying fit and healthy as we age rather than reaching a great age simply spending your days sitting in an armchair in front of the TV.
00:11:03
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You want to be able to do things. Absolutely. What I'm learning from what you're saying is that There is more of a chance of you being active in your older age. yeartics yeah If you have a more holistic approach to your health.
00:11:20
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but holistic health means that when you do something, when you make a meal, you're thinking about how that meal will impact your health. When
Prioritizing Proactive and Holistic Health
00:11:30
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you look at an activity, it's how will that activity impact your health, rather than waiting until you're ill to think about your health. Absolutely. When you wait until you're ill and then you turn to, you know, the quick fixes, the band-aids that we can apply, the various band-aids.
00:11:50
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And those are very often just simply dealing with the symptoms. Exactly. Rather than the root cause of what it is that is major illness. Yeah, so the holistic health approach, it's really about being more proactive about your health and understanding how all the different factors contribute to each other. That when you have a symptom, you can put a Band-Aid on it and maybe that can help create some ease with that symptom, but it's not addressing the root cause. And the root cause
00:12:26
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oftentimes is not a singular branch. it's It's very complex. You know, it could include your mental state, the psychology, it could include your nutrition, what you've been eating, as you mentioned, it could include your activities, it could include your stress levels.
00:12:48
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All of these factors play a role in our biology. And the way that we show up in the world every day, it's not something that just happens overnight. It's something that is built over time, over days, over weeks, over months, over years of habits that we've created for ourselves. And when we have more understanding of how all of this works together, then we can understand like which
00:13:19
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which levers we have to to play with, you know to adjust, to fine tune, to refine, to create a more harmonious state of health that gives us the longevity that we're looking for where we can be active, fit, and what we consider healthy later in life. But these actions can't be taken once symptoms arise. They need to be taken. They need to be proactively informed on our daily decisions that we, our daily choices that we make need to all be reflective of the life we want to live in the future. There is a book called Tuesday with Mori, which is ah and also been made into a film.
00:14:11
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And one of the things that I remember from reading that book is that In order to decide how you want to live, you have to decide how you want to die. Almost like how do you want to spend those later years of your life?
00:14:24
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Deciding how you want to die impacts how you will live, the decisions that you make. If you are saying, I want to smoke, I want to drink alcohol, I want to smoke all sorts of drugs or whatever, that is going to influence how you eventually die. And yet, if you want to have a healthier, older age,
00:14:44
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It's the decisions that you make in your teens, in your 20s, in your 30s that will impact your ability to live out your retirement and eventual death in the way that you want to. Yeah, I love that. It sounds so logical because we are like a car. if you don't service your car, maintain it It will not last as long as if you look after the car.
00:15:09
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And yet there'll be people who will pay more attention to their car than they will to their own health. Absolutely. It's so true. I think people often take for granted the bodies that we have, you know. Ultimately, it's about vitality.
00:15:24
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How much energy and vitality do we want to have? The majority of us, I would say, we're making choices based on things that have been externally fed into us. Good corporate advertising campaigns. Yes. and television programs and radio all sorts of things in the uk for example if you want to have a television soap opera or even a radio soap opera the chances are the point at which all the characters come together the location is going to be a pub and yet nobody ever gets drunk nobody ever develops alcoholism but that community center is very often the pub Interesting. And yet alcohol, if it was invented today, it would be probably be banned.
00:16:11
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That's my soapbox. Yeah. I mean, and this is culture, right? It's yes culture that's been shaped over many, many years that we're born into.
00:16:23
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And when you're born into this culture, you don't really know anything else. but I find it fascinating that they're saying that the new generation is really less interested in alcohol. I don't know if it's true in the UK, but that's what they're seeing in in many other countries that people are going to bars less, they are a bit more healthy. part of it is driven by cost. Part of it is driven by health education.
00:16:52
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But Bindu Institute is not just about holistic health and people getting treatments, you're an educational establishment, an educational institute, and you're providing the training that will help people understand their health in a holistic manner in more detail. Please tell me something, some more about the sort of education services that you provide.
00:17:15
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Yeah. So at Bindi, we have a few different core offerings. The one that's, is really foundational is our master's program. So it's a master's degree in holistic health sciences.
00:17:28
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And it's really aimed at anyone who's either really wanting to deep dive into holistic health to really understand fully this this full spectrum of tools that are available to us, like I said, within the modern science and the Eastern more ancient wisdom practices.
00:17:53
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So this could be anyone from ah a person who just has a natural curiosity and wants to really dive in for them personally and for their family, or more specifically, we're also looking at people who are already working in health in some way. So whether you're a yoga teacher, or if you're a personal trainer, or a coach, or a therapist, or maybe even a medical doctor who are looking to expand your set of tools. so
00:18:27
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even let's say a medical doctor, when I speak to medical doctors about their
Innovative Education at Bindu Institute
00:18:33
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training and education, most of them have very little around nutrition, for example, or meditation or the yogic sciences. like So these are beautiful tools that can be really added and compliment a toolbox for for people who are already working with with clients in some way.
00:18:53
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So we have nine different study areas that we cover and it's it's very comprehensive. So we're covering biomedical and clinical sciences like anatomy and physiology.
00:19:07
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nutrition, naturopathy, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, as well as psychological and developmental studies like somatic experiencing and psychology, women's health, human development, neuroscience. And then we're also working with the traditional and contemplative sciences like yogic science, Eastern philosophy and meditation and human consciousness.
00:19:31
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The idea is that you get a very comprehensive overview the first year of all of these study areas with online learning and also in-person practicum trainings that we're doing twice within the first year.
