Throughout these last six weeks, while I’ve been immobilized by pain in my back, I’ve had the sense that this “injury” was a cry from my deep Self, or what I would call my soul.  I’ve heard the Mystery within calling, in the often-literal voice of the body, “I can’t stand this anymore!!”  I’ve experienced my inability to move, my inability to do many things I love, and especially my inability to work as my soul telling me that fundamental and ancient ways of walking are no longer viable, informing that the self who walked in those ways must die.

Through days in quiet and solitude, through the long dark nights of late November and December, I’ve tumbled into the abyss of the unknown.  Unable to move in my habitual ways, I’ve sunk into the terror of not knowing any other way.  For weeks I’ve lived with embodied paradox: without effort, I could not move at all, and yet effort alone could not bring new ways of moving into being.  I’ve been compelled to acknowledge my helplessness, ask for help, and pray for healing.

Gradually, gradually, new ways are emerging.  Some I have tried have been useful only for hours or days; some appear to have the potential to become part of a new daily self.  All the new ways have seemed, initially, pathetically weak, small and tentative compared with the dramatic pain and fear, not to mention the lost ease, strength and certainty of my old habits.

The extent to which my “personal” situation resonates with the larger human situation at this moment has been striking.  Aren’t we all receiving a thousand messages each day that our old ways of living are no longer serving us?  The mass extinctions of species, the dying oceans, the rapidly rising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere, the catastrophic loss of topsoil worldwide, the depletion of fossil fuel supplies and many other resources which have become indispensable to our lives, the poisons in our soil, air and water giving rise to diseases in our bodies, the frenzied pace of “modern” living giving rise to agitation in our minds and increasingly frequent acts of violence in our communities—all these are signs that our familiar ways of being are coming to an end. 

Meanwhile, our leaders repeatedly fail to address these myriad interconnected crises truthfully, let alone point us in the direction of transformation appropriate to the scale of the dangers we face (see the recent pathetic “agreement” which came out of the Copenhagen climate summit).   Meanwhile, bad news continues to emerge not only from science and the media but from our own direct experience of the world, leading us to doubt that healing is possible.

To many of us it appears that collectively we are dying a death so horrifying, so overwhelming, so previously unimaginable to our species, that we can perceive no possibility of rebirth—and not many good reasons to continue living.  Those of us who can do so buy organic food, change our light bulbs to CFLs or LEDs, insulate our houses and try to drive less while haunted by a sickening sense of how small and pathetic these efforts are compared with the might of the devouring demons in whose clutches we struggle.

Few of us can be certain of anything in this context.  How do we walk in the face of such unprecedented uncertainty, such radical groundlessness?  Here too we encounter paradox.  It seems we must make some efforts, and yet most of the ways we know how to try cause further trouble! We must surrender—but to what?  Many are surrendering to madness.  Some are surrendering to greed, figuring that if everything’s going to hell anyway, we might as well grab all we can of whatever gives us a temporary experience of pleasure or security: money, possessions, entertainment, food, alcohol and other substances and, of course, power.  Still others are surrendering to rage and violence, and others, many others, to the numbness of despair.  Many of us alternate among several of these because none gives lasting peace.

Since death on an unprecedented scale is inarguably underway, how shall we behave in its presence?  Denial, anger, bargaining—we can find many all around us walking through these stages so eloquently described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.   Acceptance does not come easily to us in this culture; we are greatly disadvantaged by the habits of the past several hundred years, in which the privileged have devoted enormous resources to fighting death.   What do we do when we finally recognize that these efforts have not only been futile but in fact have contributed to death on a scale that would have been inconceivable to our ancestors?  We have trouble facing our individual mortality with honesty and courage—where are we to find the resources to face into this enormous, unfathomable ecological and cultural death?

Those who have been fortunate to spend time with the dying know that one of the gifts of dying can be the stripping away of all that is inessential—both in the dying person and in those who come to sit in hir[1] field.   That stripping away, in turn, allows what is immutable and precious to shine with great beauty, clarity and power.  Tremendous healings happen in the presence of death.  People forgive things that they never imagined they could; hearts open, ancient, imprisoning fears lose their grip.   And sometimes, too, encounters with death bring such radical surrender that bodies transform in ways the rational mind calls impossible: aggressive metastasized tumors melt away, neurological damage repairs itself, diseased organs resume full functioning. 

In this time of collective death, we long for such radical healing, for healing that “goes beyond reason,” as Carolyn Myss puts it in her amazing new book Defy Gravity.   But such healing occurs only when we go beyond the tight spaces of the ordinary, rational mind, when we take refuge in the part of us that is in ceaseless communion with all that is.   The ordinary, rational mind can bring us elegant technical fixes and symptomatic cures, but it cannot bring profound transformation or renewal.  And while healing is a gift outright from grace, technical fixes and symptomatic cures—even “holistic” ones—always come at a price.  Indeed our culture’s, our species’, current dire plight could be read as a story of our constantly seeking fixes and cures and passing their costs along to “others”—poor people in distant places, future generations, animals, plants, soils and waters—in stubborn denial of the timeless, immutable truth that we are all connected and what we do to others we do to ourselves.

So it seems to me that those of us who perceive the terror of the current situation and who long for healing are called, like any dying people, to strip away all that is inessential.  We are called to surrender to our souls, to the undying spark within that connects us with eternally unfolding creation.  We are called, in fact, to blow on that spark so that it flares into flames that can warm and strengthen our relations in the dark night, in the depths of winter. 

