White – the Medicine Wheel

The Medicine Wheel is an Indigenous worldview perspective. I’m going to speak specifically from sort of an Anishnaabe perspective. Not all nations use the Medicine Wheel so that’s always really important to remember. So, the Medicine Wheel is a holistic approach and there’s four parts to it. The physical, the mental, the spiritual and the emotional. So, while there are some cultural teachings that go along with the Medicine Wheel, generally we like to approach this from how do we use this in a professional practice kind of way. So, the four parts to the Medicine Wheel is what encompasses the holistic approach.   

The purpose of the Medicine Wheel would be to help people understand that people are comprised of these four parts. So really to view people from – like as a whole person but also really important to remember that the work that we’re doing, the workplaces that we’re in, also are comprised to these parts. So, always keeping in mind what are the physical, the mental, the spiritual and the emotional aspects of a person, place or thing.   

So, in terms of childhood development, we can see it from like a life cycle perspective and children moving through different stages, different cycles and so again, we would apply that holistic lens. So, what’s happening in the physical aspect, the mental aspect, the spiritual and the emotional aspects as well. So, understanding that there is an important part that each of those four parts play and that a child’s development can be viewed through each of those. So, we might call them milestones or markers. We can apply that holistic lens to it and understand that there’s four components to it, not just one thing.