00:19:48
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and then after that first year, you can receive a certificate of higher education in holistic health, or you can continue on and or you can continue on for your full master's, in which case you pick a specialization pathway, which eventually can create a career trajectory for you.
00:20:10
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And then with with that specialization path, and it's an extra year or two, depending on the pathway. um Some pathways were working with partner institutions, like nutritional therapist is one, which we're partnering with an institute in the UK called ION, the Institute of Optimal Nutrition. So when you choose that pathway, you graduate with your master's in holistic health sciences and your license as a nutritional therapist from ION. So you get kind of a double a double certification. this is not a novelty master's that someone might do just out of interest, although they could just do it out of interest. You have built a career pathway from the qualification as well. Exactly.
00:21:00
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Yeah, so the first year could really be open to people who are interested in really understanding more. And then when you want to go for the full master's, that's more if you really want to take your career to the next level, or maybe you're in a transition point and you're looking for a career change into something that aligns with holistic health, that you're so passionate about it that you want to turn this into a career. So then you could continue on for the master's.
00:21:30
Speaker
we have ah I have had numerous conversations with general practitioners, primary care doctors, who have become dissatisfied with the conventional, modern approach of you come see me, you tell me what the symptoms are, I give you a tablet to deal with that.
00:21:48
Speaker
And are now taking a much more holistic approach to medicine, ah which involves a longer consultation with each patient, and also making sure that the they so the patient sees the same doctor over a period of time.
00:22:06
Speaker
Rather than relying upon what is being written on the screen, the doctor actually gets to understand and to know the the patient. And that, I think, is the relationship part of the medical care is also an important part of it. And you're you're covering all those sorts things in in the Masters as well.
00:22:27
Speaker
Absolutely. yeah I think this is really important, what you're bringing up, because the system that our medical care is in, you know, it i heard a stat that the average patient gets less than seven minutes with the doctor, which in seven minutes, like, what can you really get down to, you know, you can't even build trust in seven minutes. Like, it's, it's really unfortunate that that is the circumstance. So there is a lot that needs to be done at the systems level as well. And part of what we're aiming for is to really work with the medical professionals, the medical doctors who see that there is a need for change. And
00:23:16
Speaker
they want to educate themselves more fully in and this more holistic context. So, but maybe they don't know where to go or it's, you know, there's so much out there that can be considered, you know, woo woo, you're not sure if it's credible. So this is why we wanted to create something that is very much rooted in science and really have a medical board and have the clinical trials and have everything backing, have the peer review so that,
00:23:47
Speaker
medical professionals also feel like they can trust the education that they receive from Bindu. And then they can go back and do their work to really be the leaders of system level change, because this is something that that we see a huge gap in. And we do believe that there will be a change in the future. And it's something that's coming and that's on the horizon. And so we're here to help prepare people for that and give them the tools they need.
00:24:16
Speaker
If someone is interested in participating in this master's course, when does the next course start? Our inaugural cohort starts in September. September 2026. Yes, this year. So doors are open for enrollment. We already have people enrolling and the the first cohort, it is going to be a smaller group, more curated. so that they'll have more direct access with the faculty as well. So it's it's quite interesting to to be part of the first group. We have a lot of exciting things unfolding. Great.
00:24:52
Speaker
And a lot of the learning will be online, but there will also be face-to-face sessions, and those will be in Barcelona? So those will actually be in Switzerland, in Champeri, in the Alps.
00:25:05
Speaker
We are working with a beautiful retreat center there. So the in-person immersions will be, as we have a small group the first year, we're able to make it more like a retreat-like setting, which will be very intimate and also be in a stunning location with views of the Dente Midi mountain range and very tranquil, peaceful setting. So you'll be receiving on the educational side and also be filling up your energetic cups and nourishing with nature and spaciousness as well.
00:25:42
Speaker
Brilliant. Sounds like a great educational experience. I hope it's a great success. But for today, Alicia, thank you very much for sharing information about Bindu Institute. It's been fascinating. Thank you.
00:25:56
Speaker
You're so welcome. Thank you. and Yeah, if anyone is curious, they can always look at our website, binduinstitute.org. Great. We will put a link in the description.
00:26:08
Speaker
Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abusida. And in this episode of Fit for My Age, I have been speaking to Alicia Compton, co-founder and CEO of Bindu Institute.
00:26:21
Speaker
You can find out more information about both of us by using the links in the description. At Fit for My Age, our aim is proactive positive aging. Knowing the risks early is an important part of maintaining good health.
00:26:34
Speaker
That is why we recommend the health assessments available from York Test, especially the Annual Health Test. Performed annually by an experienced lobotomist who will complete a full blood draw at your home or workplace, the Annual Health Test provides an assessment of 39 different health markers.
00:26:52
Speaker
After hospital standard tests are carried out in a yeah UK AS accredited, and CQC compliant laboratory, you will be able to access your easy to understand results and guidance to help you make effective lifestyle changes anytime via your secure Personal Wellness Hub account.
00:27:08
Speaker
There is a link and as you would expect a discount code in the description. If you are listening to Fit for My Age on your smartphone, you may like to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data.
00:27:21
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00:27:34
Speaker
That description is well worth reading. I'm sure that you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of Fit for My Age as much as Alicia and I have enjoyed making it. So please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere.
00:27:49
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. you'll probably also want to tell your friends, family and work colleagues about Fit For My Age as well. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to have made you think.
00:28:07
Speaker
Until the next episode of Fit For My Age, thank you for listening and goodbye.