I’ve been in quarantine for a week, having tested positive for Covid 19. It’s been a week of being with this virus inside me, experiencing the many symptoms that I’ve only read about and witnessed in others and experiencing my immune system wrestle with this monster of a virus. There have been days when I was too exhausted to even rest my eyes upon a screen for entertainment and nights when it felt like a comfortable position didn’t exist inside me and I was flopping all night long like a fish out of water. There have been textbook symptoms like cough, fever, loss of taste and then symptoms that I’ve never experienced in my life, like hypersensitive skin along my spine and a type of deafening electroshock feeling that made me want to crawl out of my skull. There were a few days where it felt like I turned a corner and the worst was behind me, only to feel a regression the following day. It’s been a roller coaster for sure, well, more precisely less like a roller coaster as there haven’t been moments of elation but more like one of those scramble rides that goes unpredictably fast and jerky makes you nauseous and you’re screaming for the operator to stop the ride and just when it seems like it might stop, it kicks up again.
Being a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), this period of having Covid is fascinating to me. It is allowing me to sink deeper than a conceptual framework of diagnosis and prognosis into the heart of TCM which has roots in Nature and Spirit wisdom. The themes of Nature and interconnection that I've spoken of for years are being profoundly revealed to me and want to be communicated for our collective survival and well-being.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is based on relationships. In TCM, our inseparable interconnectedness is a given. Everything affects everything else, both inside and outside of us and because of that, the aim of Medicine is to find harmony and balance inside an apparent system of interconnection. The primary teacher of that balance and harmony in TCM is Nature. This in contrast to modern medicine that assumes separate-ness with the man being center stage, a separate entity from Nature. The aim of modern medicine is one of self-protection from perceived attacks and threats on the human body. In this system, the ruling authority over our protection is the MD. I have emphasized that traditional or modern is not based on the tools being used, but depends upon the approach to dis-ease—a lens of separate-ness or one of interconnectedness. In modern culture, we are born into a lens of separate-ness that we assume as reality. All of our institutions—educational, medical, legal, information are built upon this unquestioned foundation and reinforce this experience. Depending upon which lens one assumes, life experiences and approach are very different.
In a worldview of separate-ness, we identify “good” and “bad” and then we align ourselves with what we consider “good” and try to eliminate what is “bad”. We do this in Medicine when we identify, isolate and attack the offending disease. We also do this with people. We try to exterminate people in the same ways we try to exterminate bacteria and viruses. America’s racial history attests to this. But this type of thing doesn’t restrict itself along racial lines, we do it politically, socially and now as people are separating themselves into camps of vaccinated and unvaccinated people, we are doing it social-medically.
In this era of deadly viruses, racial injustice, environmental degradation, growing homelessness, increasing violence, economic instability and isolation, our sense of separate-ness and fear is as acute as ever. And many of us are digging our heels deeper in an attempt to protect ourselves. There’s hypervigilance in identifying the offending agent (be it a virus, a person or a situation) and protecting oneself against it. In essence what’s happening is that we are becoming more isolated, divisive and fearful in face of all this. And collectively, that equates to becoming weaker.
But we can choose a different way. A lens of inseparable inter-connectedness leads to an experience of trust, strength, compassion and understanding. If we feel that our well-being is tied to the forces, people and events around us, then we seek for harmony and balance with these forces that we cannot separate from. We cannot truly eliminate anything, we must learn how to be with it as best as we can. Additionally, if we are intimately connected to the forces around us then we are abundantly resourced. We are not alone. We can receive the information and resources from all the forces and people and events around us. When we open up to this possibility, we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Our naturally connected apparatus, our body, will respond in intelligent ways. We will have an organic sense of response-ability.
The most difficult and perhaps the most threatening thing to people in response to the worldview of inseparable interconnectedness is the notion that we are not only connected to the things that we prefer to be connected to—rainbows, good times, nice people, easy living—but that we are also connected to the not so fun things—viruses, mean people, death, lack of resources. It’s what the yin/yang symbol represents, an inseparable connection of opposing forces. So, does that mean we just become complacent and succumb to doom? Let all the bad things and people proliferate?
Radical Acceptance or Love or Respect is not complacent. It is the most powerful force in the Universe. It is Healing. It asks everything of us. In face of the scariest of our fears, it asks us to not run away but to confront, to trust, to allow, to understand and respect everything’s place in Nature and to learn. Not running away or attacking does not mean to be complacent and let a thing have its way with you. It means being in relationship with the totality of a thing (not just what you deem bad or good about it) so that an organic and intelligent response-ability arises. It asks us to be informed by our constellation of connections, not our disconnections. Actions stemming from that type of relationship strengthens.
This past week, while being with this Virus inside me, a deep respect grew as I became humbled to the power of the virus. Not only in its strength and the ways it was wreaking havoc inside a body I generally consider healthy, but in the way it has shook up everything in this entire world. And as my deep respect grew for this virus, as did my deep respect for my immune system that was responding to the presence of the virus inside me. There was a conversation (sometimes an argument) between these two forces of Nature inside me and it brought up life and death of not only my separate body, but of all things and people and events that are inseparable to me. Including you.
And so I emerge from this period of quarantine with a message. An urgent plea. We don’t have much time left in this life. Don’t let this be a time of further division and weakening. We are inseparably connected to one another, to Nature, to history, to all the things that make us who we are—the good and the bad. Let this not go down in history as one of those dark periods where people turned on one another. There are no boogey men out there to point fingers at. It’s not important to locate your fears in people and situations outside of you. Reach for your capacity to be with everything and your trust in a goodness that need not have an opposite. Resource yourself from what you are naturally connected to. Affirm what is good and strong inside you, the kind that can embrace grief and fear and anger and vulnerability and mistakes without attack. Respect one another, respect the Covid virus, respect the fear virus, respect your immune system, respect your life, respect your capacity for Love, respect death, respect your mistakes and respect your knowing, respect what little time we have left and live fully. It is urgent that we learn to respect all of life without exception, and to Honor what we have while we still have it.
In Healing and Community,
