How a Physician's Practice Became a Ritual
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From clinical observation to the portable botanical sequence
Ritual Journal | Founder-review revision | August 23, 2026
For most of my professional life I worked inside systems that measured health in numbers. Charts, HEDIS scores, care-coordination caseloads, viral-load suppression rates. The work mattered. The numbers improved. Yet something remained unfinished.
Patients would leave the office with a prescription in hand and, almost in the same breath, ask about a tea their grandmother used to make, or a point on the ear a neighbor had shown them, or a plant that grew behind the house in Colombia. Some colleagues dismissed those questions. I could not. The questions themselves were data. They pointed to a form of knowledge that lived outside the chart and still shaped how people rested, coped, or simply continued.
I began to notice a pattern. The people who had a small, repeatable practice — a cup of something warm prepared with attention, a few minutes of quiet, a physical signal that the ordinary pace had stopped — often returned with a different quality of presence. Not because any single herb or point had "cured" them, but because they had found a way to mark a crossing from the day's momentum into a different moment. The transition itself seemed to matter.
That observation stayed with me long after the clinic hours ended.
Years later, when I began to design what would become Galen Naturals NYC, I returned to the same gap. Modern life is efficient at producing useful objects. It is far less skilled at producing endings. One task rolls into the next. The phone never fully sets itself down. We are left to manufacture rest on command, as if rest were a switch rather than a passage.
A product alone cannot create that passage. A cup of tea is comforting. An aromatic oil changes the air. A small tool that rests on the ear or around the neck gives the body a concrete signal. Each of these is good. None of them, by itself, is enough. The value appears only when they are placed in sequence and given time.
This is why the Ritual is the product.
The sequence we use is simple and deliberate: ACTIVATE, SIP, BREATHE, FEEL, BALANCE. Not every Ritual uses every step, but every Ritual ends in BALANCE — the point at which the separate actions stop being separate. ACTIVATE is the first movement, but I no longer think of it as only a physical action. It begins before the pendant is worn or the diffuser is switched on. It begins when a person deliberately gives the next few minutes a direction.
ACTIVATE begins with the mind.
That direction can be very simple: remember a place, a person, or a moment in which you felt safe, unhurried, or at ease. It may be an afternoon from childhood, a conversation with someone who made you feel understood, a familiar landscape, or simply an image of how you want the next few minutes to feel. The purpose is not to force calm. It is to stop asking the mind to change states without first giving it somewhere to go.
This idea did not come to me from wellness marketing. I had seen a related principle years earlier in health education and treatment-adherence work with people preparing to begin antiretroviral therapy for HIV. Starting ART was never only a matter of handing someone a prescription and saying, "take this every day." My work included increasing knowledge about what the medication was for, why adherence mattered, what side effects might occur, what could be prevented or mitigated when possible, and when a problem needed medical attention. Just as important, I tried to keep possible side effects in proportion. A patient needed to know about them without allowing the fear of them to become the entire mental picture of treatment before the first dose had even been taken.
I also encouraged patients to picture a positive, realistic outcome: not a perfect treatment with no difficulties, but a future in which the regimen was understandable, manageable, and connected to something worth protecting. I saw firsthand how that kind of preparation could change the tone of treatment initiation. The patient was no longer entering therapy with only a list of things that might go wrong; there was also knowledge, a plan, and a reason to continue. For me, that was an early lesson in agency: information matters, but the way a person mentally approaches an action matters too.
Research in HIV care later gave formal language to parts of what I had observed. Adherence self-efficacy, beliefs about the necessity and usefulness of ART, and concerns about medication have repeatedly been associated with adherence. In a small randomized pilot study, an intervention that combined education about ART efficacy, adherence and side effects with problem-solving around side-effect management increased adherence self-efficacy and more positive expectations about managing side effects (Johnson, Gamarel, and Dawson Rose 2006). A one-year longitudinal study likewise found self-efficacy and a positive attitude toward taking medication among the predictors of adherence (Godin et al. 2005). Other authors have specifically proposed "active visualisation" as a way to make the purpose of ART and PrEP more concrete, while emphasizing that the evidence base is still developing (Jones and Petrie 2017).
Cancer and palliative-care research requires the same precision. Guided-imagery and positive-psychology interventions have been studied as supportive approaches, with recent reviews reporting improvements in outcomes such as anxiety, depression, quality of life, or symptom experience in some populations (Bozkurt-Duman et al. 2025; Correa-Morales et al. 2024). That is meaningful, but it is not evidence that positive visualization changes tumor biology, disease progression, or survival; older and contemporary reviews have cautioned against making that leap (Spiegel and Moore 1997). The distinction matters. A mental practice can influence how a person experiences and engages with a difficult situation without becoming a treatment for the disease itself.
That narrower lesson is the one I carry into ACTIVATE. GN NYC is not asking a person to visualize a medical outcome. It is asking them to choose a direction for attention before the sensory sequence begins. First comes the mental decision: this is the moment I am giving myself. Then comes the physical marker - wearing the pendant, switching on the diffuser, or, in later Collections, placing the Shen-M Stability Ear Clip. The tool does not create the intention. It gives the intention a beginning that can be felt in the present tense.
Traditional systems have long recognized the power of such a threshold. In the classical Chinese understanding of the ear, one point in the triangular fossa is named Shen Men - the Spirit Gate. The name itself describes a passage. We do not present the Shen-M Stability Ear Clip as a medical device or as a treatment. We present it as a contemporary wellness wearable that draws on the traditional idea of a clear physical marker at the beginning of a different moment.