The spark within me longs to be an instrument on which the song of healing can play as purely and clearly as possible.   I have wanted to be such an instrument since I was a little girl.  But like most of us, I became clouded and confused as I grew.  While my heart could never totally give up on what I knew about healing, the more “education” I received the more fearful and cynical I became.   I didn’t see anyone getting paid to be a true healer and I was scared of being poor, so I concluded that I’d have to settle for fixing and curing—albeit the most gentle and holistic form I thought I could make a decent living practicing.

I am grateful that even though fear caused me to build walls around my heart’s true knowing and desire, gaps remained.  I am grateful that healing, like water, has managed to flow patiently and persistently through those cracks and grace my life with its presence.  But now my soul—speaking through my back—is calling for dismantling the walls altogether: blow up the dam, if necessary, but let the healing waters flow!

Lately I have been obsessed with a quote from Helen Keller that I’ve loved for decades: “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.”

            The health insurance industry provides those privileged enough to have health insurance with a semblance of security at great cost.  The financial cost of insurance, while impressive, is the least of the tolls it levies.  We have failed to account for “externalities” in all our major industries—few corporations could be profitable if we compelled them to take responsibility for the costs their activities impose on workers, communities, future generations, and the land—and health insurance is no exception.

            Our conversations about “health care reform” never address the cost that inserting a distant and impersonal third party between healers and those who need healing exacts in lost intimacy and trust.  Fixing and curing do not require intimacy and trust, but healers everywhere throughout time have known that healing does.  One of the most obvious ways the health insurance industry has eroded trust between healers and patients is by creating incentives for some classes of “healers” to charge much more for their services than their local communities could pay and thus enabling those “healers” to become much richer than the majority of those they serve.  Inequality breeds distrust, hostility, and social instability; distrust, hostility and social instability, in turn, foster stress and dis-ease.  

            Our discussions about “health care reform” also fail to address the costs entailed by acting as if health can be recovered or maintained within a mechanistic, “objective” paradigm. Insurance demands that “healers” reduce their patients and their work to numbers in the name of “objectivity.”  The industry then uses those numbers to determine what is “reasonable and necessary” to fix the broken objects as well as how long it should take.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with healing, for there is nothing reasonable or objective about healing!  Indeed the objectifying paradigm embodied by insurance contributes to the deepest causes of our sickness: treating the world and each other like “ a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects,” as Thomas Berry puts it, has brought us collectively to death’s door.  The fact that healing sometimes still occurs in this mechanistic, objectifying context demonstrates just how powerful a force healing is! What costs do we incur by constantly obstructing, rather than cooperating with, this force?

            While we in this community have made great strides toward recognizing the value of eating and buying local, we have not yet applied these insights to health and healing.  Insurance companies are transnational corporations; a high percentage of the resources we give them leaves our communities never to return.   Do we reckon these lost resources in our consideration of the costs of health insurance?  As we confront the myriad inter-related crises spawned by our species’ recent orgy of short-sighted and rapacious consumption, many of us recognize that it is past time for us to practice relating differently to resources of all kinds.  Isn’t it time we applied the wisdom of “buying local” to healing as well as eating and shopping?           

Pooling resources to care for each other in times of need is an excellent idea.  But so much is wrong with the way our health insurance “system” currently embodies this kernel of compassion and skillful means!  Many of us recognize this:  we know that our health care system—like so many of our current systems—is utterly broken and totally unsustainable.  The problem is that we want to, and imagine that we can, move toward something better without giving up any of the “security” of the familiar. 

Which brings us back to death.   Life constantly teaches that death is a necessary and often fantastic part of our journey.  We die to the security of crawling in order to stand and walk.  We die to the ease of having everything our way in order to enter into partnerships; we allow our child selves die to become parents. But when it comes to health care—and many of the other systems that currently provide “security” to those of us with privilege—we are still clinging to the illusion that we can give birth to the new without sacrificing the old.

The root of the word “sacrifice” and the word “sacrum”—that wounded part of my body—are the same: sacer, to make holy.  As we face death on an overwhelming scale, will we continue to waste energy and resources on clinging to what must be lost, or will we at last make our resources—inner and outer—holy by offering them up in love and gratitude to the creative force which is transforming our world (whether we like it or not)?

A healer is someone who makes whole.  Can I heal myself, let alone offer healing to others, if I ignore the destructive effects of the insurance industry because I rely upon that industry for much of my income?  Can I help others walk with integrity when billing insurance asks that I subtly yet consistently conceal the true nature of my work? Can I offer others the full harmony, the full wholeness, of my being if I ignore the dissonance that arises from tailoring my office notes and procedures to the demands of the un-whole-some insurance industry?  I have wrestled with these questions throughout my fifteen years in practice, but suddenly they seem much more urgent.  The collective death I have seen coming for much of my life is happening now, is reflecting itself in my body today.  In the face of death, there is no time for half-hearted action, and no room for excuses.

Yes, I’m scared.  The risks of surrendering to my soul’s uncompromising imperatives are tangible; the rewards may be much less so.  But Helen Keller’s words remind me that there is no path without risk.  Since that is so, I may as well choose to joyfully embrace the risks my soul’s path entails.   These days my soul has also been resonating with the words of the Mexican liberation fighter Emiliano Zapata: “It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”  Viva la (r)evolution!