Being Healthy in Trying Times
    

Whenever trauma or difficulty occurs in the collective, I witness its manifestations in our “individual” bodies and lives.  I felt the shock, horror, grief and fear in my own body and the bodies of those who come to my office after 9/11.  I felt  the sadness, numbness and rage which afflicted us after our government attacked Iraq and the widespread and deep despair when Bush was “re-elected” in 2004.   In recent weeks, as a year of soaring oil prices and increasingly grim portents of climate change have been followed by potentially catastrophic economic collapse and a grotesquely inequitable and likely futile “bailout,” I have been witnessing these emotions and many others rampaging through our bodies.   

We all respond differently to these collective traumas: some of us rant and rage and weep openly, while some of us collapse in wordless sorrow.  Some of us barricade ourselves behind walls of analysis and cynicism.  Others tend to the business of daily life with a brittle will and frantic energy that belies our outward calm, determinedly acting as if nothing unusual were happening as if by wishing and acting we might make it so.    Many of us bounce back and forth between these diverse reactions.

No matter how firmly we tell ourselves that we are alright, no matter how much we appear to believe our own stories, the physical body, the faithful animal self to which I bear witness each day, never lies.  The body goes on speaking, crying out in the universal language of symptoms:  disturbed sleep, tense, sore muscles, aching and swollen joints, digestive distress, allergies and irritability, compulsive behaviors of all kinds.   As a holistic healer, it is my job to address the sources of dis-ease as fully as I can, to go to the root of our suffering even as I try to ameliorate its symptoms.    
    

Fundamentally, all these crises spring from the same root: our persistent delusion of separateness.  Those who engineered our “pre-emptive” strike against Iraq and our vengeful actions against the land and peoples of Afghanistan imagine that the harm they wreak will not come back to haunt them or those they love.  Those who sanction torture and the evisceration of civil liberties imagine that they are better off for such actions.  Those who are possessed by greed, those who enrich themselves by creating unfathomable misery for countless other beings—human and non-human alike—delude themselves that they are and will remain immune to the suffering that their actions cause.   And those who advocate that we now respond to the economic crisis by stocking up on “guns, dry goods and gold” are similarly insane: they imagine that a few of us can remain safe and whole while millions freeze or starve.

We are all sick with this same dis-ease, this delusion of separation.   None of us is free from the greed, hatred, and ignorance that flourish in the soil of that delusion.   But the fact that so many of our bodies are growing symptoms as vigorously and persistently as our landscape is growing glossy buckthorn, purple loosestrife and Japanese knotweed indicates that we contain within ourselves the antidote to the dis-ease.  Our bodies tell us we ARE connected—to each other and to the non-human relations with whom we share this precious earthwalk.  
    

Perhaps this is the only good news in today’s world:  the staggering of the global economy, the intensifying distress and disorganization of the earth’s systems  and the painful symptoms of our own bodies are making it harder and harder to evade the truth of our radical interdependence.   If there is any promise to be found here, it lies in surrendering ourselves to this truth.    
    

The fact that we find ourselves vulnerable to the contagion of fear sweeping through our political and economic institutions means that we have the potential to affect these institutions with our own emotions and actions: we are not nearly as powerless as we have been taught to believe.   Radical honesty,  courage and fierce compassion can be as contagious as panic.  The flames of our wrathful love for each other and life itself have the potential to act as a backfire against the forest fire that threatens to consume us.
    

So if you want health for yourself, your family, your community, don’t turn away or close off from what is happening now.  Drop out of your head and into your heart.  Dare to feel the raw feelings seething there.   Dig under the surface of your physical symptoms—don’t just medicate them—let them rip you open and expose you to the power of the truth that lives inside.  And when you touch your truth, share it with those around you.  Share your tears, your shaking fear, your rage for what has already been lost and all that is dying now.  Don’t pretend there isn’t time.  There isn’t time for anything else now.  

Especially share your truth with your children.  Last weekend I attended a workshop with Joanna Macy, a Buddhist, activist and teacher who has labored for years to help others connect with their feelings about what is happening to our world and to use those feelings to fuel action. http://www.joannamacy.net During the weekend, a woman told us that she has been taking the slide show of An Inconvenient Truth to nine year olds in her local schools.  Recently the mayor of her town called her to announce that the town was creating a task force on climate change and invited her to come and meet the citizen who had prompted the task force’s creation.  She arrived to find one of the nine year olds who had seen the slide show!  The little girl said, “I was so happy that this lady came to our school—I was afraid I was the only one who cared.”
    

We imagine we can protect our children by pretending that everything is o.k.; this nine year old girl teaches us differently.  She reminds us that our children are alive to the unseen, alert to the unspoken.  They hear the crying of the world and feel the tears well-meaning adults try to keep hidden.   When we fail to share our truth with them, we simply sow confusion and distrust.
    

I do not know whether there is hope for us .  I do not believe we can “save the world” because we and our world are not separate, not subject and object, but body and breath, blood and bone, rain and river.  I only know that, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”  I know that health cannot come from lying or pretending, from cutting ourselves off from the truth of our existence.   In our bodies’ symptoms, in the bewilderment of those who are ill and alone, those who have lost their homes, in the laments of the dying honeybees and bats and oceans, I hear the world calling to us to recognize her creative power in ourselves, and to use that power to glorify the whole.    Calling us to come home.