Everything I have built
was forged by everything I survived.
A long-form essay on apartheid, law, motherhood, exile, illness, and the practice of medicine that followed.
There is a kind of clarity that only comes from crisis.
From watching injustice and refusing to look away.
From standing at a historic crossroads and choosing to be counted.
From the moment a system — political, medical, or otherwise — fails you completely, and you decide that failure ends with you.
I have lived each of those moments.
They are why I practise the way I practise.
And they are why I built something Canada has never seen before.
Where justice first became personal.
I grew up in Durban during apartheid.
Not as an abstract political reality. As the texture of daily life — the signs, the boundaries, the silences, the things you were permitted and the things that were simply closed to you because of who you were.
I watched injustice operate as a system. Methodical. Institutionalised. Ordinary.
And I knew, from a young age, that I wanted to be someone who could challenge it from the inside — with precision, with language, and with the force of the law.
So I studied law.
I completed my B.A. (Law) at the University of Durban-Westville — a university that existed, under apartheid, exclusively for Indian students. A separate institution built to keep each race apart, even in education.
Then I applied to study my LL.B at the University of Natal — a whites-only institution under the apartheid regime. As a non-white South African, I was not permitted to attend.
So I applied directly to the Minister of Internal Affairs for special authorisation to enroll.
And I was granted it.
I want you to understand what that means. Under a system designed specifically to deny people like me access to institutions like that — I went to the government that built that system and made them let me in anyway.
I completed my LL.B at the University of Natal. I then completed two years of articles. And I founded my own practice.
Both universities have since merged into the University of KwaZulu-Natal — a unified institution that could only exist after apartheid ended. I hold degrees from both of its predecessor institutions. One built for people like me. One I had to fight to enter.
That is who I was before I ever saw a patient.
Building a practice in a country rebuilding itself.
When I graduated, I completed my articles at a prestigious law firm. Then I built my own.
Arlini Singh & Associates was my property law practice in Durban — operating in one of the most contested legal landscapes of the post-apartheid era, where questions of land, ownership, and what rightfully belongs to whom were not abstract. They were the unfinished business of a country trying to rebuild itself after decades of deliberate dispossession.
I understood those questions intimately. I had lived them.
A property lawyer understands that what has been taken from someone, what has been diminished, and what needs to be restored — these require careful examination, not surface-level assessment.
I still bring that same precision to every Ayurvedic consultation I conduct today.
The day a country voted for the first time.
In 1994 I was appointed as a Presiding Officer for South Africa's first democratic elections.
For the first time in our country's history, every South African — regardless of race — could vote. Including me. Including my family. Including people who had waited their entire lives for that single act of dignity.
I stood at my voting station and watched it happen.
Both Nelson Mandela — the incoming President, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and father of a free South Africa — and F.W. de Klerk — the outgoing President, last leader of the apartheid regime, and fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate — visited my station that day.
Two men. The end of one era and the beginning of another. Both present at the moment I was responsible for.
I had spent my entire adult life fighting the system those two men represented — in different ways, from different sides. And on that day, I was the one holding the process that made both of them accountable to something larger than either of them.
I have thought about that day many times since.
What it means to be entrusted with a historic moment. What it means when a system finally becomes what it was always supposed to be. And what it costs — personally, professionally, physically — when it does not.
Those questions followed me into medicine.
They are present in every consultation I conduct today.
Why we left the country we had helped build.
My law practice was broken into three times.
After the third break-in, the insurance company refused to renew my policy. A practice I had built from nothing — that I had fought a government minister to earn the right to build — was no longer insurable.
And then came the day that made the decision final.
My husband and I were hijacked on the Durban beachfront by five men carrying AK-47 rifles. Our children were in the vehicle. They were three and five years old.
The men wanted the vehicle. And the children.
The incident was reported in the Durban press at the time. We survived. Our children were unharmed.
But we knew, with absolute certainty, that we could not stay.
In 1995 we left Durban for Newfoundland, Canada — carrying two small children, two law degrees, two medical degrees, and the quiet, unshakeable belief that we were meant to build something meaningful with the lives we had been given.
In 1999 we moved from Newfoundland to Ontario, where we have remained ever since.
Canada was not a retreat. It was a beginning.
My husband, Dr. Kishore Singh, is a Family Physician and Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at McMaster University Medical School.
In 2004, we co-founded Appleby Medical Centre — a full-service Family Medicine practice in Burlington, built on his conventional medical training and our shared belief that good medicine begins with knowing the patient, not the chart.
I managed the practice. I understood medicine from the inside — its rhythms, its gaps, its extraordinary capabilities, and its equally extraordinary blind spots.
Ten years later, in 2014, we would integrate Ayurveda into Appleby Medical Centre and become the first practice in Canada to hold both traditions under one roof.
But that part of the story came only after a chapter of my own life I had not yet lived through.
When the system I knew could not help me.
I was healthy. No chronic conditions. No history of skin issues. Nothing.
Then one morning I woke up covered in a rash. Head to toe, everywhere my clothes touched my skin — angry, red, and unbearably itchy. My dermatologist said it was a reaction to my laundry detergent. The same detergent I had used for twenty years.
I was prescribed prednisone. The rash settled — but what came next was far worse. A severe reaction left me so profoundly fatigued I could not get out of bed. Could not lift my head off the pillow. Could not function.
