In my quest to recover the ability to walk without pain following this back injury, I have discovered movements that enable me to feel my left foot, ankle and leg more clearly than I have in decades.  I have discovered specific places that need to be stronger and effective ways of strengthening them.  Intermittently I’ve felt myself standing and walking with clarity and presence in my left leg and foot.  At this point the new ways are unfamiliar, tentative, and tiring, but they feel deeply right.

I’ve visited a number of other old injuries as well—falls onto my tailbone, blows to the back of the head from horses’ hooves.  Compelled to lie still and move slowly and gently, I’ve had a chance to touch into the patterns these injuries have left in my being; compelled to lie still and move slowly, I’ve witnessed them relaxing in the warm bath of compassionate awareness.

This injury has also taken me into less tangible realms.  I would call them past life memories; we could also call them memories, experiences or nightmares from the collective unconscious.   I don’t really care what stories we tell about their origins—as the Zen saying goes, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.   I care about remaining open to the infinite potentials these bodies can contain and allowing them to express themselves.  I have witnessed how powerfully healing can emerge from witnessing these mysterious wounds, from bringing breath, touch and compassion to the places they have shaped us, from listening to the stories they tell not through words but through gestures, sighs, moans, and shrieks.

While I am still in the middle of this healing process and do not know where it is going, I am literally not the same person I was.   I am lighter, freer, more joyful and more compassionate.  These are not ideas I have about myself—these are names I can give to the increased sensation in my feet, the new movement available in my ankles when I walk, bend and squat, the unfamiliar—and for now fleeting new length throughout my spine.   These changes will inevitably shape how I work with clients when I return to my office.  Less directly but perhaps more powerfully, these changes affect everyone I encounter. 

In the last twenty years or so there has been an explosion of research about mirror neurons and other neurological pathways through which we humans are “wired” to (usually un-or subconsciously) perceive and respond to one another’s movements and emotional states (see Daniel Goleman’s book Social Intelligence for a down-to-earth exploration; Malcom Gladwell’s popular Blink also touches on these topics).   In this arena as in so many others, Western science is belatedly affirming what our ancestors have always known: we are inescapably and profoundly interdependent. When one of us “walks in beauty,” ze[1] offers that beauty back to everyone.  

So, what ICD-9 diagnostic codes would adequately describe my back injury?  And how many visits to the chiropractor or physical therapist should it require for me to heal from it? What “outcome measures” would satisfy those who demand “evidence-based medicine” as to the utility and value of the care I’ve received and the extent of my transformation?

The sadly obvious answer is that our current “health care system”—our current health insurance model and the materialist, mechanistic, allopathic worldview in which it is inextricably rooted—is not interested in healing.  It is interested only in re-covery, in returning me to something resembling my former “normal” as quickly as possible.  It doesn’t care if I walk in beauty; it ignores the effects my unhealed injuries and limitations may have on the next seven generations.  It is wartime medicine—it seeks to send me back to the battlefield as quickly as possible, not to question, let alone end, the war.  As I watch the charade of “health care reform” playing out in Washington, I feel rage about our collective failure to look at the real roots of our current “system’s” sickness, our collective failure to dream more radical dreams of healing.  

It’s not that the materialist/mechanistic paradigm in which our current “health care system,” is rooted has no utility.  If you break your leg skiing, you don’t care about childhood trauma in that moment.  You want skillful mechanics to stabilize and transport you, and other skillful mechanics to set and cast your leg as soon as possible.   (However, you might endure the pain more easily, require less pain medication, and incur less lasting trauma if someone looked into your eyes, smiled at you and touched you gently which they did these things, or if someone gave you Rescue Remedy or homeopathic remedies on the spot.  Your bone and soft tissues might heal more rapidly and effectively if you took homeopathic or herbal medicines during your recovery, or if someone prayed, sang and/or did Reiki for you.)   The mechanistic/materialist model is wonderful when applied in proper context.   Newtonian physics remains an extremely useful tool under certain conditions, but no physicist in hir right mind would suggest that physicists should only be paid if their work appears to conform to Newtonian principles!   But our health insurance system makes everyone—even “holistic” providers—conform to allopathic models if they want to get paid.

I have been trying to raise this issue with advocates for single payer health care reform for fifteen years.  The response I have received most often is, “Even if I agreed with you, we don’t have time to think or talk about that now.  People are dying for lack of health insurance—we have to get them covered.  Then we can debate these less critical issues.”  My perception is that we don’t have time NOT to think and talk about–and more importantly, feel and dream into—these questions.  They are at the roots of our health care crisis and many others; to ignore them makes these crises more complex, more difficult—perhaps impossible—to untangle.

We have an aging population beset by chronic illnesses and injuries that are VERY expensive to treat.  More and more of us are recognizing that it is unsustainable—economically, ecologically, emotionally, spiritually—to treat these problems exclusively within a materialist/allopathic model.   The single payer systems of Europe and Scandinavia are marvelously equitable and efficient, but even they are straining under the burden of trying to provide heroic, high-tech, crisis-oriented “health care” to an increasingly aged population.  If we wish to care for one another in the long run, we need to make a radical change in how we relate to health and illness and life and death.   Acting as if the quality of health care and our health care system begins and ends with numbers—including the percentage of the population covered by “health insurance”—keeps us moving in the wrong direction.