The rest of the sequence follows the same logic. The preparation of the tea is not incidental; the waiting is part of the practice. Aroma adds another layer because olfactory pathways are closely linked with brain systems involved in emotion and autobiographical memory (Herz 2016). A familiar smell can bring back a room, a person, or a period of life with remarkable immediacy. Repetition can also make sensory cues feel familiar within a routine. That does not mean a GN NYC aroma "conditions" the brain to relax, and we do not claim a guaranteed response. Individual associations can be positive, neutral, or negative. The point is more modest: when attention, taste, aroma, a physical marker, and time are repeatedly brought together with intention, the sequence can become easier to recognize as a personal pause. When personal care is added in later Collections, touch extends the same multisensory logic. None of these steps asks you to perform wellness. They give the day a structure it did not offer on its own.
I have watched the wellness industry turn plants into products and products into metrics. The result is often another form of pressure — another thing to optimize, another score to raise. The practice I am describing moves in the opposite direction. It is closer to what some herbalists have called a quiet rebellion: the decision to treat attention, sequence, and a few minutes of unmeasured time as the active ingredients.
That decision is rooted in two lineages that have shaped my own work. One is the Hippocratic understanding that body and spirit are not separate problems to be solved in sequence. The other is the living botanical knowledge of the Colombian Andes — the same knowledge that produced the plants we source and the cultural memory that still treats a pause, a shared table, and the smell of the air as ordinary rather than optional.
The rituals are portable because the need is portable. Fifteen minutes is enough. The pouch fits in a bag. Hot water and a quiet corner are the only additional requirements. You do not need a free afternoon. You need a clear first movement and the willingness to let the sequence do its work.
I did not invent the idea that an ordered practice can restore a sense of agency. I observed it repeatedly across clinical, community, and health-education work. People asked about their grandmother's tea because the tea was never only tea. Patients starting treatment needed more than a list of instructions; they needed knowledge, confidence, and a way to imagine themselves carrying the treatment into ordinary life. Years later, those experiences helped me recognize the same human need outside medicine: a clear beginning, a meaningful sequence, and sensory signals that make an intention easier to inhabit. The task was to give that crossing a contemporary form that could travel - into an office, a hotel room, or the thin space between one obligation and the next.
That is the origin of the system. Not a collection of useful objects, but a passage you can carry.
Return to the Origin. Move Forward with Wellness! — Portable botanical rituals for modern life.
Dr. Luis E. Solarte P., FMG, MSHI
Founder & CEO | Galen NYC LLC | Hudson Heights, New York City
References
Bozkurt-Duman, Canan, Hande Arici-Turk, Oznur Erbay-Dalli, and Yasemin Yildirim. 2025. "The Effectiveness of Guided Imagery on Psychological Outcomes and Quality of Life in Cancer Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis." Supportive Care in Cancer 33(11): 952. doi:10.1007/s00520-025-10016-8.
Correa-Morales, Juan Esteban, Nidia Mantilla-Manosalva, Ximena Rodriguez-Cardona, et al. 2024. "Guided Imagery for Symptom Management of Patients with Life-Limiting Illnesses: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials." Journal of Palliative Medicine 27(6): 802-812. doi:10.1089/jpm.2023.0445.
Godin, Gaston, Julie Cote, H. Naccache, L. D. Lambert, and S. Trottier. 2005. "Prediction of Adherence to Antiretroviral Therapy: A One-Year Longitudinal Study." AIDS Care 17(4): 493-504. doi:10.1080/09540120412331291715.
Herz, Rachel S. 2016. "The Role of Odor-Evoked Memory in Psychological and Physiological Health." Brain Sciences 6(3): 22.
Johnson, Mallory O., Kristine E. Gamarel, and Carol Dawson Rose. 2006. "Changing HIV Treatment Expectancies: A Pilot Study." AIDS Care 18(6): 550-553. doi:10.1080/09540120500241439.
Jones, Annie S. K., and Keith J. Petrie. 2017. "I Can See Clearly Now: Using Active Visualisation to Improve Adherence to ART and PrEP." AIDS and Behavior 21(2): 335-340. doi:10.1007/s10461-016-1611-7.
Mitzel, Luke D., and Peter A. Vanable. 2020. "Necessity and Concerns Beliefs and HIV Medication Adherence: A Systematic Review." Journal of Behavioral Medicine 43(1): 1-15. doi:10.1007/s10865-019-00089-2.
Spiegel, David, and Rhonda Moore. 1997. "Imagery and Hypnosis in the Treatment of Cancer Patients." Oncology (Williston Park) 11(8): 1179-1189.
Note on language and claims
The clinical examples in this article describe the Founder's prior health-education and treatment-adherence experience and are presented as personal professional observation, not as evidence for any GN NYC product or Ritual. Research on ART adherence, guided imagery, positive psychology, palliative care, and odor-evoked memory is cited only to describe broader human patterns and evidence boundaries. No cited study evaluated the GN NYC Ritual System. Guided imagery should not be represented as changing cancer progression or survival. The traditional naming of the Spirit Gate (Shen Men) is used only as cultural and historical context for the idea of a physical threshold. No clinical, therapeutic, or disease-related claim is made. The Shen-M Stability Ear Clip is a wellness accessory (Trademark & Patent Pending). Essential oils are for diffusion only and are never applied directly to the skin or ingested. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.