Two months of doctors. Tests. No answers. I ended up in the ER in a wheelchair because I could not stand. X-rays normal. Bloodwork normal. And yet I could not hold myself upright.
The ER doctor prescribed antibiotics — not because I had an infection, but in case I got one, since prednisone suppresses the immune system.
I refused to fill that prescription.
I went home angry, heartbroken, and determined. I had survived apartheid. I had fought a government minister for the right to my own education. I had survived a hijacking at gunpoint with my children in the vehicle.
I was not going to be defeated by a medical system that had simply run out of ideas.
That same day — sitting in the ER — I searched for answers outside everything I had known.
And I found Ayurveda.
What Ayurveda showed me that no test ever had.
For the first time, I encountered a system of medicine that was not chasing symptoms.
Ayurveda asked why. What was I eating? How was I sleeping? What stress had I been carrying? What had depleted my body so profoundly that it simply could not protect itself anymore?
And suddenly the root cause was clear.
That detergent had not changed — but I had. I had been pushing through an intensely stressful period, quietly depleting my body until it simply could not protect itself anymore. The rash was not the problem. It was the signal. Everything that followed — the prednisone reaction, the fatigue, the endless cycle of appointments that treated each symptom in isolation — happened because no one stopped to ask what had made my body vulnerable in the first place.
Root cause. So obvious once I saw it. So completely overlooked by everyone I had turned to for help.
I began studying Ayurveda. I started applying what I learned. And I began to heal.
A decade of practice. Built with rigour.
I did not take a weekend course. I did not complete an online certification.
I enrolled in the multi-year clinical training program at the California College of Ayurveda — one of the most respected Ayurvedic institutions in North America — and completed three progressive programs, each followed by a supervised clinical internship:
- Ayurvedic Health Practitioner + supervised clinical internship
- Clinical Ayurvedic Specialist + supervised clinical internship
- Doctor of Ayurvedic Medicine + supervised clinical internship
From my very first internship in 2014, I was seeing patients at Appleby Medical Centre — a fully functioning Family Medicine clinic. Not a classroom. Not a simulated environment. A live clinic where real patients came with genuine health concerns.
Every internship across all three programs was conducted under direct clinical supervision by the California College of Ayurveda. Before each patient consultation I reviewed the case with my supervisor. After each consultation I debriefed. Every patient. Every time. Without exception.
This was structured, accountable clinical training of the highest standard — embedded within an integrated medical environment from day one.
I have been in active clinical practice since 2014. That is over a decade of seeing real patients, in a real clinic, with real outcomes.
The Doctor of Ayurvedic Medicine designation, completed in 2019, was not where my clinical journey began. It was where it reached its fullest expression.
And then my alma mater invited me back.
In September 2025 I was selected as the alumni speaker at the California College of Ayurveda's 30th Anniversary celebration — invited by the institution that trained me to address its faculty, its current students, and the next generation of Ayurvedic clinicians.
The student who refused to take a weekend course had become the alumna they wanted at the podium.
The thread that runs through everything.
Look at the arc of my life and you will see the same impulse running through all of it.
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1.
A child in Durban who watched injustice operate as a system — and chose law as her response.
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2.
A young woman who went to the Minister of Internal Affairs and made the apartheid government grant her access to the education she was entitled to.
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3.
A lawyer who built her own practice in a newly democratic country — fighting for people's rights to what was rightfully theirs.
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4.
A presiding officer who stood at the turning point of a nation's history and was trusted to hold it with integrity — in the presence of two Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
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5.
A mother who protected her children when everything was at stake.
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6.
An immigrant who rebuilt her life and her career in a new country — not once, but twice.
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7.
A patient who refused to accept that there were no answers — and found a system of medicine that proved there always are.
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8.
And now a doctor and founder who brings all of that — the legal precision, the decade of supervised clinical practice, the personal knowledge of what it feels like to be dismissed by a system that was supposed to help — into every consultation she conducts.
I built A·YUR·VEDA because I know what it feels like when a system fails you.
And I built it so that my patients never have to feel that way.
Two locations. One integrated practice. Worldwide.
Today, A·YUR·VEDA — founded and owned by Dr. Arlini Singh — and Appleby Medical Centre together form Canada's only integrated Ayurveda and Family Medicine practice.
At Appleby Medical Centre, Dr. Kishore Singh leads a full-service Family Medicine practice — bringing conventional medical expertise, lab interpretation, and referral pathways to every patient relationship.
At A·YUR·VEDA, I offer classical Ayurvedic consultations, deep clinical assessments, and personalised protocols rooted in more than a decade of supervised clinical practice.
Together, we offer something that does not exist anywhere else in Canada — the ability to hold your health through both lenses simultaneously. Conventional medicine's precision alongside Ayurveda's depth. In one integrated model.
Consultations are available in person in Burlington, Ontario, or virtually from anywhere in the world. No referral required.
Training & credentials.
30th Anniversary California College of Ayurveda · United States Invited by the institution that trained me to address its faculty, current students, and the next generation of Ayurvedic clinicians.
I do this work because I remember exactly what it feels like to be told there is nothing more anyone can do.
And I know — from my own body, my own life — that that is simply not true.
If you have been dismissed, misdiagnosed, or told that everything looks normal while you know something is wrong — I want you to know that there is another way to look at what is happening in your body.
And I would be honoured to show you.