As we allow our perception to spread out from the immediate crisis in health care, it becomes apparent that our addiction to crisis-oriented, materialist perception and action is killing us.   Our chronic illnesses and injuries are provoked or worsened by our attempts to survive within an economic system driven by short-term profit and endless growth, a system in which “success” requires a constant fight against the rhythms of nature, including the rhythms of our bodies.  Our chronic illnesses and injuries are inextricable from the poisoning of our food, water, and air—and in our materialist/mechanistic addiction, we see this as reasonable, or at least necessary. No matter how lavishly the politicians and pundits praise his new garments, the emperor of “health care reform” will always be naked until we acknowledge that health care is inseparable from economic and social justice and ecological intelligence.   As members of a planetary ecosystem, a planetary community, do we have time for make believe?  Do we have time for incremental reform that leaves these catastrophically destructive ways of perceiving, thinking and acting intact?  I sense that we are called to an evolutionary leap.   

No one can make the evolutionary leap for us.  It is futile for us to wait for our President, our Congresspeople, our Governor, or anyone else to do it for us. The most recent “national debate” over “health care reform” makes it vividly apparent that waiting for our so-called leaders to lead us in the direction of healing is about as useful as waiting for Godot.  Somewhere, somehow, individually and in our extended families and communities, we need to find the courage to let go of the illusory security of the habitual and jump into the unknown.  It is immature of us to expect our “leaders” to create conditions that will make it easy for us to leap; a leap is never comfortable.   As Helen Keller famously said, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men [sic] as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”  There has probably never been a moment in the history of our species when these words were more resonant.

The “national health care reform” effort is a sick joke (although the increased dollars coming to Vermont for community health centers may actually do some good).   I am revolted by the prospect of Americans being compelled to give still more money to the insurance companies whose executives and shareholders have been getting rich on denying us care for decades.  I am revolted by the prospect of Americans being compelled to do this by so-called representatives who are receiving millions from those insurance companies while we pay for their comprehensive health care packages.   Will our revulsion ever erupt into creative, intelligent and sustained (r)evolution? 

The current economic and political situation in Vermont makes it unlikely that we’ll manage any major health care reform here in the next year, but I still have hope that we might soon commit ourselves to ensuring that all Vermonters have access to excellent health care that is worthy of the name.   We may feel that we can’t afford to do this, but again I ask, can we afford not to?  Nothing works in our economy, not to mention our communities and families, when people are limited by dis-ease.  

I would love to see us begin a health care revolution here in Vermont—a revolution that is truly healthy and radically caring.  I hope we can begin by allowing ourselves to recognize just how profound and fatal the flaws of our current insurance system are and to feel the anguish and outrage we should feel after tolerating it for so long.  I hope that we can continue the revolution by asking how we can insure access not only to allopathic care but also to genuinely holistic healing.  I hope that we will consider, at the town and state level, withdrawing our support from for-profit insurers and using our money to insure ourselves, using our money to develop more creative, effective and humane ways of caring for one another. 

For myself, I do not know how much longer I can continue to engage with our current system.  One of the things my injured lower back is saying is that I literally can’t stand the daily insult to my integrity offered by tailoring my notes and my office procedures to meet insurers’ standards; I can’t stand pretending to conform to a model of health and illness that is destructive to us all.  I understand that this daily subterfuge seems “normal” and “reasonable” to many others, but so what? What we are accustomed to always seems reasonable and normal, and humans can get accustomed to just about anything.   As I can no longer walk without fully engaging both my legs, my back cries out that I can no longer stand the splitting caused by constantly disguising the true nature of my work in order to get paid by insurance companies.   Continuing to participate in this system is injurious to my wholeness, injurious to my health.  And yet I don’t want to make my care financially inaccessible—this is what has kept me engaging with a system I've always known was sick for so long.   In this way, too, I feel split.  Will my back hold up long enough for us to create an alternative I could genuinely support, or will I be compelled to jump on my own?

How much longer can I continue to buy health insurance for myself from the same folks who demean the value of my work and demand that I hide its true nature? Soon, apparently, refusing to give my money to these rapacious corporations will be an illegal act!   I do not know what the present moment will demand of me in 2012 or whenever the new health insurance legislation takes effect, but at the moment, I see this legislation as an imminently fitting target for civil disobedience.   

People say, “Well, we’re required to buy car insurance from for-profit companies.”  This is true, and likely problematic also, but it’s not my battle.  The whole fabric of the society we live in is unjust, unsustainable, utterly insane.   There are a million threads we can pull on to unravel it, and they’re all honorable: to each hir own! Like Butch Cassidy and his sidekick, we are being chased toward a cliff edge by a skillful and determined enemy posse.  Each of us meets the edge in hir own place and time, and each of us must choose whether to be shot or whether to jump.  I don’t know about you, but I’m just about at my edge.